Tenth Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research

The Accountability Framework and Civil Rights Rhetoric

Civil rights language has been widely appropriated by the standards-and-accountability movement, which took hold in the Reagan administration, perhaps most notably in the George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, whose name was taken from the slogan of the Children’s Defense Fund, founded by civil rights pioneer Marion Wright Edelman. In his campaign speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the future president tried to reframe civil rights:

I will confront another form of bias: the soft bigotry of low expectations. . . . There’s a tremendous gap of achievement between rich and poor, White and minority. This, too, leaves a divided society. . . . Equality in our country will remain a distant dream until every child, of every background, learns so that he or she may strive and rise in this world. No child in America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy, abandoned to frustration and the darkness of self-doubt. There’s reason for optimism in this land. A great movement of education reform has begun in this country built on clear principles: to raise the bar of standards, expect every child can learn; to give schools the flexibility to meet those standards; to measure progress and insist upon results; to blow the whistle on failure; to provide parents with options to increase their option, like charters and choice; and also remember the role of education is to leave no child behind. (Bush, 2000)

This argument, which was central to the creation of NCLB and reflected the basic bipartisan theme of education reform of the Reagan through Obama administrations, rests on a number of assumptions: First is that what is needed is basically determination, that the fundamental problems of inequality among schools relating to race and class have been solved and that the policy failure has been to let the schools off the hook for failing to get equal educational results. Second is that there are no fundamental inequalities of educational resources. Third is that successfully changing school outcomes does not require any policies to equalize conditions in families and neighborhoods. Fourth is that the schools with the weakest outcomes have staffs that have the capacity to greatly increase student outcomes if sufficiently pressured. Fifth is that no specific educational program need be specified—that strong accountability will force schools with inexperienced teachers to find ways solve the huge gaps. Sixth is that relevant educational research can simply be ignored, since it is mainly full of excuses for failure. Seventh is that Brown was wrong and segregated schools can be made equal. Eighth is that educational success can be adequately measured by test scores, and ninth is that no special programs are needed for students from families with different home languages in linguistically isolated communities. The last assumption holds that the answer where schools fail to respond to strong accountability is the creation of schools outside the normal public systems, which will be better by definition because public educational institutions controlled by school districts are inherently inferior, at least in poor communities.

The standards movement came to the fore after a quarter century of frustrating efforts to change schooling outcomes with the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act funds, Head Start, school funding equalization lawsuits in most states, and numerous other initiatives. It was a period of massive tax cuts and attacks on government. The idea that replacing these complex and difficult changes with simple mandates without spending more money was seductive. Politically, standards and sanctions sounded tough, efficient, and simple to understand. The debate moved away from troublesome and costly programs; it blamed teachers and their organizations for not working hard enough. These reforms were not based on research, and fundamentally, what was written into law was an assertion that tests and sanctions could drive successful reform. It was a theory predicted to fail very badly by experts before it was adopted, but their warnings, which turned out to be true, were rejected. Civil rights policies were seen as unnecessary distractions, and the Bush administration appointed officials and judges dedicated to ending those efforts. When the schools serving minority and poor children failed to realize the standards, they were punished and sometimes dissolved; school systems made massive investments of time and money on teaching test-taking skills; standards were manipulated in a number of states to make it more possible to attain them; serious cheating was documented in some school districts; and the list of documented failures steadily grew. But Congress never voted to alter the standards. Ultimately, as the country approached almost universal failures at the NCLB deadline, the standards were bargained away in a big set of waivers. Ironically, one of the requirements for getting those waivers was to adopt another theory about intensified accountability for individual teachers, based, at least in part, on student test scores. Although experts were quick to point out that no such tests had been documented as valid and scientifically reliable measures, they were very widely adopted to escape the consequences of the previous set of arbitrary requirements.

As critics had predicted, the schools and staffs most targeted by these efforts were schools segregated by race and poverty; schools that served poor, non-White communities; and a disproportionate share of teachers of color who worked in them. As it became more and more evident, even to the most local advocates, that the NCLB standards and sanctions were not working, the advocates doubled down on the other part of the theory, and there was a broad bipartisan push for the expansion of charter schools, in spite of the fact that a succession of studies showed that such schools made no significant difference in achievement compared to public schools working with students from similar backgrounds. Because there was substantial evidence that charter schools tended not to serve an equitable share of special education and English language learner students, who typically had lower test scores, and flunked out many lower-scoring students to the public schools, it seemed reasonable to expect that charters would have somewhat higher scores, just on a compositional basis, but they did not. In terms of Brown, the stunning fact was the charter movement neglected the painful lessons about the conditions needed for equitable-choice policies that had been documented by the mid-l960s, and the charters proved even more segregated for Black students than regular public schools. In Manhattan, for example, 97% of the charter schools, actively fostered by Mayor Bloomberg, were intensely segregated (Kucsera, 2014). As a solution for their inadequate public school segregated by race and poverty, students were being given a choice of an inadequate charter school segregated by race and poverty, usually with a less experienced group of teachers and without provision for language-minority students.

A classic part of the accountability movement has been the continuous refusal to guarantee that students who are held accountable are given a good “opportunity to learn” the subjects and skills they are being evaluated on. It is, of course, totally unfair to impose sanctions on students who have never been given a fair opportunity to learn the tested material, but Congress has refused to vote for an opportunity-to-learn requirement. Both the Supreme Court and the Congress have rejected the idea that there is a right to a fair chance to learn tested material even when the tests have very high stakes. Policymakers want schools and students to be held accountable, not policymakers.

What We Actually Need

Obviously, we need a new civil rights agenda. The visionary leaders of the civil rights struggle in the early 20th century envisaged a world that seemed, to practical people, impossible to attain—but they won major transformations, taking down the racial barriers in the segregation laws of 17 states that had always been segregated. Our challenge now is to create a vision appropriate to our society in this century. This is the work of this generation, and it will involve creating new understandings of the forces that create and sustain unequal opportunity and expanding the definition of basic rights so that it works in transformed context. Educators must be part of that enterprise, and their vision must reach beyond the schools to consider the forces outside the schools that limit the chances of millions of students.

This analysis sets out the issues that need to be addressed, the relationship between civil rights and other social and economic policies, and briefly discusses some of the ways in which a new civil rights framework could play out in practice. I am convinced that we have enough understanding of a number of issues that we could significantly and rapidly improve equity in the society. But there is much still to be learned and many experiments and local efforts that need to be undertaken if we are to move from a society profoundly polarized on the basis of race and class to something that even begins to approach the “beloved community” of Martin Luther King’s dream, a society where racial and ethnic background is not a systemic barrier, where communities are open and respectful of diverse cultures, where teachers and others understand and are committed to equal opportunity, where all share a common goal of openness and lasting integration. If we were to seriously turn toward this goal again and devise policies that would work in our extremely diverse metropolitan contexts, I believe that our diversity—which is now too often a source of division, isolation from opportunity, and wasted talent—would become an immense strength of our society. This must be a central goal of civil rights policy.

