50 Years after Brown v. Board of Education

Fifty years after the long-overdue Supreme Court ruling that public schools cannot discriminate by race, African Americans and other minority groups have long had the right to attend public schools along with whites. But do they have reason to celebrate?

Not hardly. The achievement gap between black and white students is still enormous, closely tied to the academic gap between the rich and the poor. As I've written elsewhere,

If you are wealthy in America, you have a one-in-one-hundred chance of being functionally illiterate. If you are in the bottom fifth of wage earners or have no income at all, you have a less than even chance of being able to read a newspaper or write a resume. Wealth and literacy are positively linked in most nations, but nowhere more so than in the United States. Poor Americans academically underperform their fellow citizens by a wider margin than is to be found in any of the 26 other countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Would reintroducing an education market with some sort of financial assistance mechanism help boost student achievment among minorities and low-income families? A new book by the Cato Insitute, Educational Freedom in Urban America: Brown v. Board after Half a Century, argues that it would. I wrote the chapter titled: "How Markets Affect Quality: Testing a Theory of Market Education Against The International Evidence." Which you can check out in .pdf format.

Posted by Andrew Coulson at May 5, 2004 12:51 AM | TrackBack