60th Anniversary of Brown v. Board

"Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 1954" is sixty years old on May 17th. It ignited two and a half decades of civil rights legislation that helped generate the most notable improvements in minority educational opportunity & achievement in the 20th century. But, those achievements have eroded in the last two decades. Resegregation of communities is leading to resegregation of schools, which may well be playing a major factor in why we are experiencing problems narrowing the achievement or opportunity gaps between minority & majority populations.

Major forces in our society have brought about restrictions to traditional "affirmative action" programs on the grounds that they violate the 14th Amendment prohibitions on racial preferences. Washington state experienced its own version of these restrictions in our Initiative 200. Current applications of "affirmative action" are limited in the amount of time they may run.

OK, if the 14th Amendment prohibits ongoing racial preferences, aka traditional affirmative action, how about focusing upon "income disparities", without regard to the racial makeup of the population involved. That makes additional resources available to all who qualify without making race a qualification. Would that not overcome the Constitutional issue?

And that might well explain a decade’s worth of vehement denials that poverty, the lack of income and the disadvantages that go with it, is the determining factor in the "achievement gap". In anticipation that "income disparity", aka poverty, may become the qualifying factor for mandated "action programs", corporate educational reformers have been investing millions on campaigns designed to convince the voting public that their "no excuses", "higher expectations", "standardized test driven", "Common Core" education models can succeed without addressing the issue of poverty. Because, if poverty is the determine factor, then support programs can be crafted that will help traditional public schools narrow the "achievement gap".

We have evidence of Washington state's ability to craft such programs in the successes of our SIG schools program. According to Washington's Superintendent of Public Instruction, our SIG schools have outperformed all 1400 other SIG schools in the nation.

So, for the 60th Anniversary of Brown v Board of Education, I challenge Washington state to craft its own version of SIG programs that direct additional state resources to schools with significant "income disparity".  Instead of diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of state resources toward charter schools, online schools, for profit schools, or privately managed schools, let us begin to revitalize our public schools in the spirit of Brown v Board.