Changes in American Society and Its Economy

A new policy must begin with the changed realities of our society and its economy. We are experiencing an unprecedented demographic transformation together with an economic shift that severely threatens the future of those without educational credentials. In the civil rights era, the country was almost 90% White, and 60% of Blacks still lived in the South. The 1960 Census reported that the U.S. population was 10.7% Black and 88.9% White, with less than 1% other non-Whites (Price, 1969, p. 246). By 2012, the Census Bureau, in dramatic contrast, reported that the non-Hispanic White population was down to 64% and continuing to fall (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.). The 2010 Census showed that the number of White children had actually declined by 4.3 million in a decade, and virtually all the net growth was accounted for by Latinos and Asians (Frey, 2011). The schools, nearly half non-White now, will have large non-White majorities nationwide since the majority of children being born in the United States are already non-White and non-Whites are younger with larger families (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). Immigration continues to be overwhelmingly Latino and Asian. These changes, which are most advanced in the South and the West, mean that it is simply not reasonable to conceptualize the problem of racial equity as the exclusion of Blacks from White institutions. By the 2011–2012 school year, the country’s two most populous regions, the South and the West, had White minorities; the very rapidly growing Asian population has the highest educational and income levels, on average (though there are, of course, disadvantaged subgroups); and the largest minority community is the Latinos. Most are immigrants or children of immigrants, the majority from Mexico. Although their educational disadvantage is severe, especially in higher education and high school dropouts, they have a very different history and major issues of language and immigration status that differ in some important ways from the Black situation, and differences must be considered in designing policies.

To make matters more complicated, many Latinos and African Americans are attending the same schools, bringing together two disadvantaged groups of students. In the West, there are far more Asians than Blacks. The South was historically a Black-White area, but now the Latino numbers have passed the Black numbers, and very rapid change is occurring in places like North Carolina and Georgia. ¹⁰ Although Blacks are segregated from Whites, there are very few overwhelmingly Black schools in the West, and many Black students attend largely Latino schools. Western Latino schools are even more segregated, often with triple segregation by ethnicity, poverty, and home language. Usually research and policy simply ignore these very important realities. It is ridiculous, for example, to assume that segregation can be examined by considering only one of the two “minority” groups in the schools. There has been little research on the most effective way to pursue rights and opportunities for both groups and how to prepare teachers and administrators to work effectively in these settings, which are often further complicated by Asian and White minorities in a school. In such increasingly common settings, policies from another era are simply inadequate.

We must also consider enormous economic changes. In the civil rights era, we still were the world’s greatest center of manufacturing, with many millions of well-paying unionized jobs as well as rapidly expanding government employment, which provided crucial mobility opportunities for families of color. The loss of jobs or sharply declining real wage rates and hours in many jobs makes it much more difficult for parents to have the resources for mobility for their children and to access neighborhoods with good schools. The division of the country into millions of low-wage service industry jobs and high-skill, high-education, high-wage employment has produced a country that is part Walmart, part Silicon Valley, with a shrinking middle. The tightening relationship between higher education and decent middle-class jobs increases the demand for higher education and the consequences of not getting it. Young families with limited schooling are particularly vulnerable, with a record 37% of all those below 30 living in poverty in 2010. Fewer than a third of high school dropouts in this age group had a full-time job, and there had also been a dramatic drop in full-time employment for those with only a high school degree (Tavernise, 2011). In a society where it is illegal to discriminate by race but perfectly normal to discriminate by location within metropolitan areas, these families’ situations in the housing markets mean that they have very little chance to access the kind of education their children need if poverty is not to extend into another generation.

At the March on Washington 50 years ago, the economic dimension of justice was highlighted. The sign I carried said, “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The movement King was planning when he was killed was called the Poor People’s Campaign (King, 1967). Civil rights leaders were not naive about the need for an economic base if rights were to have real meaning, and neither were the governmental leaders. In l965, at the peak of his power, President Johnson spoke about this issue at Howard University, the university whose law school was a massive force in the great legal struggles for civil rights in the 20th century.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race . . . and still just believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. . . . We see not just . . . equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result. (Johnson, 1971, p. 166)

The problem was not a lack of understanding by civil rights supporters; it was political defeat by the new coalition produced by Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” which continues to exercise great power today.

The central idea of the civil rights era was that there was fundamental racial and economic injustice in American society that must be addressed by conscious changes in educational policy specifically designed to bring down racial barriers and empower people from historically excluded groups and those locked into poverty to participate in stronger institutions that had been closed to them. The idea was that there should be not only serious government action to punish discrimination but also an array of programs and supports to make it possible for minority students and their schools to overcome the effects of a history of racial inequality. This vision was expressed in policies of desegregation orders and affirmative action in higher education, Justice Department and Office of Civil Rights (OCR) action against state and local authorities that were required to develop extensive plans, and serious monitoring by federal civil rights officials. These goals led to the creation of Title I and massive increase in the funding of segregated schools with concentrated poverty; to the Head Start program, the Upward Bound, and related programs to identify and support talented but unprepared young people get ready for college; to affirmative action plans for hiring public school and college faculty; and to major investments in training teachers in race relations and implementing programs and new curricula to make schools more fair. Work study and what became the Pell grant were born then. So was the Bilingual Education Act. There were also summer youth employment programs to help young people earn something and get work experience and Job Corps programs for youth who could profit by an organized experience away from their home communities. In the job markets, there were affirmative action and minority contracting policies to foster mobility and the growth of the non-White middle class.

There was a dramatic drop in family poverty and an increase in equality in incomes during this period. Exactly the opposite would happen under conservative administrations. Larry M. Bartels’ compelling and sophisticated analysis in his 2008 book, Unequal Democracy, shows that inequality, and all that flows from it in education and many spheres of life, is to a large extent the product of ideology and political choices, not market forces (Bartels, 2008). The vast redistribution of resources from the huge tax cuts during the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations and drastic reductions in domestic social programs aside from health care were perfect examples of these tendencies (Noah, 2012). Our tax policies, weakening of labor unions, cuts in domestic programs, and the deterioration of the minimum-wage standard since the l980s have taken income inequality to a historic high (Shierholz, 2014; Irwin, 2014). Need-based programs have been radically reduced and are far more limited than in our peer nations. Rising barriers of cost and fierce competition for college opportunity benefit the advantaged families and tend to foster intergenerational perpetuation of inequality.

A huge change since the l980s has been the extreme economic polarization. The average family experienced no growth of income for 30 years, and poorly educated families have lost dramatically. We now have a level of economic polarization and inequality unmatched by any advanced society, increasingly tied to education, and all the net gains of our economy are going to a small sector at the top. Since the wealth of most families is primarily the equity (net value) they have in the homes, and minorities were long excluded from homeownership, especially in the desirable neighborhoods where the homes increased substantially in value, they did not accumulate the wealth that enabled them to buy bigger homes in better areas and become more wealthy. Fair housing has not been seriously enforced. Unfortunately, a poorly designed major effort to increase minority homeownership under the Bush administration often led to expensive and risky predatory mortgages in marginal neighborhoods for Latino and Black families, exactly the places that turned out to be most vulnerable in the Great Recession, which produced a large-scale loss of homes and wealth and a serious increase in an already massive gap in wealth (Oliver & Shapiro, 1995). In 2009, the average White family had 19 times more wealth than the average Black family and 15 times as much as the typical Latino family (Kochhar, Fry, & Taylor, 2011, p. 3). Millions of families had no net worth. These differences mean access to very different neighborhoods and schools and very different ability to send children to college. Those concerned about education, which differs drastically by location, have to be concerned about housing and urban policy in a society where more than 80% of people live in our very fragmented metro areas (Denton, 2001; G. Orfield, 2013).

Suburbia’s Destiny and the Cities’ Fate

Too often those concerned with civil rights ignore the suburbs, but we became the world’s first predominantly suburban society in the l990s, and there has been a very large suburban migration of middle-class Blacks and Latinos, who have followed Whites to the suburbs, where many have ended up in resegregated and declining suburban communities with weak school systems (Frankenberg & Orfield, 2012). We already have some suburban rings that are majority non-White. Half of the students in the suburbs of the largest metro areas were non-White by 2011. Central cities have increasingly been left without any significant force of middle-class parents involved in the public schools, which has gravely weakened their position. This process also threatens the sectors of suburbia with the kind of racial transition followed by economic decline that ghettoized major sections of central cities a half century ago. Very little civil rights attention has been paid to the fate of the diverse suburbs, but the possibility of racial equity in the next generations will be strongly influenced by what happens in these communities.

