During our lifetimes, the public schools originally designed by white adults for white children have chronically failed Black students and students of color. It is one of the great failures of our generation.

Whether we call it an achievement gap or an opportunity gap, the fact remains that the results of schooling in America, especially in the American south, are now and have been consistently and significantly different for white and children of color. The recent decades of piecemeal attention to inequalities in schools have not succeeded in overcoming the persistent effects of racial segregation in public education.

A proper response now would be to re-examine the whole enterprise and re-imagine public education in the most inclusive ways possible.

The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education was in part based on a gross devaluation of Black schools. The court and followers of its decision concluded that there was little or nothing worth retaining, believing that as vestiges of a discriminatory past, the educators and students from Black schools should be quickly distributed among the previously all-white schools.

It's true there was much to be gained in the dispersal, at least in theory if not in practice. Many Black students and teachers attained access to newer facilities, newer textbooks, larger collections of library holdings, more band instruments and athletic gear. Desegregation brought Black students into contact with more students from a wide variety of socio-economic classes, backgrounds and locations.

There would have been a corresponding increase in the kinds of social capital that previously only the white students enjoyed, thus affording Black students the possibility of increased access to academic enrichment and advanced employment opportunities.

But the theoretical advantages we thought there’d be of closing Black schools and reassigning their students and teachers to previously all-white schools came with costs paid by the Black students and teachers.

The curriculum may have improved in some respects (e.g., more advanced courses) but it lost the core of its ethnic and cultural identity. Teaching about and learning the biographies of Black leaders, artists and intellectuals which had been mainstays of the Black schools’ curriculum, were lost entirely or crammed into February in observance of Black History Month.

In the extracurricular spaces of many southern schools, icons of the Confederacy such as its battle flag, as well as the rebel anthem “Dixie,” were imposed on Black students and families who found such symbols of southern (i.e., white) heritage to have been questionable at best, deeply offensive at worst.

The essential pedagogical purposes of the traditionally Black schools were traded for a ticket to the desegregated schools with their European American aims and perspectives. In contrast, Black educators had been committed to preparing their students to be ready for life as Black men and women in the time of legally sanctioned racism.

*There was hopefulness as well as tragedy in the teaching of washing and ironing skills to Black children in kindergarten.*

With the dispersal of the Black students, their families and communities lost the networks they had been able to look to for support and security, important to members of any culture, but essential to the health and survival of a minority culture.

Black students, whose misbehavior in a segregated school might have earned them a reproachful and effective look from a stern teacher, found the same behavior could result in suspension or expulsion from a desegregated school.

*The "teacher look" keeps order in the hall*

Black teachers and administrators also had enjoyed respect and achieved status at their previously assigned schools. With their dispersal to desegregated schools they lacked the protections of professional organizations (i.e., tenure and seniority) and were subject to dismissal or demotion without cause.

Education researcher Sonya Horsford’s interviews with former Black superintendents elicited the idea of proximity without affinity, a term coined by Dr. King that captures the essential differences between desegregation and integration.

The former can be represented as dots on a map or entries in a spreadsheet. The latter is not so easily represented because it connotes subtle, yet significant social interactions and emotional responses governed by acceptance of differences for the sake of unification.

Is it a mystery why Black parents were then, and continue to be now, skeptical about the quality of the education their children will receive in public schools still operating as they had been for more than a century? Should we be surprised that today Black enrollment in charter schools and voucher-ready private schools is swelling while many public schools are under-enrolled and under-performing?

The Case for Remodeling Public Education

For the first 250 years of their time in the American south, generations of Black children received essentially no public education. And for the next 100 years, through about 1970, public education was offered to Black students but was both racially segregated as well as intentionally unequal.

*One-room school for Black children (1941)*

For the next 50 years, to the present day, the inequity of public resources dedicated to identifiably Black schools has remained firmly in place. We have a new name for it: the opportunity gap, which is an improvement over the accusatory term achievement gap.

But even the recognition that the origins of the gap arise from within the inequitable governance of education rather than in the children themselves, the current systems of governance and funding fail to guarantee that public policies will be responsive to the still segregated and still unequal facts on the ground.

Why? Maybe it’s because 40 percent of educators hold fast to the baseless belief that there is a problem within the Black children’s genetic make-up, according to a survey by Education Week. And if educators, arguably among the more optimistic and fair judges of children’s potential, can maintain such beliefs, imagine how much higher that proportion might be among the general public.

Black children attend public schools that were conceived at a time and in a cultural climate openly hostile to their well-being. Even today, previously white schools have made only minimal accommodations to the learning, emotional and social needs of Black students, and have been the venues for desegregation penalties levied on those students.

*Black students were most unwelcome in previously all white schools.*

Given the well-documented and persistent inequities in public schooling, how is it possible to expect better outcomes for students of color in the absence of a top-to-bottom re-examination of public education, a re-examination viewed through the lens of multicultural educational values and traditions?

