The United States has struggled to establish social policies to ensure equal access to education for minorities since the creation of the United States. Laws preventing the education of free Blacks or enslaved Blacks prior to the Civil War were prevalent, but mainly concentrated in the South. Educational opportunities for Blacks in post-Civil War America were limited and segregated. The Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson [23] provided statutory authority to separate students by race. With the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 [5], school districts were forced to desegregate to ensure diverse schools with equal access to education for Black students. Because of massive resistance campaigns built on racism, desegregation of students took nearly two decades to achieve. For the next three decades, desegregation policies remained intact nationally. With additional federal rulings and the Supreme Court’s decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle [22] making it unconstitutional to establish school assignment policies solely based on race, demographics in public schools nationwide are increasingly segregated [12], [18], [21] and [13]. Despite efforts since Brown v. Board of Education [5] to desegregate schools, the ability of school systems to ensure equal access to education for racial and ethnic minority students has been inconsistent at best [12].

Authos: Margie Crowe, Michelle Tlhabologang

Published in: Ireland International Conference on Education (IICE-2023)

• Date of Conference: 24-26 October, 2023
• DOI: 10.20533/IICE.2023.10.0011
• ISBN: 978-1-913572-68-6
• Conference Location: Dún Laoghaire, Ireland