A New Civil Rights Agenda

The civil rights agenda aimed at ending Southern segregation and discrimination was a comprehensive attack on state-sponsored segregation policies aimed at African Americans in the 17 states with apartheid-like laws, and it produced deep changes in the few years in which the laws were strongly enforced. A civil rights agenda for the present and the years to come must first document and explain the profound inequalities and explore the evidence both of current discrimination and of the continuing impacts of a history of discrimination in a nation that has never had equal income or education for a single day, because our legal system requires proof of violations to trigger remedies. In a society where issues tend to be defined by the two national political parties and neither is talking about the need for further civil rights action, it may be easy to dismiss the ideas I am about to describe as unrealistic. That was certainly the reaction to the ideas of Dr. King and civil rights leaders and scholars, like Kenneth Clark and Gunnar Myrdal, when they framed ideas in the 1940s and l950s that eventually helped transform parts of the society. Academics have the privilege and the responsibility to explore hard and unpopular truths.

Civil rights policy has to incorporate a vision of equalizing educational opportunity from preschool through graduate and professional schools. We now know that high-quality preschool can be a powerful factor in school readiness, but high-quality preschool is largely limited to middle- and upper-class families. Head Start is popular but clearly not adequate. It needs better teachers and a more coherent and comprehensive design if there is to be a real possibility of closing gaps for children who have far more limited opportunities at home (Heckman, 2013, pp. 26–42).

The dropout issue has large civil rights dimensions. Research shows that, everything else being equal, students are more likely to drop out of segregated high schools and that the nation’s dropout crisis is concentrated in about 2,000 “dropout factories” (Balfanz & Legters, 2004), which are usually segregated and impoverished urban high schools. The great bulk of education research and education reform is about the early years of school and is measured in test score increments. We celebrate the successes that have been achieved in a small group of elementary schools but ignore the fact that they seem to disappear in high school. What is critical to families and essential for economic and social mobility, however, is graduating and going on to college. The major education reforms, however, have left high school largely untouched except for raising the graduation requirements with more math and science courses and imposing exit tests, both of which can create additional barriers for students of color. A series of studies shortly after 2000 reporting dropout rates, especially for students of color, much higher than official reports had shown created a flurry of interest and got dropout accountability written into NCLB together with an entire title of the act authorizing federal aid to improve graduation rates. The Bush administration, however, interpreted away the dropout accountability provisions and asked for no appropriations for the dropout programs (Losen, 2004). A serious program to keep students in school and help them graduate should be part of a civil rights policy and is, in fact, included in a very recent consent agreement in the desegregation case in Tucson, Arizona (Fisher et al. and Mendoza et al. v. Tucson Unified School District, unpublished order, February 6, 2013). There is now an extensive body of research that can be a basis for future action (Rumberger, 2011). In recent years, graduation rates have finally begun to rise significantly, after a long period of stagnation and decline. There are still large racial gaps, and boys are especially affected (Swanson, 2014). This is an important example of the possibility of real progress and the need for continued close attention to build on these gains.

We must include college as a central element in discussing civil rights in education. In a society in which all the economic gains are going to those with postsecondary education and where the vast majority of families want college for their children, policy and civil rights remedies must not separate public schools and colleges but consider them together as a system. Omitting college from civil rights remedies today is the equivalent of omitting high school during the civil rights era—it makes no sense. Research is still far too divided between scholars of public schools and researchers on higher education. We must put these pieces of students’ lives together in our research and teaching programs. The artificial separation of these levels of education means, for instance, that those claiming “racial preference” in college admissions almost always ignore the extremely segregated and unequal high schools that leave a very large share of students of color without any real opportunity to prepare equally for college. Civil rights policy must be preschool to graduate school.

Middle-class children in good middle-class schools usually get, by default, access to a strong path to college, with good college advising, classes set at the appropriate level, a competitive peer group, and a rich information network as well as effective teaching in their courses. In schools of poor and minority children, those opportunities and connections are seldom available, and the schools are not well connected with 4-year colleges. Almost all parents today want their kids to go to college and so do the students, but there are tremendously different levels of success in college for students from different high schools. Students of color are heavily concentrated in high schools with low rates of success. There are many academic, informational, financial aid, and other barriers to college, and it is fundamentally unfair that students of different races have such different opportunities. Since college is as important now as high school was in the civil rights era, a civil rights policy for the future must address preparation and access to college. If the essential elements are not present in a local high school, there must be access to other institutions that would offer a more fair opportunity. All high schools must have an appropriate array of precollegiate and Advanced Placement classes available or provide a transfer to a school that does. A college counseling staff is essential since information is critical to have a chance of successfully navigating the complex maze of college choices and costs. Public college costs not covered by need-based aid raise serious civil rights issues, as society allocates something that is now essential increasingly on the basis of family income and wealth while increasingly subsidizing, though the tax system, payback of college loans. This would be fine if we were covering basic access to 4-year public colleges through the aid systems, but we are not, so transferring resources to those who have already finished college and away from those who can never go without more support, is wrong.

Metropolitan Issues in a Multiracial Metropolitan Society

Educational stratification and inequality today are basically defined by school district boundary lines interacting with metropolitan patterns of housing segregation much more than by problems within one district, so civil rights remedies must have a metropolitan dimension. This is vital not just for the central cities but to provide stability and block resegregation by race and class in growing sectors of suburbia. Boundary lines and the housing segregation that makes them so significant must be central foci. If opportunity is allocated on the basis of space within a metro, crossing boundary lines and regional cooperation arrangements in schools and housing become urgent priorities. As thinking about remedies within a single district made sense in some cases a half century ago, it rarely does today. Many of the suburban communities that fought strongly against any solutions to racial inequities that cross district lines now need such regional remedies and collaborations if they are not to face resegregation and economic decline. The fact that almost all contemporary interdistrict plans involve voluntary transfers to desirable magnet schools or voluntary transfers of students of color from the city to suburban schools means that the fear of suburban parents that their children would be sent into poor urban schools has no basis. We are a country of extremely diverse metropolitan areas in rapid change without any metropolitan educational institutions or even serious collaborations in the great majority of our metropolitan areas, where four of every five Americans live. It has long been clear that this has harmed our central cities and their school systems. Now it is damaging large sectors of suburbia as well. Educators need to support and foster cooperation and use their imaginations in creating the very attractive schools that would foster and reward regional approaches. For a half century we have talked about equity issues within individual central cities, something that made sense before the large exodus of African American and Latino middle-class families began in earnest four decades ago. Now educators concerned with civil rights must understand and devise policy on a metro level.

In a multiracial society, we must redefine segregation and inequality in multiracial terms and devise multiracial remedies. Today in many areas, it is much more accurate to speak of segregation of the Black plus the Latino students in schools of intense poverty, isolated from real opportunity. Policy cannot be only about access to White institutions, and it cannot be about assimilation. It must be about expanding opportunities in strong schools that are often White, Asian, and privileged for students who are often in Latino and Black schools of high poverty. There is a serious split on class lines in the Black and Latino communities and a great value in finding ways to attract and hold middle-class families of all races in urban and racially changing suburban schools. In thinking about this situation, multiple dimensions of inequality must be considered, and research must be done to learn more about the demographics and housing situation in multiracial communities. It is very important as well that we document more fully the advantages for children of privilege to attend more racially and economically diverse schools if they are to be prepared for the institutions and communities of America’s future.

