Educators say Brown ruling was good first step toward equality
Fifty years after the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education ruling, some local educators say the ruling was a “good first step,” but was ultimately more idealistic than anything else. “On one hand the case itself was a big change for our society, so I think we came a long way in terms of it overturning the separate but equal ruling (1896),” said the Rev. Louis Ridgley. “The ruling also set a precedent for an ideal of how we should be, but as far as actually achieving the ideal I don’t think we did that.”
Ridgley, treasurer of the Fayette County NAACP and assistant director of student affairs adult learning center at Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus, has been involved in education for 31 years. He said that while the ruling 50 years ago set a standard for equal treatment of all men regardless of race in America, the ruling did not change people’s thinking.
“Legislation still can’t legislate how people will act if they don’t accept it in their heart,” Ridgley said.
Ridgley noted that the court ruling to desegregate schools came up against much opposition. He said in the 1960s, almost 10 years after the ruling only 2 percent of blacks attended schools with white students. He noted that Prince George County in Virginia closed their public schools for five years rather than allow black children to attend classes with white students.
In 1955 the court heard additional arguments on the decree implementing the ruling and ultimately concluded that, to achieve the goal of desegregation, the lower federal courts were to “enter such orders and decrees consistent with this opinion as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases.”
“‘All deliberate speed’ gave Southern opponents to desegregation an opportunity to get around desegregating. All the way to this day, we have not achieved the ideals of the Brown vs. Board. Too much deliberation and not enough speed,” Ridgley said.
Dr. Burrell Brown, president of the Pennsylvania State Conference of the NAACP branches, agreed. “There’s lots of work to be done. We’re not doing as well as we’d like to believe. We need to address these issues and there’s no question about that. Brown is 50 years old. All deliberate speed is over.”
Brown said that looking at statistics is proof enough that the ideals of the Brown vs. the Board of Education ruling have not been met.
“We are not given the same opportunities and that is proven by the facts of statistics,” Brown said.
According to Brown, who is also a professor of business and chairman of the business and economics department at California University of Pennsylvania, two-thirds (66-percent) of black students in the fifth grade are not reading at a fifth-grade level compared to one-third of white students. He said 80 percent of black students do not perform at an eighth-grade level compared to 40 percent of their white counterparts.
Burrell said he believes the “problems (with education) are many.”
But it seems that while Brown vs. the Board of Education ruled against segregating students by their race, America is still up against segregation of a different kind – economic status, which both Burrell and Ridgley say is associated with the disproportionate achievement levels between black and white students.
“Education is tied to money and money is tied to race,” Burrell said. “This is an exasperating problem for African-Americans,” Burrell said.
Burrell said that there are not enough resources and funding available and without funding there is no money to pay qualified teachers.
“Education funding is based on property taxes. In African-American neighborhoods, the incomes are lower. Our schools don’t get the funding. We don’t have the resources and we’re not getting the best and brightest (teachers). This is a nationwide problem,” Burrell said, noting that a black man earns 76 cents to a white man’s earned dollar.
While Burrell said that both white and black students from poor economical backgrounds “suffer in this country,” he added, “unfortunately, the way people decide if you are going to be a poor person is based on color. The way the resources are allocated are all to often based on the color or your skin.”
Acknowledging the federal No Child Left Behind Act, established to make sure all of America’s children receive an adequate education, Alice Coleman, regional director at Young Inspiration, an afterschool tutor and mentoring program in the Uniontown Area school district, said that the act is “just a Band-Aid on an open wound.”
Coleman said NCLB is a good idea in theory but was not given the funding needed to succeed. She said all it has done is put schools in a “state of panic.”
“We’re testing students that are supposed to meet these standards, and if they don’t perform, it seems as if the whole school has failed and we know that’s not how education works,” she said. “It has schools focusing on testing rather than teaching. They are just pushing for everyone to pass these tests,” she said.
Burrell agreed. “NCLB has just got poor school districts trying to do more with less. And it’s placed a greater strain on the black community.”
Burrell, who was in Topeka, Kan., for a NAACP national conference on the Brown vs. Board of Education, said that the “NAACP is hoping to develop a strategy to put the problems of education back on the front page.”
He said the NAACP plans to take a “multifaceted approach” politically, through community demonstrations and litigation.
“Maybe we’ll get the politicians and the communities to realize that it’s much more important to fund education than to send a child to war. We spend $87 billion for war and ask for another $26 billion, but yet there’s not enough dollars for education. We’ll pay $27,000 to keep a person in a state penitentiary but we won’t put up $10,000 to put them through state college. We understand where our priorities are at,” Burrell said.
Ridgley pointed out that the black community must also step up and take an active role to improve education and achievement among their children.
“We can’t blame someone for the things we don’t do or achieve. We have to do our part in it. But there is a hindrance in terms of race, resources and economic standing,” he said.
Burrell agreed.
“Blacks have to take their own share of the responsibilities and insist that their kids go to school, insist on proper resources and equal pay. They got to go to the school board meetings and address the issues and be sure things are done right We have to do our share but the system has to take their share of the blame.”