Separate But Unequal: No Longer the Law of the Land?

This was interesting to us. On the day after the US Supreme Court practically overturned Brown v. Board of Education, the PEN Weekly Newsblast had this little item. We thought it perhaps deserved more attention in light of the Court's decision.

Perhaps it's not quite as easy as Justice Roberts thinks. He wrote, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." It's probably more complicated than that. Separate but equal...looks as though it may still be...unequal.

SEGREGATED SCHOOLS HINDER READING SKILLS

Children in families with low incomes, who attend schools where the minority population exceeds 75 percent of the student enrollment, under-perform in reading. This is true even after accounting for the quality of the literacy instruction, literary experiences at home, gender, race and other variables, according to a new study.
The majority of black and Hispanic children in the United States attend such "minority segregated" schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. "Good instruction is essential, but it’s not enough," said Kirsten Kainz, an author of the study. "Most current reading instruction initiatives and policies are aimed at improving classroom instruction," Kainz said. "This research shows that characteristics of the child, the home, the classroom and the school influence reading development, and that maximally effective reading policy should address all four systems simultaneously."
Kainz and her colleagues found that classroom and school characteristics had a larger affect on low-income students’ long-term reading abilities than the method of instruction or a child’s background, such as the parents’ employment patterns or size of the household.