Issues & Trends
布朗大学70周年纪念行动呼吁
July 12, 2024
纪念这一标志性案件70周年 Brown v. Board of Education, the National
Archives and Records Administration and the National Park Service teamed up to host the Civil Rights Conference at the end of June. The multiday event explored the history behind the case, the decision itself, and its impact. On June 28, the conference concluded with “The Unfinished Agenda of Brown v. Board威廉姆学院院长达拉·伯恩(Dara Byrne)的虚拟演讲. 麦考利荣誉学院在纽约. 伯恩在民权奖学金方面的工作包括共同编辑 The Unfinished Agenda of the Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March.
Byrne began with a quote taken from Justice Thurgood Marshall’s 1992 Liberty Award speech: “Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. 自由不能在仇恨中开花. 正义无法在愤怒中扎根. 美国必须行动起来.”
“We should think of this as a call to action because in order to achieve a flourishing democracy and true liberty, real justice does require the effort and active participation of everyone,” said Byrne. “在很多方面，我认为这就是大目标 Brown 是全体公民的教育和积极参与吗. 这是对我们所有人的提醒, 正如瑟古德·马歇尔所说的那样, 这些理想不会自动发生. They require the constant work and vigilance of each and every one of us.”
Byrne described the current climate as counter to ongoing desegregation efforts. “It’s not lost on anyone that we are in a moment of significant backlash around efforts to build a more diverse and inclusive school system using public funding,” she said. In response to this attitude, she emphasized positive impacts after the Brown decision, including a significant increase in enrollment rates by students of color in K-12 and higher education institutions; increasingly diverse and inclusive curricula representing a broader range of histories; greater diversity in teachers, principals, and administrators; more research into educational disparities; higher public awareness of educational disparities; and significant investments in technology and infrastructure that have improved educational tools and environments for diverse students.
Byrne said that her own middle-school-aged child continually surprises her with school materials that would have been unheard of when she was a student. However, Byrne also identified a number of areas where work has remained incomplete. When The Unfinished Agenda of the Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March was published in 2005, 她指出了重新种族隔离的人口趋势, achievement gaps, 政策变化和法律斗争, 特许学校和学校选择, equity and funding, the digital divide, 还有其他领域 Brown美国的进步受到阻碍、破坏或挑战. Byrne said that the list represents an accurate description of the current state of affairs.
Byrne cited a report issued in May by Stanford University and the University of Southern California (USC) showing that racial and economic segregation among schools has grown steadily in the largest school districts over the past three decades. Data shows a 64 percent increase in segregation in the nation’s 100 largest school districts since 1988, as well as a 50 percent increase in segregation by economic status since 1991. Byrne said that this trend is due, in part, to policies favoring school choice over integration.
除了他们的报告，斯坦福大学和南加州大学还制作了 种族隔离探索者, an online tool providing searchable data on racial and economic school segregation in U.S. 州、县和大都市地区. Bryne asserted that trends toward resegregation are the result of policy changes, 而不是人口统计, pointing to the reduction in state and federal monitoring of integration in recent decades as an example of one policy change that has driven trends.
“This is important because there is a tendency to attribute segregation in schools to segregation in neighborhoods,” Byrne said. “This was argued by one of the professors associated with this project, Dr. Anne Owens, 在南加州大学研究公共政策的人, in pointing to the fact that the story is a little more complicated than that.”
伯恩从 “Our World in Data” detailing public funding for education as a share of GDP in seven countries from 1870 to 2021. 该图显示了美国经济的一系列下降.S. 过去二十年的公共开支. She followed this with data drawn from Connecticut schools demonstrating the broad disparity in funding among schools in the state.
Byrne said that the availability of data creates opportunities for students to learn about the importance of Brown 并参与正在进行的反对种族隔离的努力. “我们教这些话题，比如 Brown v. Board 以及塞尔玛到蒙哥马利的游行, as historical matters, not as present-day influential issues that we need to be thinking about,” Byrne said. 她还指出，数据分析, role play, 辩论可以让学生们在这些问题上共同努力.
In addition, Byrne asserted that the participation of students in the continuing work toward an equitable, 社会一体化是其成功的关键. 回到瑟古德·马歇尔的自由奖演讲, she again quoted the justice: “The legal system can force open doors and sometimes even knock down walls. 但它无法搭建桥梁. 那份工作属于你和我.”
“虽然法律系统可以执行法律, 消除歧视性做法, 并在具体案件中伸张正义, 它本身不能创造理解, cooperation, 以及人与人之间的和谐. It cannot address the underlying social and personal dynamics that contribute to division and conflict,” Byrne concluded, suggesting that it falls upon educators and policymakers to pursue the perfection of Brown’s promise.
“这是关于呼吁个人和社区, 尤其是我们的教育工作者和图书馆员, to be rather fearless in the work of fostering relationships, understanding, and community,” she said. “Building bridges between different groups of people requires personal effort, sustained effort, empathy, dialogue, and collaboration. These are the types of things that we’re trying to instill in our public school students. These all go beyond the legal mandates and strike directly at what is at the heart of the work that we do in any classroom, in any library, and, especially, 我们的课程需要什么.”
