
Schools remain segregated today because neighborhoods in which they are located are segregated.Even with these added resources, students can rarely be successful in racially and economically isolated schools where remediation and discipline supplant regular instruction, excessive student mobility disrupts learning, involvement of more-educated parents is absent, and students lack adult and peer models of educational success.


But Brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission-to undo the school segregation that persists as a central feature of American public education today.

The Brown decision annihilated the “separate but equal” rule, previously sanctioned by the Supreme Court in 1896, that permitted states and school districts to designate some schools “whites-only” and others “Negroes-only.” More important, by focusing the nation’s attention on subjugation of blacks, it helped fuel a wave of freedom rides, sit-ins, voter registration efforts, and other actions leading ultimately to civil rights legislation in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that prohibited Southern states from segregating schools by race. May 17 is the 60 th anniversary of Brown v.
