More comments from the blogosphere

Paul Street at Empire and Inequality argues that we still live in a state of "educational apartheid:"

To really grasp how badly our post-Brown educational structure mistreats children of color, you need to visit inner-city schools where kids have no idea that Cornell, Columbia, and Northwestern are universities and where teachers chronically quit to escape a militarized, test-based curriculum, absurdly high student-teacher ratios and rotting, dangerous schools. Then visit shiny and leafy white suburban schools that serve as defacto private college preparatory academies within the “public” system. These latter schools attract the best, most energized teachers who enjoy the opportunity to practice their craft in pleasing structures with low student-teacher ratios and the best and latest materials....

Peter Levine has this suggestion for how individuals can mark the anniversary

Last fall, we worked with students at a local high school in Maryland to create an interactive, deliberative website about the epic history of desegregation in their own district. ("We" means the Democracy Collaborative and the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy, both at the University of Maryland.) We have now collaborated with NABRE, the Network of Alliances Bridging Race and Ethnicity (pronounced “neighbor”), to develop a plan for a replicating the same project in many school districts. This year is the 50th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education, the first of a series of 50th anniversaries of events in the Civil Rights Era. Coming to understand the difficult choices made in one's own community seems both a good way to commemorate this history and an excellent foundation for making choices today.

In a post from February, Joshua Claybourn offers a quote from Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas on the anniversary:

"We're still back in the race business," he said, when asked about the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation. "We haven't solved the problem of educating people of my race or other minorities. We seem to be answering that by putting black men in prison. That's sad."