May 17th marks the 65th
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.
