Educating African American Urban Learners: Brown in Context‪.‬

The educational rights and opportunities of African American urban learners have been of grave concern to educators, policymakers, and society. The 1954 landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in Topeka, Kansas was the most significant school inclusion case requiring that schools make a "good faith" effort to desegregate schools "with all deliberate speed" (Dooley & Voltz, 1999, p. 19). The intent of Brown was to uphold the 14th Amendment and redefine issues related to equal access of educational programming. This case recognized that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal and unconstitutional. To a large measure, it failed to favor discrimination in school admissions and retention on grounds of race or color. Although this case was supposed to extinguish practices that are discriminatory and protect the educational rights of children and youth, there continues to be the issue of unequal educational programming and policies for African American learners (Dooley & Dooley, 2002). After 3 decades of Brown, Staples (1984) discovered some apparent inequities at all educational levels that involve African Americans. He noted that "the ideology of equal opportunity masks the reality of a country stratified along racial, gender, and class lines" (p. 12). He was also saddened by what he called the new racism, which (a) tended to deny the existence of racism or the responsibility for it, (b) defended phony meritocracy, and (c) relied on standardized tests that are not valid predictors of quality performance. The problems identified by Staples about 20 years ago, remain visible in today's urban school programs for African American learners. Issues of misidentification, misassessment, mislabeling, misplacement, and misinstruction-misintervention have continued to be prevalent (MacMillan & Reschly, 1998; Obiakor, 1999). As MacMillan and Reschly acknowledged, the outcry of the people was not merely because culturally diverse learners were disproportionately represented in special education classes but because they were also put in classes that were stigmatizing, degrading, and less effective than their previous general education classes.