The process of desegregating these schools, however, was not congruous across the country. Board of Educationthat the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause made it unconstitutional to maintain segregated and “separate but equal” public school facilities based on race. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Photo credit: Berkeley News A brief history of segregation School segregation tugs our communities and our schools farther and farther away from academic achievement and progress. But it affects every single student in public schools across the country. It can be hard to see the extent of segregation, and it is even harder to see its impact. These students are equally capable but unequally supported. School funding is determined in part by property value and property tax, external factors outside students’ control which are heavily influenced by race. The students we serve at Reading Partners are primarily Black and Brown children, and they often receive fewer resources than their White counterparts considering they attend schools in segregated neighborhoods. Different, but much the same.Īmerican schools are heavily segregated by race. Yet our class is made up entirely of Black and Brown students. All of our students come from unique backgrounds and no two are the same.

Sharing this book with my student, my attention was drawn to the makeup of our class.

One child was White, while the other was Brown. The pen pals in the book lived similar lives but were both culturally and racially different.

They would write to each other, describing how their lives had similar elements imbued by different cultural experiences, like how one child greeted his friends with a fist bump, while the other greeted his friends with a slight bow and a statement of “namaste.”

We alternated pages, reading about two pen pals from vastly different cultural backgrounds. During a recent tutoring session, I read a book with my student called Same Same, But Different by J enny Sue Kostecki-Shaw.

Brown v board of education impact