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A crowd of Black children walking into school.

How Delayed Desegregation Deprived Black Children of Their Right to Education

On the ongoing battle to desegregate schools across America throughout the 1960s.
Erased chalkboard in empty classroom

Cruel to Your School

Public education is meant to be a great equalizer. That’s why Trump wants to do undo it.
Carver Junior High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

How to Keep a School Open

Two Carvers and the fight for fair desegregation.
Photograph of young students getting off a school bus.

Public Schools Really Can Save America

America's public schools were founded on the ideal of uniting rich and poor, but inequality persists due to racial, income, and systemic divides.
Row of suburban homes.

White America Facing Its Ghosts

The slow unraveling of a nation’s suburbs.
Supreme Court building.

The Untold History of Affirmative Action — For White People

To remain exclusively white after Brown v. Board of education, universities created scholarships to send qualified Black students to out-of-state HBCUs instead.
Painting of a young boy working as an apprentice, wearing an apron

How Long Did the School Year Last in Early America?

Even throwing off of a colonial power, representative institutions, Protestantism, and local autonomy in school decisions did not produce an egalitarian system.
Linda Brown Smith, Ethel Louise Belton Brown, Harry Briggs, Jr., and Spottswood Bolling, Jr., 1964

Brown v. Board of Education: Annotated

The 1954 Supreme Court decision, based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, declared that “separate but equal” has no place in education.
An 18th-century building travels Feb. 10 from its location on the campus of William & Mary to Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area.
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Schools for Black American Children Predated the Revolution

Efforts in early America to educate Black children offer us a template for addressing educational inequality today.
Empty classroom.

The Neoliberal Superego of Education Policy

Institutional reform is no match for pervasive structural inequality.
Florida Governor Rob DeSantis addresses a crowd behind a podium reading "freedom from indoctrination"
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Too Many White Parents Don’t Understand The True Purpose of Public Schools

Black Americans continue to fight for access to the public school systems their forebears created, against a history of white backlash and appropriation.
Hasiba N. Ali conducts a class at the Clara Muhammad School in Southeast Washington in 2001.
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Inequality Has Long Driven Black Parents to Pull Children From Public Schools

What’s happening amid the coronavirus pandemic is nothing new.
Student completing standardized test

The Racist Beginnings of Standardized Testing

From grade school to college, students of color have suffered from the effects of biased testing.
Black Students Matter demonstrators march through Washington, D.C., June 19, 2020
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My Great-Grandmother Ida B. Wells Left A Legacy Of Activism In Education. We Need That Now.

The gap in education equality is holding America back.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey speaks about school COVID policy.
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The Undemocratic History of School "Pandemic Pods"

Why Americans rejected educating only the children of the wealthy.
Crowd of students demonstrating.

Walkout: In 1960s L.A., Mexican-American High School Students Took Charge

Fifty years ago, teenagers organized a multi-school walkout that galvanized the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles.

The Data Proves That School Segregation Is Getting Worse

This is ultimately a disagreement over how we talk about school segregation.

How a Jewish Youth Camp Birthed the 1968 East L.A. Chicano Student Walkouts

‘The young Mexican American is tired of waiting for the Promised Land.’

Will America's Schools Ever Be Desegregated?

Though there are practical obstacles to school integration, it's not an unreachable ideal.
Children reading a storybook with a teacher.

What We've Learned In the 50 Years Since One Report Introduced the Black-White Achievement Gap

A Harvard education professor explains how far we've come in answering some of the most important questions in education since the famous Coleman report.

The Massive Liberal Failure on Race, Part I

How the liberal embrace of busing hurt the cause of integration.
Eve Ewing, and the cover of her book "Original Sins."

How Do We Combat the Racist History of Public Education?

On the schoolhouse’s role in enforcing racial hierarchy.
Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo (three of the Little Rock Nine), and NAACP president Daisy Bates.

Selling Out Our Public Schools

For decades, the term “school choice” was widely and rightly dismissed as racist. Now it’s the law in thirty-three states.
The “Little Red Schoolhouse” in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Schoolhouse Crock

In every generation, charlatans come along with a plan to make education better by spending less money on schools.
Linda McMahon speaking at the Republican National Convention on July 18 in Milwaukee.

Back to the Future

Why “Let’s have public schools like the Founding Fathers had” is such a terrible idea.
A standardized test and a pencil, with answers bubbled in.

The Rotting of the College Board

Testing is necessary. The SAT’s creator is not.
Fred Grey photographed in front of a book shelf of law books.
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The History of Segregation Scholarships

A narrative not of brain drain but of Black aspiration.
Co-founder of Moms for Liberty Tina Descovich speaks during the 2024 Joyful Warriors National Summit.

From the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s ‘Body of Liberties’ to Today’s ‘Moms for Liberty’

The "parental rights" movement, rooted in colonial theocracy, has evolved into a political force resisting racial, gender, and educational equality.
The gym and auditorium at Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, built just before the school closed in 2008.

What Abandoned Schools Can Teach Us

Empty chairs, empty tables, and the dismantling of the American Dream.
Portrait of Julius Rosenwald hanging on a wall.

Finding Philanthropy’s Forgotten Founder

Julius Rosenwald understood that charity is not just about giving, but about fixing the inequalities that make giving necessary.

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