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Returning to Square One: From Plessy to Brown and Back to Plessy

This essay describes significant legal and policy system changes in America's 50-year crusade to curtail or eliminate racially segregated public school. In hindsight, a more forceful initial policy system stance regarding judicial enforcement might well have resulted in greater desegregation success. However, after 5 decades of judicial and operational compliance trial and error, United States public schools presently appear almost as racially segregated as before the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954, 1955). In effect, over the 50 years since 1954, the nation has ricocheted from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to Brown and, practically if not constitutionally, back to Plessy. The contemporary cause of school segregation rests more with income and housing patterns than with explicit apartheid policies. Regardless of cause, however, even if there now exists something much closer to equal educational opportunity than was true 50 years ago, there clearly is not anything close, nationally, to racial parity of educational achievement. Mindful of the remaining achievement gap, this article posits that it is time to reconsider past policies built almost exclusively around busing and achieving physical mixes of Black and White students. Instead, it is now time to rely on new strategies involving elevated expectations, explicit learning standards, notions of financial "adequacy," and effective accountability. In effect, it is time to measure racial policy progress by student successes, not by transportation and school resource processes.