A major potential benefit of diverse schools is that cultural and linguistic differences can be changed from what are seen as deficits to what can become educational resources. The current movement for creation of “dual-immersion” magnet schools, bringing together native speakers of English and another language in a school designed to make students fluent speakers of both, is exactly such an approach. In a society where a fourth of the children are Latino and a fifth of U.S. homes speak another language, and in a nation more involved in international commerce than ever before, an opportunity to study with native speakers and attain real fluency offers an obvious value to the English speaker. At the same time, interacting with good students who are fluent in academic English is likely to speed fluency for the Spanish speaker—when done well, it is a true win-win that also accomplishes a broader social purpose without any coercion (Genesee, Lindholm-Leary, Saunders, & Christian, 2007). This is the kind of social and educational invention we need as we become a society without a White, European majority.

Changing attitudes is essential. One of the worst consequences of segregation is the implicit assumption by policymakers that no one in the segregated institution is capable of advanced intellectual work and that, therefore, the opportunity does not have to be provided and we can focus on rigidly drilling basic skills in those schools. Since there may often be a small share of students ready for advanced work in a high-poverty segregated school, none is provided. At its worst, this attitude is internalized in the segregated institution. This means that a civil rights policy needs not only to bring down barriers but also to change racial practices and attitudes within schools and colleges. Teachers need to avoid projecting negative attitudes on families that are struggling and simply do not have the resources and the time that middle-class families possess. In a world where single moms are having most African American and Latino children and are trying to raise children while holding low-paying jobs that often have constantly changing work schedules while living in often dangerous neighborhoods without adequate child care, schools must be understanding and supportive. Unless teachers understand this and also the harsh realities that many immigrants face, they will often blame these families or their communities. Within segregated schools, there must be genuine opportunities and the assumption that in every community, there are students with great talents if they have a chance. Many of the same issues apply to community colleges serving low-income minority communities, where students are often lost in endless, boring remediation and few successfully transfer.

Diversifying their staff and leadership and training teachers and others in policies and techniques to assure real equality are essential elements of ending discrimination and assuring equal treatment. If a poor Latino student gets access to a strong school but is counseled into dead-end courses, or placed in no-exit special education programs, or suspended because the teacher does not have the skills to manage a diverse class, it is a serious civil rights failure. At all levels from the university to school system and building leadership, diversifying and training staff must be understood as a key part of leadership, and at all levels, an increased diversity in staffing is one essential element.

Fairness is more likely when there is a central and positive vision of integration and an insistence on equity from the top leadership of our institutions and thus must be built into assessment of leaders. ¹¹ Privileged White and Asian students and teachers from a world with enormous advantages and the conceit of cultural superiority need to understand how irreversibly linked our destinies are if our communities and nation are to succeed. As Martin Luther King wrote when he was imprisoned in the jail of Birmingham, Alabama, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” (King, 1964). If that mutuality is not developed, the garment will be torn and the society will lose.

Choice and Rights

The great expansion of choice programs and market approaches in education raises major civil rights issues. Choice programs without civil rights protections give great advantages to more educated and connected families who can figure out the systems and obtain key information and connect their children with the best options while hurting poorly educated and immigrant families whose parents are much less likely to be able to effectively navigate these complex choices and often end with poor choices or none.

Civil rights history warns that choice can stratify opportunity. Hundreds of school districts in the South implemented “freedom of choice” in the l960s as a strategy to minimize integration, the first major use of school choice in U.S. history. Under this system, all the Black schools remained entirely Black, and the few Blacks who chose to try to enroll in White schools faced resistance and intimidation in the community and isolation in the receiving schools. Both the Johnson administration and the Supreme Court (Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, l968) concluded that it left segregation largely intact. Federal authorities first tried to make choice more effective by inserting some basic civil rights requirements—that all families be informed of choice alternatives and given forms to make a choice, that good information be provided, that the choices be honored without conditions or screening, that no transfers increased segregation, and that free transportation be provided. The federal rules also required significant annual increases in integration if choice was to continue (G. Orfield, 1969, p. 146). This did produce real gains, but by l968, the administration and the Supreme Court had decided that mandatory plans were needed to meet the constitutional mandate for desegregation (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office for Civil Rights, 1968).

A new form of choice became important in the mid-1970s—magnet schools, which remain the nation’s largest form of school choice. Big city school districts that faced judicial mandates to desegregate their schools often decided to try to do it by offering compelling educational choices that did not exist elsewhere in the district with a recruitment and enrollment policy that set desegregation goals. They actively recruited students and held seats open for integration purposes. All key civil rights conditions for choice that had been developed in the l960s were used in these programs. Congress enacted the federal magnet school program, whose funds were avidly sought by school districts across the country. When magnets were implemented as part of desegregation plans and seriously monitored, they were often integrated and popular, and they did expand educational choice with their distinctive educational offerings while offering all racial groups the opportunity to attend a school that was stably integrated at levels that many parents liked (Blank, Levine, & Steel, 1996).

Magnet schools were not always successful, and efforts to turn all schools in districts into magnets floundered, but they were an important tool. Unfortunately, federal dollars were radically reduced in the 1980s with the elimination of the federal desegregation assistance program in l981, and by the early 1990s, the Supreme Court was dismantling desegregation orders and the policies they contained for the magnet schools, often producing rapid resegregation. As choice was, once again, separated from civil rights policies, it provided the best choices to those with the best information and ability to provide their own transportation and the worst treatment to those who did not understand the system.

Attention turned to a major new form of unregulated choice, in essence returning to the “freedom of choice” of the early l960s. These were the charter schools, schools under private control with public funds and able to recruit their own students, sometimes using selection criteria and sometimes designing schools for only one race or ethnicity. The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations provided funds for a great expansion of this form of choice without civil rights protections and not for magnet schools. In the Obama administration, lifting the caps on charters in many states was a condition for getting Race to the Top funding or waivers from NCLB requirements. Lacking civil rights policies, they ended up even more segregated than public schools for Black students (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Wang, 2010). A 2013 study in Minnesota shows overwhelmingly White charter schools are developing in the suburbs in the state that enacted the first charter legislation (McGuire, 2013). Color- and class-blind choice policies often end up increasing stratification. When one does not deal with race, the default often is to fund an expansion of segregation and a deepening of inequality (Ladd, Fiske, & Ruijs, 2011). The great expansion of charter schools in New York City, for example, produced schools that were even more segregated than the very highly segregated regular public schools; 97% of the charters in Manhattan were intensely segregated (Kucsera, 2014). So, although the Obama administration placed strong civil rights supporters in its civil rights offices, those making its basic education policy decisions provided strong incentives for the rapid expansion of the most segregated part of the public schools.

Rights of Language-Minority Students

In a society where one fifth of students who come from homes speaking another language, and many of these students experience very serious educational problems, a positive language policy could be an invaluable part of a civil rights remedy. The Supreme Court recognized in Lau v. Nichols that failing to offer students instruction that they could understand amounted to discrimination, but the court left definition of a remedy up to federal civil rights officials (Lau v. Nichols, 1974). Most of the state laws and federal regulations that followed the Supreme Court decision in the 1974 Lau case have been abandoned (Gándara et al., 2010). With many states using high-stakes tests that ignore the language issue, there are civil rights problems since students and teachers are sanctioned on the basis of tests that can seriously underestimate what a student actually knows about a subject. In the 2009 Horne v. Flores case, we see the extraordinary spectacle of a divided Supreme Court approving Arizona’s segregated “Mexican rooms,” which isolate students in separate classes with other native Spanish speakers most of the day for ineffective English language drill, making it impossible for them to get the general curriculum. ¹² There is strong evidence that this approach has harmed the learning and blocked the graduation of many affected students (Gándara & Orfield, 2012). The Department of Justice has intervened on some aspects of this policy, and the rights of these students are an important goal in civil rights policy, but this still recalls the historic isolation of Mexican American children in the Southwest (U.S. Department of Justice, 2012).

