It is far from controversial to state that education is an immensely valuable and important public good to individuals and democratic societies. Yet the United States Constitution, the document which citizens place their faith to effectively communicate our country’s fundamental values and commitments, fails to explicitly address education and any intended associated rights. This has made questions about who retains access to high quality education and how educational opportunities and resources are distributed critical topics of dispute since the United States was founded. Prior to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education which struck down the application of “separate but equal” in public education, state-sanctioned segregation and diverted attention to equalization efforts plagued the advancement of integration and equality in education. The Brown ruling, despite significant initial resistance, supplied some compelling momentum to the push for legal equality across the nation. Left in the case’s wake, however, was an amalgamation of forces which perpetuated previous inequalities and have kept education in the spotlight as an active arena in the struggle for rights and equality until the present. In the decades following Brown, education remained a battlefield for rights and equality as a result of judicial retreat from correcting enduring de jure segregation, lasting structural barriers in school financing systems, and continued outright resistance to and inconsistencies in the interpretation of “equal opportunity” in education.
Prior to the Brown decision in 1954, the prevailing “separate but equal” philosophy compounded by insufficient legal protections preserved highly institutionalized educational inequalities and inspired early leaders to begin challenging unfair treatment. Sanctioned segregation in schools was disputed in court as early as 1849 in Roberts v. City of Boston. At the time, a General School Committee governed Boston public schools, reserving sole authority and discretion over the distribution of students among schools. If unlawfully denied school admission, Massachusetts law gave every child, through his or her parents, the right to sue the city for damages. Benjamin Roberts, on behalf of his five year-old daughter Sarah, cited this provision, as well as miscellaneous excerpts from the Declaration of Independence and Massachusetts State Constitution given little other legal ammunition, as his basis to sue when his daughter was repeatedly denied entry to a white school. Sarah lived approximately half a mile from the nearest black school with multiple geographically closer white schools along that route. She and other peers forced to walk longer distances to attend school were clearly inconvenienced, but the circumstances also led to various spillover effects. Given that most parents would want their children to go to school, constraints of school location further confined housing and employment options. Chief Justice Shaw’s opinion upheld both the existing segregation and supported the authority of the General School Committee. Through the turn of the century, the Roberts case would serve as a precedent to show that separated schooling for white and black children was not incompatible with the principles of equality before the law.
The Roberts decision validated segregation in public schools under the principle of “separate but equal” and established the rationale for the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson at the end of the nineteenth century. While Justice Brown’s opinion in the Plessy decision supplied a federal endorsement of segregation in education (given equal provisions for both black and white people), black students were consistently abused under the “separate but equal” system. Compared to their white peers, black students’ educational opportunities remained vastly unequal or not present at all. This phenomenon became a major obstacle in the struggle for educational equality for decades into the twentieth century by creating a battle for equalization of separated provision on top of the initial battle against segregation. Not only were African Americans tasked with challenging the broader system of segregation, but they were additionally afflicted by highly unequal opportunity in terms of overall school quality and distribution of specific resources. Passage of the G.I. Bill in 1944 sparked a new line of questioning regarding the actual equality of separate provisions and motivated new equalization cases, including Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents which both successfully challenged unequal treatment by educational institutions in 1950. Recognizing widespread inequalities, the Supreme Court became decreasingly tolerant of institutions cutting corners and maintaining “fake” equality.
Nearly 60 years after the Plessy decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education to dismantle legal segregation offered a midcourse correction to America’s path and set the stage for a dramatic transformation in favor of educational equality. However,