There are several reasons why the remodeling of public education should lift up and focus on the educational and cultural history of parents, educators and students of color:

African Americans and other oppressed American minorities have demonstrated a profound commitment to the education of the children.

At great risk the enslaved and their allies provided what education they could manage during the time of slavery. Then, during the era of Jim Crow segregation, they developed schools, curriculum and pedagogy that made the best of a rotten situation and which now should be examined for their potential to benefit not just students but also the communities in which they live.

*Making the best of Jim Crow segregation*

In the American south, education was initially infused with white supremacism and administered by white supremacists who tried everything they could think of to deny education to children of color.

When the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal, and that such inequality ran afoul of the 14th Amendment, those same white supremacists managed to resist and delay compliance for almost two decades.

White educators' slow walk toward compliance rested on the premise that such efforts were a waste of time and resources. The results of all this malfeasance are glaringly evident in the persistence of opportunity and achievement gaps.

Excluding parents and educators of color from the formulation of educational policies and practices was simply wrong.

The calendar cannot be turned back, nor can the wrongs be erased, but the next best thing would be to reboot and remodel with all the stakeholders in the room and at the conference table. The historical damage cannot be undone, but it is susceptible to a repaired future.

The historical reconstructions of African education generated by scholars suggest that had African Americans in the American south been engaged in the design of public schools, they would have placed a high value on communality as a guiding principle of public education. A priority placed on the common good would also have included the teaching and rewarding of empathy, compassion, reciprocity and solidarity to complement the value of individuality.

The curriculum would have included science, civics, technology, law and other subjects of value to the local community. Teaching would have been interdisciplinary and learning history might have been exemplified by the composition and public performance of artistic works such as epic ballads, from which students would gain an appreciation of the personal attributes valued by their society.

Creation of inclusive school communities would have been a feature of public schools. Assumptions regarding differences among students would have been less prevalent. Children would have been exposed to a variety of cultural norms.

“Born into slavery,” a descriptor often used in the biographies of African Americans, is a grim reminder of one of the many repulsive aspects of slavery. What is less frequently acknowledged is that children born into slavery were also born into the remnants of what had been in pre-colonial Africa a culture of learning.

However, in the American south, it was by necessity a covert culture. Because of the real threats to the safety those who would dare to educate the enslaved, and the suppression of Black literacy, there is scant documentation of the teaching and learning that did occur. Nevertheless, African American culture, castigated by some white Americans as lacking in commitment to education, was so committed to it that they practiced it at the risk of whippings or worse for those caught in the act of educating while Black.

The same commitment assured that continuing the schooling of Black children was attempted when necessary. Prince Edward County in Virginia closed all its schools in 1959 rather than comply with the Brown desegregation decision. The white administrators awarded vouchers to white families so that their children could attend private school. North Carolina's Pearsall Policy provided for similar benefits to whites.

Far from being uncommitted to education, many of Prince Edward county's Black families were so committed they sent their children to live with relatives or unrelated host families in order for them to attend school, even if in distant locations.

Less dramatic but no less significant were the heroic efforts of Black educators to provide effective, comprehensive education during Jim Crow segregation. Black education lasted well beyond 1954 as school districts, north and south, resisted the orders of the Supreme Court and operated unconstitutionally separate and unequally resourced school systems. When the same resistant districts begrudgingly came into compliance with Brown, they all but obliterated the traditions, purposes and practices of Black education developed over centuries.

*Trophies earned by athletes filled the cases in the formerly Black schools, but desegregation emptied them.*

At a minimum, the buried features of Black education need to be exhumed, their relevance assessed and their value to a remodeled system of public education reclaimed. Examples would include the full and accurate teaching of Black history, which had occupied a central place in the curriculum of the segregated Black schools but was typically lost or distorted in the desegregated schools.

Another element of the remodel would be correcting the imbalance of curriculum that resulted from the ill-conceived and high-stakes testing policies that placed undue priority on individual students' achievement in tested subjects (i.e., reading and math) to the detriment of arts, sciences, humanities, additional languages, civic engagement, career and technical subject matter as well as physical education.

Undergirding and motivating the necessary transformations of curriculum lies the fundamental rethinking of the purposes of schooling to include elevating its benefits for the entire community and its contribution to democratic processes; benefits not manifest in test scores.

Ironically, the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s did succeed in raising Black students' nationally standardized test scores. As Nikole Hannah-Jones reported in 2015, those achievement gains have mostly been overlooked as the national consensus settled on the misconceptions that desegregation was tried but failed. While court-ordered desegregation was enforced, the Black-white achievement gap was closing. But resegregation, the unforeseen and largely unrecognized consequence of simplistic policies, hobbled the progress.