Teacher Equity

Teachers are, of course, the most important school-based resource for equity, but experienced and effective teachers from strong educational backgrounds are concentrated in schools and districts with higher-income families and fewer students of color, and the nation’s teaching force has remained overwhelmingly White as the student body has been transformed. There is evidence that such teachers leave when districts go through racial transition and stay in stably integrated districts and schools (Siegel-Hawley & Frankenberg, 2012). If schools are to be segregated by race and class, getting and keeping such teachers should have high priority. There is evidence that teacher reforms using evaluation of student performance will only intensify the desire of experienced teaches to leave those schools, yet that has been strongly pushed by the Obama administration.

Good, experienced teachers are particularly critical for disadvantaged students. Teachers, however, are located in ways that increase rather than diminish educational equality. Since the teacher accountability reforms expose teachers in schools with high concentrations of non-White students to extremely negative consequences, and since there has long been a tendency for experienced teaches to leave segregated minority schools, these plans only make a bad situation worse. We need plans to improve the professional treatment of and resources for excellent teachers to commit themselves to long-term service in the schools that need them. Appropriate evaluation and rewards would be an integral part of such strategies. Unless this can be done, these students will never have a fair chance and teachers will often feel that it is an unacceptable risk to stay in a school that is much more likely to be branded negatively (Murnane & Papay, 2010). NCLB showed concern about teachers by requiring that all schools hire “highly qualified” teachers, but that was interpreted in terms of meeting state certification rather than experience or skills, and the segregation issue was ignored. Also untrained teachers in a short training program were defined as highly qualified. Defining highly qualified to include successful experience and working with teachers to learn how to attract and keep teachers where needed should be part of a civil rights remedy.

The fact that these sanctions are targeted very disproportionately on schools of poor non-White children and on many of our far-too-small group of teachers of color who work there compounds the damage. A civil rights policy would seek a better definition of qualified teachers and a systematic plan to give them the support, respect, and professional treatment that would convince them to make a long-term commitment to schools that truly need them. Although inadequate probationary periods and extreme cumbersome dismissal policies do protect a small number of teachers who should leave the profession, the idea, expressed in a 2014 California decision, Vengara v. California (Medina, 2014), that ending all teacher tenure rights would be a kind of a new Brown decision that would radically improve educational equity is doubtless a massive overstatement of the reality and would deny good teachers the kind of security and protection from arbitrary administrative action that teacher and civil service tenure systems were designed to provide. The dismissal issue that the California judge estimated might affect 1% to 3% of teachers should not distract us from the fact that the nations with better educational outcomes than the United States do have teachers’ unions and teachers. But they recruit, train, and empower teachers much more effectively than we usually do. Teachers are now often punished and blamed if they take on the most difficult schools and cannot meet standards that have no research base and rewarded if they transfer to schools with more privileged students. To attract and hold better teachers where they are most needed, we have to make those better jobs where realistic accomplishments are recognized and rewarded, where evaluation is thoughtful, and where teachers are treated as professionals deserving respect.

A Civil Rights Policy Framework

After decades of trials, it is clear that the color-blind policy that denies the realities of race and poverty, and of the special problems of highly isolated disadvantaged communities, has failed. Assuming that the society now provides equal opportunity so race can be ignored is ignoring the obvious differences anyone can readily see by visiting theoretically identical courses in high-poverty minority schools and middle-class White and Asian schools. When researchers look at data showing the distribution of the things that are most strongly related to student success, they are distributed by race. Black and Latino kids still come to school from families with much more limited resources far behind, and their weaker schools cannot close the gap.

We need a new civil rights policy and a series of social and economic policies that would increase the resources and capacity of non-White families to take advantage of those opportunities. It should start with a few basic assumptions:

Since we learned from the experience and research of a half century that racial problems do not heal themselves, that inaction or color-blind policy perpetuates and even permits expansion of racial inequality, and that there are known ways to deal more effectively with many dimensions of racial inequality, it is clear that we need policies that will work now in radically changed circumstances.

The core anti-discrimination aspect of civil rights policy is often neglected because people assume that discrimination happened only in the past. But it is still present and there needs to be a clear understanding of what is illegal and a clear risk of administrative or judicial sanctions. When school districts gerrymander assignment zone sites or policies in ways that systematically advantage some racial groups and harm others, they should be investigated and prosecuted if they do not change. If there is discrimination in the hiring or assignment of teachers and administrators by race and ethnicity, it should be prosecuted. If immigrant and language-minority children and their families are ignored or stereotyped, that is discrimination. When students are punished for something they never had a chance to learn and it is systematically related to race, it is discriminatory. When young men of color are placed on suspension or assigned to special education far more than is reasonable without objective criteria, that is a civil rights violation. If choice systems systematically disadvantage and isolate groups of students, they should be investigated. If language-minority students are denied equal access to the curriculum, it violates the law. In recent decades, there have been harsh consequences for failure to meet test score goals but very few for civil rights violations. This needs to be corrected and local civil rights groups, scholars, and journalists should give serious attention to these issues. Clear enforcement actions would change the agenda in school districts. The Obama administration’s OCR and Department of Justice Civil Rights Division officials are a great improvement over the Bush administration’s dismal record, but these issues need to be addressed on a much larger scale.

To expand opportunity, education policy must be supported by policies that improve opportunity in homes and communities. Housing policy is school policy. If children have to move often, it disrupts their learning. If the family cannot live in a safe neighborhood with a decent school and positive peer groups, the children will learn less. Food policy is educational policy. Students’ health and vision care have an obvious and strong relationship to their ability to learn. Preschool and child care policies affect school opportunity. All of these policies, if they distribute opportunities on racial and ethnic lines, are civil rights challenges and must be addressed in civil rights policy.

Obviously, we need a set of policies that is based on an understanding of how race works in our society and embraces a research-based strategy for overcoming those effects to the extent that schools can do it. To the extent that the problems are rooted in conditions outside the schools, it is imperative that educators understand those root causes, join with researchers from other fields to explore how they relate to school success, and be part of the discussion about policy changes in those arenas. Educators and educational researchers are especially close to the changes in society that policymakers and leaders are often deeply isolated from—they have knowledge the society and a responsibility to enter into broader social policy debates.

Do No Additional Harm

When thinking about what can be done now, we should first stop policies that are unintentionally and unfairly making things worse, such as driving good teachers out of low-achieving schools. Education reformers should follow the precept of the Hippocratic Oath doctors have been taking for 25 centuries, the pledge “to never do harm to anyone.” We should stop building new subsidized housing for families in areas with segregated low-achieving schools and require sites with better and more diverse schools. We should not judge and punish teachers on the basis of criteria that research has shown to be invalid. We should fund no more intentionally segregated charter schools. Schools should stop suspending large fractions of their young men of color and invest in positive remedies. We should not eliminate transportation for poor kids to better schools in the name of budgeting. We should not expand graduation requirements and test complexity until we are prepared to effectively teach the students who are in weak schools and will be harmed. When we incarcerate great numbers of young men from impoverished Black and Latino communities, we have to have educational programs in prisons and educational reconnections after prison to avoid profound damage to their future, their families, and communities. This list could go on and on. The basic need is to keep in mind who our students are, what obstacles they are facing, how their lives will be ruined if they do not finish school, and that it is our moral responsibility not to impose popular-sounding reforms that will predictably make a very bad situation even worse. This does not mean we cannot raise standards or provide more demanding courses. Both should be done but only when we develop our schools’ capacities for change and prepare our students. When we have a situation where young men of color without high school degrees cannot find any legal jobs that could possibly support a family, we have to be extremely careful not to put a fatal obstacle in the way of those who have a chance to succeed.

