From the Pursuit of Equality to the Pursuit of Equity in Public Education: The Enduring Political Dilemma

Abstract

In 2014, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Brown versus the Topeka Board of Education decision. Some sixty-years after the Brown decision and fifty-years since passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, we are still dealing with significant racial disparities in educational outcomes. Today the percentage of Black students prepared for and graduating from post-secondary educational institutions remain significantly less than that of White students. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (Kena and others, 2014), the Black/White educational achievement gap, as measured by mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), did narrow between the 1970s and 2012. Despite the narrowing of the achievement gap since 1970, two things have remained evident today. First, White students’ math scores remain significantly higher than Black students’, and second, there has been no significant closure in the Black/White achievement gap since the early 1990s.

Former Secretary of Education Rod Paige described the educational achievement and attainment gaps as the civil rights crisis of the twenty-first century. The seriousness of racial disparities in educational outcomes is such that it should be treated as a threat to national security. With the persistence of the educational achievement and attainment gaps, it is becoming increasingly important that we examine the phenomenon across multiple contexts. The central thesis of this paper is that the educational performance gap is the result of complex social and political relationships that have developed over time. It is argued that a combination of social and political events occurring since the early-1980s have been crucial in our nation’s failure to close the achievement and attainment gaps. Furthermore, the political focus has changed from equal protection to a struggle for equity in educational outcomes.

The proposed paper will examine the disparities in educational outcomes within a socio-political context. A socio-political context takes into consideration the influence of factors such as culture, history, socialization, institutional and political behavior among other characteristics on educational outcomes. The objectives of this paper are threefold: 1) to examines the politics of race and politics public education in a historical context; 2) examining the political nature of continuing disparities in educational outcomes today, and 3) offering a socio-political framework for understanding the continuation of racial disparities in educational outcomes.

Keywords: race and politics, race and public education, racial disparities in educational outcomes