Dive Brief:
- On the eve of this weekend's 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation, an article in The New Yorker analyzes the inequality persisting in Newark's education system despite reform efforts.
- Dale Russakoff writes that the city is still struggling to provide an equal and adequate education for its youth despite consultant-heavy reform and a $100 million donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
- Acccording to Russakoff, the reform movement is missing community engagement, as he claims the top-down approach lacks "an understanding of the contours of poverty and racism in America."
Dive Insight:
Newark is not alone when it comes to these persisting problems, and Russakoff's argument is very much in line with the points made in education historian Diane Ravitch's latest book, "Reign of Error." When Brown v. Board of Education became law, many hoped that by merely desegregating schools, black students would have an equal education.
As historian Jelani Cobb explains in the New Yorker podcast released alongside the article, "The push for integration was really a last-ditch effort to fight against resource inequality. And so the idea, the underlying logic of integration, was if we put black children in the classroom next to white children, then they have to equalize resources.”
Even though schools are technically integrated, poverty lines have done a good job in creating homogeny that makes many urban schools look like they are stuck in the 1950s. De facto segregation persists through poverty, leaving commentators like Russakoff and Ravitch to ask why we're ignoring this underlying inequality.