Since the Reagan years, the development of educational policy has ignored the deep impacts of social and economic conditions and policy. The success of the conservative movement’s approach of insisting that schools can succeed regardless of these conditions, that anyone who talks about them is making “excuses,” and then heavily sanctioning the schools when the great majority predictably fail has undermined public support for public schools and led to a major commitment to nonpublic or quasipublic schools in spite of the lack of evidence that they provide significant gains. We are dismantling public school systems whose problems are basically the problems of racial and economic polarization and segregation on the unfounded and untrue assumption that anything else will be better and that there are no costs involved in picking apart the vulnerable schools that serve the most disadvantaged students and turning the students over to a maze of private operators who have political power and are rarely held accountable. This worldview is increasing the tendency to blame the teachers and the resulting demoralization and de-professionalization of teaching, especially in schools serving the most disadvantaged students. When that policy predictably fails, then the attack turns to teachers’ colleges and the assumption that anyone who does not have professional training or experience but comes from a good college will do better.

Resuming a Long-Delayed Discussion

The last time we had a rich policy discussion embracing both education and social and economic inequality was during the l960s. Then we had simultaneous enactment of the War on Poverty, a massive expansion of civil rights (including school desegregation, voting rights, nondiscrimination in employment, and affirmative action). There was a major rise in the minimum wage, job experience and training programs, social services, and college scholarship and preparation policies. Government recognized that decayed urban communities needed serious and sustained help. The idea then was that taking down barriers was not sufficient. This meant that there had to be a major effort to provide families with economic opportunities and resources and to fill in the gaps of skills and preparation that could enable, for example, a student from a poorly performing school with limited opportunities to prepare for college. Major new programs stretched from preschool through college. There was pressure on employers to systematically hire non-Whites, along with efforts to end the segregation and pathology of high-rise housing projects and to enable low-income and minority families to have access to more successful neighborhoods and their schools.

Unfortunately this lasted a few years, before much of it was repudiated and leaders became committed to the theory that it was the schools that were failing and that they could solve the problem if the teachers could be held seriously accountable. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama generally adopted the assumptions of the Reagan policies, although they favored more funds for schools of concentrated poverty. Not for almost a half century has there been serious consideration of the underlying conditions linked to school inequality.

Schools are the only public institutions we have that reach the vast majority of our people and have an explicit commitment to equalizing opportunity. They are the only institutions that have the potential to cross lines of race and class in the socialization of children in a polarized society that will soon have no racial or ethnic majority. The central idea of the civil rights era was that there was fundamental racial injustice in American society that must be addressed by conscious changes in educational policy specifically designed to bring down racial barriers and empower people from historically excluded groups to participate in stronger schools and colleges where they had been excluded. The idea was that there should be not only strong action to stop and remedy discrimination but also an array of programs and supports to make it possible for minority students and their schools to overcome the massive effects of a history of racial inequality. This vision was expressed in policies of desegregation and affirmative action in higher education and serious campaigns of litigation and enforcement of rights. The understanding of the damage done by concentrating and isolating poor kids, usually poor minority kids, in troubled schools led to the creation of Title I and massive increases in funding of those schools. The understanding that the inequality began far before students entered school led to the Head Start program, the first national program of the War on Poverty. Even at the peak of the Great Society, there were large racial gaps, but at least there was a set of policies designed to make mobility more possible.

The governing principles of post-Reagan education reform are that the schools could do it by themselves—in an increasingly unequal and impoverished society—if the teachers wanted to and that, if they do not, they need to be exposed as failures, sanctioned, and faced with publicly funded semiprivate charter school competition. This sounds tough, but it punishes many teachers and administrators who are actually making a positive difference against considerable odds. And it increases the incentives for the best and most experienced teachers and leaders to leave the schools that need them the most. Worst of all, it shifts the blame for the inequalities to students whose lives are deeply unequal and to the educators who work with them, absolving the rest of the society. This is the consequence of a color-blind set of policies in a society still spatially divided by color. Critics of this policy framework are often assailed for offering “excuses” (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 2003). Once damaging patterns of segregation by race and poverty are accepted as normal, the inequalities in communities of color tend to be blamed on those communities and the professionals who work in them, not on the fundamentally unequal opportunities in all aspects of the students’ lives.

Obviously, we need a set of policies that is based on an understanding of how race works in our society and embraces a research-based strategy for overcoming those effects to the extent that schools can. Although it does not have the highest academic prestige, research on approaches that work and evaluation of small promising experiments is important. There may not be gold-standard longitudinal data, but very important ideas and possibilities can be surfaced and the policy universe expanded. The reality is that the large budgets and high access needed for major longitudinal random-assignment studies tends to reflect mainstream policy preferences and government priorities, not issues of racial change and equity. When scholars study issues that go against the current mainstream, they must show creativity, persistence, and a drive to get the best data they can under often difficult circumstances. Very important ideas and proposals can start in small projects. To the extent that the problems are rooted in conditions outside the schools, it is imperative that educators understand those root causes, join with researchers from other fields to explore solutions, and have a voice in the policy debates that move beyond school policy.

Serious attention must be given to the spatial and institutional barriers to opportunity in a metropolitan society with institutional fragmentation and boundaries that are strongly related to race and ethnicity and clearly define different systems of opportunity. A massive national 2013 study of intergenerational mobility whose authors included two of the leading young U.S. economists (recipients of the renowned Clark Medal for the nation’s very best young economist) found that segregation and weak school systems were directly related to low economic mobility, not only for minorities but for all residents (Leonhardt, 2013). Most segregation by race and poverty is among school districts, not within them, and the suburbs, far from being a single entity, now show enormous differences between those that are flourishing and many that are stressed or declining. Between 2000 and 2011, there was a 67% increase in the number of poor people living in suburbs (Allpert, 2013; M. Orfield, 2002). Race and poverty and local policies and practices that exclude the poor, fail to end discrimination, and do not coordinate school and housing policy on a regional level are all implicated in these problems. We have permitted local boundaries set generations ago for other purposes to become walls of separation for educational opportunity.

It would be good to begin to move toward regional approaches by creating policy incentives and supportive regulations. The Obama administration has been able to enact a whole set of major school policies, mostly for heightened pressure on teachers and more charter schools, without any authorizing legislation because school authorities across the country are so willing to do many things just to escape the irrational accountability mechanisms of NCLB, and Congress has been incapable of writing a new law for many years because of the extreme ideological polarization between the parties and the inability of either to control both Congress and the presidency. Unfortunately, the administration has been using this leverage to push flawed policies for more charter schools and teacher accountability systems that are not scientifically defensible. It has failed to respond to the suggestions of the National Coalition on School Diversity, which represents 20 civil rights organizations and research centers, to create significant incentives for integration of schools (National Coalition on School Diversity, 2014). States need waivers from the very harsh penalties prescribed for schools and districts that failed to have all subgroups of students over proficiency by 2013, which was an unrealistic requirement that no state achieved. The administration could have, for example, given major weight in granting waivers to those states that created regional collaborations to devise regional magnet schools and transfer policies with civil rights standards, an approach that has been found to be successful and popular in creating integrated and excellent schools in Connecticut metropolitan areas. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) could also offer incentives and technical assistance for such planning, which can make an entire metro healthier economically and socially.

The federal government also has major leverage over school choice programs both as a leading funder and as a civil rights regulator. The basic policy need is for the government to subject all choice funding for charter and magnet schools to civil rights criteria, including diversity goals and recruitment processes, no admissions requirements, welcoming policies for English language learner students, a lottery selection method, and excellent parent information. Although the Parents Involved decision has created obstacles (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 2007), there are still several legal means of pursuing diversity. With such changes, charter schools could become a building block for a diverse society rather than a force for separation. If there is to be real choice and students are to escape neighborhood segregation, free transportation for students choosing is essential. Otherwise choice is only for those with the resources to pay their own transportation.

