Committee on Education and Labor, May 16, 2019
Sixty-five years ago tomorrow, the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck down lawful school segregation in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In a unanimous decision, the Court noted that, “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if 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.”
Chief Justice Earl Warren went on to write that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”
Yet, more than six decades later, the promise of this landmark ruling has not been fulfilled. According to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report, public schools are more segregated by race and class today than at any time since the 1960s.
Just last week, researchers at UCLA and Penn State revealed that the share of racially segregated schools has tripled to nearly 20 percent since the 1980s. That’s one in five schools in America where students are both of color and low-income.