I think we are going to classism rather than race inequality. If you are rich enough go to a high class university or college, as a black or latino you can go. If you are rich enough to live in the suburbs to go to the more well off schools there than you can go.  Inequality goes much further than race.

Juan Williams tells a different story on the editorial pages of the NYT.  

With yesterday's Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown's time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.

here here

Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown's promise of equal educational opportunity.

I have spent 20+ years as an advocate and organizer, mostly on behalf of children of color.

The problem is not integration.  The problem is unequal education and vast disparities in funding.

And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America's public schools have been growing more segregated -- even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

By the early '90s, support in the federal courts for the central work of Brown -- racial integration of public schools -- began to rapidly expire. In a series of cases in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo., frustrated parents, black and white, appealed to federal judges to stop shifting children from school to school like pieces on a game board. The parents wanted better neighborhood schools and a better education for their children, no matter the racial make-up of the school. In their rulings ending court mandates for school integration, the judges, too, spoke of the futility of using schoolchildren to address social ills caused by adults holding fast to patterns of residential segregation by both class and race.

The focus of efforts to improve elementary and secondary schools shifted to magnet schools, to allowing parents the choice to move their children out of failing schools and, most recently, to vouchers and charter schools. The federal No Child Left Behind plan has many critics, but there's no denying that it is an effective tool for forcing teachers' unions and school administrators to take responsibility for educating poor and minority students.

It was an idealistic Supreme Court that in 1954 approved of Brown as a race-conscious policy needed to repair the damage of school segregation and protect every child's 14th-Amendment right to equal treatment under law. In 1971, Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for a unanimous court still embracing Brown, said local school officials could make racial integration a priority even if it did not improve educational outcomes because it helped "to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society."

In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision? Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hypersegregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation.

Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?

His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools -- both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

They never even came close to equalized spending.

50 years later....schools populated by children of color are a disgrace.  Drop out rates are at best 50 percent--more like 75 percent in the densest poorest blackest inner city.

Only 1 or 2 children who begin kindergarten will finish the 12th grade.  This is the world we live in!.  Brown hasn't helped those children and if nothing else this decision may force the politicians and society to someday provide equal and excellent education to all children.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinio n/29williams.html

The plaintiffs in this case did a good job being sympathetic.  Imagine living a block away form an elementary school and then being told your kid needs to be bussed 90 minutes to a school on the other side of town?

Unfortunately, every government action, whether by ruling or statute can have some pretty serious adverse, unintended consequences.

Brown's busing decision really accelerated the "white flight" from major cities into the subrubs.  Suburbs, being smaller school systems, didn't need to bus people around to integrate...  Who wouldn't want that for their kids?  We all know that the best way to integrate schools is to integrate communities... Brown unwittingly did the opposite...

You bring up title IX... sure, there have been wonderful successes for women, but there was a cost.  Schools had to kill dozens of mens sports in order to be compliant.  Male athletes in "lesser" sports were now being denied an opportunity to play, just 'cos they are male.  In some cases, even major sports like baseball have been cut.  Imagine if you are a sophomore at your school, a varsity athlete, and suddenly told your team no longer exists, for no other reason than you are a man.  That was never the purpose or intent of Title IX, but it has been the result.

When the provided solutions to society's problems are inequitable, backlash is inevitable... often destroying the progress that was created....

For Brown, the real solution could have been a plan for truly integrated neighborhoods... for Title IX, the solution is true balance that allows all athletes to compete regardless of sex.  It is too late for Brown... but, title IX can be saved from its almost inevitable death from the supremes, if we work now to make it truly fair.

Thanks,

Mike