Roles for Educators and Researchers

Research on schooling outcomes consistently shows that social and economic factors in homes and communities are strongly related to educational opportunities and outcomes. The success of the conservative movement in separating these dimensions of policy and, first, insisting that schools can succeed regardless of these conditions and then heavily sanctioning them when they predictably fail has produced profoundly unfair and unsuccessful policies. Setting absurd standards and then announcing massive failures has undermined public support for public schools and led to a major commitment to nonpublic or quasipublic schools in spite of evidence that they provide no significant gains. We are dismantling public school systems whose problems are basically the problems of racial and economic polarization, segregation, and economic disinvestment on the unfounded and untrue assumption that anything else will be better and that there are no costs involved in picking apart the public systems and faculties that serve the most disadvantaged students. When that approach predictably fails, then the attack turns to teachers’ colleges and the assumption that anyone who does not have professional training but comes from a good college will do better, another assumption without any significant evidence. Obviously, it would be better to get more of our best students to become teachers, and there are those, as in every profession, who should move on to another job, but these are simply not the real problems. Not for almost a half century has there been a serious attack on the underlying conditions linked to school inequality. Since it is now clear that the assumptions of a school-only policy focused on assessment and sanctions are incorrect, it is time to look seriously at alternatives.

The Policy Vacuum

There have been only two major education reform laws enacted by Congress since the l960s—Goals 2000 and NCLB (though there have been many minor changes)—and both promised to end racial gaps by a fixed deadline and failed miserably. There have been no major urban policies enacted in nearly four decades. The social safety net for the poor has been drastically reduced. All of the major programs to produce affordable housing for poor families have been eliminated except for a system of tax subsidies to developers that is very expensive and ineffective, reinforcing concentration of low-income non-White students in weak schools. Our civil rights laws have been gravely weakened by courts transformed by the conservative political movement. The financial barriers and competitive pressures for strong public higher education have considerably lowered access to many colleges. We have had a major disinvestment in higher education by state governments, which have shifted the cost burden to families and students and left what are often insuperable gaps while not expanding 4-year campuses or financial aid sufficiently to deal with needs.

In the last generation, the average U.S. family has made no economic progress as the economy has grown substantially. All of the gains have gone to the rich and to the businesses as the position of labor has been devastated by globalization of companies and destruction of unions. We are in a society in which the middle class has to take what business offers, in which the working class is increasingly in jobs without benefits or full-time work and with declining real incomes. It is a society in which the minimum wage in a much richer economy is far lower in real dollars than it was decades ago. This is a society in which there was a fierce attack on a very limited welfare system and in which the poorest mothers are forced to take dead-end entry-level jobs without the provision of decent care for their children. We lack family benefits that virtually all other advanced nations provide, and much of our politics is about how to cut back further in a nation where the only secure parts of government have become programs for defense, for caring for the old, and tax cuts and subsidies for those with enough income to take advantage of them. It is a society where courts and legislatures cut back on voting rights in ways that harm minorities and the poor while giving virtually unlimited power to the rich to buy political influence and distort our electoral process (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010).

The reality is that we need a great social movement and some major political leadership if we are to create a viable civil rights policy for our time. We are living in the political system that has been dominated by suburbia since the l960s and has largely written off minority interests. Since only one party seriously seeks minority votes and one often engages in wedge issue politics playing on fears of racial change and opposition to immigration, communities of color have little leverage. The GOP has 2% Black membership but 22% of Democrats are Black. Eighty-nine percent of Republicans are White, and the Democratic Party has twice as high a share of Latinos and Asians than the GOP. This is the result of the decision of one political party to become the representative of the White South, of conservative religious groups and frustrated middle class looking for scapegoats, and another political party that has become pro-business, a strong defender of Social Security and Medicare, and a supporter of education within the Reagan framework. One party plays on fears of racial change, and the other avoids the issues so civil rights policy languishes. The powerful foundations with resources to launch new issues in many cases invest instead in a highly politicalized effort to extend the testing and charter movements.

The first requirement of a decent educational policy is to understand the nature of the society and communities that are producing the students we must educate and to remove, as far as possible, the external obstacles that send the students to school far less prepared to learn and give them far less support and more obstacles to their progress in school. Those obstacles can be and often are massive and create barriers that are insurmountable unless the school or those outside the school take extraordinary steps. There are many things that could make a difference in moving toward the goal of equal opportunity in an integrated society.

In terms of coordination of school and housing policy, for example, we could try to catch up to where we were at the end of the Carter administration more than a third of a century ago. Although it was a centrist administration of a Southern moderate, it began to take serious steps to coordinate educational policy with HUD programs and policies so HUD would not pay for housing, which resegregated schools and communities and combined housing and school litigation at the Justice Department in the search for coordinated policies. The administration used housing and regional planning funds to incentivize regional fair-share subsidized housing programs and supported experiments with Section 8 certificates and counseling to give some public housing tenants access to suburban neighborhoods and schools. There was a pending federal regulation on these issues as well as pending civil rights litigation in Houston, Phoenix, and elsewhere that was quickly reversed when President Reagan was elected. If would be an important step to catch up with the Carter proposals and offer incentives to spark interest and plans. The largest affordable-housing construction program, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, is under the Treasury Department, which has failed to implement and monitor civil rights standards. A recent study of the program’s impact on Southern California families shows that it is locking in poor minority families needing housing to weak schools (Pfeiffer, 2009). The president or the Justice Department, which has power to coordinate civil rights policy, could direct Treasury to change this policy.

We are now in a rush to implement Common Core standards and tests. This is the new solution. As a critic of very uneven and often misleading state testing data, I tend to agree that one set of tests that is good would be much better than 50 sets that are mediocre and cannot be compared. I love the idea of moving to encourage more focus on the kind of “higher-order” skills students need in college. But I believe that high-stakes testing often harms minority students if it is set at the wrong cut point, has high stakes for students and schools, and does not include serious assurances that students will be appropriately taught what they are tested on. Testing is useful and necessary if used to diagnose problems, allocate resources, and improve instruction. If used in the wrong way, however, it punishes students whose families have few educational resources and attended weak schools, and this will very disproportionately harm minority students and low-income students whose native language is not English. I think that, for example, when there are obvious problems with the acquisition of Algebra 1 for many students, having a mandatory test that assumes Algebra 2 knowledge will have discriminatory impacts if used for accountability. If we are to avoid yet another round of unintended harm to students of color and their schools, this needs to be carefully examined from a civil rights perspective and rolled out in a way that increases the capacity of schools before punishing their students for something they never had a fair chance to learn, adding insult to injury.

Education reformers often use the language of civil rights to justify their policies, but the policies tend to ignore the reality of the roots of racial inequality and sometimes actually compound the damage and perpetuate or deepen the impacts of segregation. NCLB was a classic example in a policy that purported to end the “soft racism of low expectations” and enacted absurd standards that all of the states failed, as experts predicted before the law was enacted. In the process, they subjected the children in the schools that were segregated by race and poverty to a mindless process of endless drill accompanied by virtual abandonment of subjects that were not tested, subjects like the arts, like history, like civics, things that help give meaning and interest to life and are prerequisites for a democracy. This is a classic example of using civil rights language to justify a truly harmful policy that has now been discredited in virtually every state and city.

