Brown vs Board

Brown vs Board Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

“those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school.” “. . . his ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession.”

To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. The effect of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro plaintiffs:Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system. [n10] Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. [n11] Any language [p495] in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.      —> grounded in appeal to educational psychology

60 years after board Reardon & Owens

In 1974, the Supreme Court’s Milliken v. Bradley decision ruled out court-ordered interdis- trict desegregation plans unless plaintiffs could show that the state was responsible for between-district segregation patterns, a burden of proof difficult to meet.

A more powerful countervailing force to the retreat from desegregation efforts is the grad- ual decline in racial residential segregation. Black-white racial segregation has declined slowly and steadily from 1980 to 2010; seg- regation between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites and Asians has remained fairly stable (and lower than black-white segregation) during this time (Farley & Frey 1994, Logan et al. 2004, Logan & Stults 2011, Iceland & Sharp 2013).

More recent studies use the exogenous variation in timing of desegregation court orders or implementation to estimate the causal effects of desegregation on students’ outcomes and disparities in those outcomes      —> Same method as used elsewhere in Reardon

Sur- prisingly, however, the sociological literature appears to lack a detailed and comprehensive theoretical model (or models) of exactly how segregation might affect educational and social outcomes. As a result, many studies estimate different parameters, all under the rubric of un- derstanding the effects of segregation. Given the theoretical confusion in the literature, one of our aims in this review was to articulate a very general and stylized model for understanding how segregation might affect student outcomes and to characterize the types of parameters of interest in the issue. Although our model is certainly incomplete and oversimplified, it may provide a useful framework for future theoret- ical specification.