Improvements in scores did not translate into significantly improved and sustained adult outcomes for most Black students. It was not then nor is it enough now to simply bus the children around until the colorfully encoded wedges in the demographic pie charts look the same from school to school; complete rethinking and remodeling are required.

Reverse the Curse

The reversal of America's choice to separate its children by race is long overdue. Brown was potentially transformative in that it reversed the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision in which seven of the eight justices who heard the case concluded that separate but equal was a legitimate approach to serving the public. As long as railroads in Louisiana provided Black passengers with a functioning rail car, relegating all of them to that car and banishing them from white cars was permitted. Public education was held to that same racist standard.

But America still is waiting for the transformation promised by the Brown court to be completed as many American schools are now as easily recognized as Black or white as they were in 1954. Even well-intended desegregation plans have been largely undone, leaving little that could be called transformative. By the time Chief Justice Warren died in 1974 the nation's attempts to desegregate its schools, efforts launched by the chief justice and his unanimous court in 1954, were already showing signs of unraveling.

Federal courts and agencies under President Nixon had begun to back away from strict enforcement. In a 1975 case (Riddick v. City of Norfolk), as white parents were steadily withdrawing their children from city schools, a U.S. District Court declared the implementation of Brown essentially complete, even as resegregation was getting underway.

To qualify as transformation, desegregation plans must be designed to last far longer than the lifetime of one chief justice.

Children are owed the very best education a nation and its states can provide. But a large segment of the American population has opted for mediocrity as the standard for everybody's children but their own. Many have given up on public schools altogether.

In a hearing marking the 65th anniversary of Brown in 2019, some members of Congress and witnesses raised the polarizing banner of school choice, their twisted interpretation of Brown. On the other side were representatives and witnesses who asserted that the legacy of Brown was not the parental right to choose but to have equality in public education as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Renowned education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond synthesized the two opposing positions best when she testified that “Every school has to be worth choosing.”

Desegregation of public education could serve as a demonstration of respect for the educational traditions of communities of color. What might the results of such re-centering look like?

Restoration of the damaged reputations of African, Latino and Indigenous schools and cultures. For example, while west Africans were being stolen and sold into slavery, an academic culture was thriving at a university in Timbuktu, a city known in America more as a punchline than a center of higher learning.
Unwinding white privilege from America's neck. Segregation was launched by and derived momentum from legalized white supremacism, a malignant stance that unless upended will surely sabotage any future efforts to achieve a just, democratic and integrated society.
       The racial wealth gap. Scholars have calculated a $23 billion difference in funding between identifiably Black and white school districts. They pin the blame for the gap on unequal sources of revenue of the kind used to fund public schools, i.e., property taxes. Desegregation of public schools can make substantial contributions to eradication of the racial wealth gap. Differential funding of education based on unequal property tax revenues will be rendered obsolete when the school districts are no longer racially identifiable.
      When Black students gain improved access to the resources currently less available to them than to their white counterparts (e.g., advanced coursework, highly qualified teachers and the social capital that comes with increased economic diversity) the potential to earn, save and accumulate wealth will be enhanced.
      And when everybody's children can attend schools worthy of choosing, the aggregated political power of parents and communities will surpass that of any single racial group.
The racial wealth gap is not genetic in its origins, but it is heritable. As reported by Rucker Johnson and his colleagues, improvements in a number of indicators of academic achievement have been observed one generation following integration that was one component of a comprehensive package of policies. Critically important were equitable funding arrangements, high quality pre-kindergarten programs, and attention to children's health.
But the benefits do not stop there. The children one generation removed from desegregation attended more selective colleges than did their segregated peers. As a result, their children, who would be two generations removed from desegregation, would have had the benefit of parents with increased quality of higher education and the enhanced social capital available to students in selective colleges. It is difficult to imagine a more sustainable method for eliminating the racial wealth gap.

Desegregation cannot make amends for all the injustices visited by Americans and their governments upon enslaved Africans, their descendants, as well as those descended from other oppressed minorities. But insisting on desegregation can signal a willingness on the part of the American people, through the actions of their government, to acknowledge the grievous error of segregation and to build the systems of education that should have existed from the very beginning.

As a graduate student at UNC's School of Education, David Cooper began writing and teaching about racial injustices in public schools and continued as a contributing scholar while on the faculties of the University of Maryland and Elon University where he served as professor and Dean of the School of Education.

His first publication on the need for integration in North Carolina public schools appeared in 2020: The Missing Pages. Earlier versions of Reverse the Curse were presented to the state's educators attending the Color of Education and Teaching in Color conferences.

He is the founder of The 1868 Project which advocates for comprehensive approaches to integration of schools and honors the memories of the racially integrated Constitutional Convention which ratified a short-lived amendment calling for a unified system of public education.

Reverse the Curse: Designing the Integrated Schools We Should Have Built

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