On the 65th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Journal of Educational Controversy Reflects Upon and Continues the Conversation

May 17^th marks the 65^th anniversary of the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that brought state-sanctioned segregation in our nation’s public schools to an end.  Still, today’s reality reveals that schools remain more segregated than at any time since 1968.  And most disturbing, at recent senate hearings, over two dozen judicial nominees nominated by President Trump declined to even answer the question on whether the Brown decision had been properly decided.  (“Trump judicial nominees decline to endorse Brown v. Board under Senate questioning,” New York Times, May 16, 2019)

Over the years, the Journal of Educational Controversy has published articles that have tried to create a national dialogue on the struggle of African Americans in the quest for equity and the justice.   Three issues in particular addressed directly some of these concerns.

Volume 2, Number 1 (2007) Jonathan Kozol's Nation of Shame Forty Years Later

            In this issue, dedicated to Jonathan Kozol who had just published his latest book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, and who wrote the prologue to the issue, we sought to examine the various forces that impede or distract from the realization of the nation’s struggle for equal educational opportunity. At the time of its publication, the U.S. Supreme Court was about to examine Seattle’s school policies that aimed at promoting greater integration in its schools. We devoted a special section to the case, PICS v Seattle School District, in which we first talked about Seattle's past struggles for desegregation within the history of segregated housing patterns and restricted covenants.  Following our historical account, we offered opposing legal positions as well as opposing views of school administrators including the story of Principal David Engle who resigned his position in opposition to the decision.  Notably, the principals of 17 other high schools in Seattle wrote a public letter in support of Engle’s action.  A video of an interview with the author is also found on the journal’s website.  

Later, we published two issues that examined specific topics and movements.

Volume 7, Number 1 (2012) The School-to-Prison Pipeline

In this issue, we examined a national trend in which school policies and practices were increasingly resulting in criminalizing students rather than educating them. Statistics indicated that the number of suspensions, expulsions, dropouts or “pushouts,” and juvenile justice confinements is growing.  Moreover, this trend has had a disproportionate impact on students of color. We invited authors to examine the policy implications, the political ramifications, and the causes and possible solutions to this problem as well as a look at what these policies are teaching our students.

Volume 12, Number 1 (2017) Black Lives Matter and the Education Industrial Complex 

In this issue, we turned to a contemporary social movement and examined the way the Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted the deep roots of institutionalized racism in the United States.  Starting with the fundamental question, Do Black Lives Matter in the U.S. Education Industrial Complex?, the issue sought to explore the various questions raised by Black Lives Matter in relation to U.S. educational institutions, policies, and practices. The questions included the status of schools as institutions of control and sites of reproduction of racist ideology, the possibility of schools as sites of liberationist  transformation, the institutional history of schools alongside the development of institutional racism, the institutional response of schools to incidents of racial violence, the history of black studies programs in relation to black liberation movements, and the appropriation and sanitizing of terms like diversity and multiculturalism.

Our upcoming issue will be on the theme: The Ethics of Memory: What Does it Mean to Apologize for Historical Wrongs (Volume 14)

While the theme will look at multiple dimensions of the question, we also wanted to include a reexamination of affirmative action since the U.S. Supreme Court will once again revisit the topic.

One of the goals of our journal is to provide a continuing conversation on these issues, returning to them within a different context, and opening a new perspective on the way we ask the question.