Brown Vs. The Board of Education

1 Pages 274 Words

In assessing Brown vs. the Board of Education, there is often mention of its “failed promise”. There is concern as to how successful the Supreme Court ruling to desegregate public schools has actually been.
In some ways, the decision has been a vehicle for social equality. It has opened the doors for the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and movements towards an end to the oppression of many minority groups. It has abolished laws that permit segregation and apartheid.
Brown vs. the Board of Education has not been able to fully abolish the behavioral practices of Americans. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we have seen an abundance of court cases still defining the regulations of a desegregated society. In the 1974 decision of Milliken vs. Bradley, a school desegregation remedy was denied. Milliken II, in 1977, attempted to negotiate that separate schools would become equal through programming. However, in 1995, the Jenkins decision stated that “rapid restoration of state and local authority was much more important than efforts to assure that educational remedies produced actual gains for minority children”.
In a statement given less than three months ago, current President George W. Bush stated, “even though progress has been made, there is still more to do”. Schools continue to exist in this nation that practice segregation. Racial imbalances are attributed to demographics, socio-economic status, and housing patterns. While the 1954 decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education was an achievement that brought promise, nearly 50 years later, the equality that it hoped for is still being sought....