The dead end of policies that ignore racial and economic segregation can be seen in cities like Detroit. Detroit children were denied access to suburban schools by the Supreme Court four decades ago, the year after the court said poor schools had no constitutional right to fair funding. The school district tried special reading programs, an Afrocentric curriculum, and many other strategies over the years as middle-class families of all races continued to leave the city and its schools. The school system and its schools have been lashed by NCLB and picked apart by charter and transfer policies. Racial transition and resegregation are reaching into the Detroit suburbs. There is only a skeleton of a public school system segregated by race and poverty. With the city in virtual bankruptcy, the state government has taken control and is slashing expenditures. When one looks at the devastation in Philadelphia, the elimination of a traditional public school system in New Orleans, the massive school closings in Black Chicago, and similar problems in other cities, it should be apparent that we are beyond the point where marginal policies can work. It may be that we are now beyond the point where school districts in the very poor, all–non-White cities are viable and that we must consider making them part of a larger, more viable metropolitan entity on the model of what happened in North Carolina, where the state strongly encouraged consolidation into countywide school districts, or Wilmington, Delaware, where a federal court combined all the districts in the metropolitan area, which were later divided into four large districts, each with part of the city and a large segment of the suburban ring. There is no reason to think that district lines created generations ago, before vast social changes, can provide the education our society needs for its future.

The Big Changes

If there were a new civil rights movement, what would be the large goals? After a half century of neglect and painful reverses, we need a movement against poverty and income inequality, working for the creation of fair and integrated communities, schools, and workplaces. We need to consider major changes in the structure of local government though creation of metropolitan institutions and collaborations so that our metropolitan society does not fly apart into distant and destructive separation, letting the communities that serve the poor die while those that house all the people made rich in part by tax subsidizes of various sorts feel deep pride in their excellent schools in communities where housing and land-use policy exclude those who are not affluent.

We need housing and urban development policies at the federal and state levels that foster and support racially and economically diverse and stable communities. We need to admit that our War on Drugs and mass incarcerations have had immense costs both economically and socially and are a failure and learn lessons from our more successful states and our peer nations. For those who are incarcerated, we must have a path back that includes education.

We need a sensible immigration policy to replace the vast investment in a militarized border, a policy that welcomes and legalizes long-settled families and a reasonable number of young, hard-working immigrants, since we are headed toward demographic decline in many parts of our county, and the birthrate of our top sending nation, Mexico, is also plummeting. Without such a policy, we will age out, something many countries in Europe and some in Asia are already experiencing. We need to invent ways to see and use our diversity as a source of wealth and cultural and linguistic richness, not as a problem. We need to have courts and administrative agencies staffed with people who understand how our nation is changing, not those imagining that it can go back to their idealized version of the past. At all levels of government and in the private and nonprofit sectors, we need leaders who acknowledge that problems of inequality and segregation have not been solved and have the courage to support facing reality and solving the problems.

Is Any of This Possible?

When we look back at the period of great reforms a half century ago, there is a tendency to think that something on that scale can never be repeated. The truth is, however, that we face much less formidable odds than the leaders of the civil rights movement faced in many respects. They faced 17 states, home to most Blacks, where apartheid was totally locked into state law and history, a situation where there were almost no lawyers in the region who would represent civil rights against a powerful establishment defending the status quo as well as the Ku Klux Klan and violent fringe groups willing to use terror. They faced a Congress that had not enacted a major civil rights law since the l870s, a Congress that had never enacted a major aid to education bill, and a Supreme Court that had passively accepted racial subordination. They faced extreme racial stereotypes and fears that were deeply rooted in American culture, which they overcame with persistence, courage, and dignity.

Today we are one vote on the Supreme Court from a different understanding of civil rights. We have the largest representation of minority communities ever in Congress and a former community organizer from Black Chicago in the White House. Racial attitudes have improved on many dimensions, although there is very little understanding by Whites of the need for more civil rights initiatives. Millions of Americans have been educated together and have had positive interracial experiences. There has been a vast increase in the share of the population that is non-White and that will have more and more impact on the political system over time. We have many examples of more successful approaches to racial equity than were available in the civil rights era. We have many researchers and intellectuals willing to help.

It is the conservatives, however, who have vigorously pursued over decades a radical redefinition of civil rights. They now have a majority of members on the Supreme Court, all appointed by conservative presidents elected by overwhelmingly White votes, who have embraced the idea that the 14th Amendment, a post–Civil War amendment intended to guarantee the rights of freed slaves, means that it is just as bad to consider race for the purpose of creating integration as it is to use race, as the Southern states long did, to segregate. This interpretation has resulted in the preposterous 2007 decision (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 2007) forbidding the most common forms of voluntary school desegregation through magnet and choice plans with specific desegregation goals that had been embraced by the courts for several decades. ¹³ It has also resulted in the court’s gutting the Voting Rights Act as no longer necessary, only to see several states reinstitute voter suppression measures on the same day.

But Dr. King Is Gone

What civil rights supporters do not have is very important, too. Martin Luther King died 45 years ago, and there is no one today who can so eloquently speak to the best of our religious and political traditions and be heard across the society. We do not have Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, John and Robert Kennedy, and many others who were willing to spend great political capital to make great changes. We do not have a highly competent and respected nonpartisan Civil Rights Commission to help create an agenda, and we really do not have a national press that seriously explains to the public the current racial dimensions of our inequality.

It may be, however, that the next Martin Luther King is a college student, part Latino, part Asian, in Southern California. It may be that the next Thurgood Marshall is an African American girl living in what looks like a bombed-out area of Detroit. It may be that the evangelical Christian and traditional Catholic awakening to the immigration disaster is the first sign of a reviving moral understanding of the issues we face today. It may be that the people reading this article have the knowledge and skills to forge and document the necessity and the workability of a new agenda. Researchers can contribute to this work in many ways.

Let us stop feeling sorry for ourselves about the dismal trends we see—many the product of reversal of good and successful policies. We can regret the wedge-issue politics of a failing, bitterly resistant movement of older White people protesting and fearing the changes that are coming in our society, but we cannot yield to their fears. The United States has wasted decades on hostile social policy and civil rights changes that have diminished and divided our society, and education policy has been deeply limited by those trends. It is time to reclaim and to update the dream and to talk about the only viable future for a society of incredible diversity that is now wasting too much of its potential in division and ideological blind alleys.

The civil rights movement showed that there are ways to link the issues of racial justice to the widely shared values of country and faith. The researchers who read this can be part of a new movement. There is much we need to know. We need much better research on the intergenerational effects of segregation and discrimination, on contemporary discrimination by school and other authorities, on strategies to diversity and retain faculty, on the development of race relations and community consciousness in schools with several racial and ethnic groups, on housing and urban policies that foster stable school integration, on the educational impacts of immigration policies, on language learning in different settings, on policies that increase graduation levels and reintegrate ex-offenders, and many other issues. Researchers can help people understand the roots of inequality, diminish stereotypes and unfair blaming of minority students and teachers, and demonstrate that to do something that actually works on sensitive issues of racial and ethnic fairness means that we must take risks, we must persist in spite of the predictable blowback and always present possibility of defeat, and we must deliver the best possible evidence and ideas and explain them as clearly and honestly as possible. The people who led the movements that ended slavery and abolished the Jim Crow laws did not turn back in the face of what looked like insurmountable odds. It is now apparent not only how fiercely the status quo will be defended but also how that has harmed our potential as a nation. People who know better have accepted senseless and destructive policies. It is not about economics, although economics matter greatly; it is not about test scores, although high test scores are good. It is, in the end about us, about who we want to be, about how we go through the great transitions in our society, about how Whites join with others to imagine and create a new society enriched by the contributions of all. It is an immense challenge but also the great opportunity of our time. Many Americans, many educators, care deeply and have knowledge and skills that could move policy forward. A movement begins when people decide that injustice is unacceptable and challenge the conscience of their community. It asks people to replace fears with dreams, to reach across lines, and to commit their talents to a fairer society. The civil rights movement a half century ago made the American South a much better and more successful region. A new civil rights strategy could do the same for our multiracial, largely metropolitan society.