Case Statement

Our schools represent one of our best hopes to achieve unity within diversity in our society. More than in any other agency of our society, the achievement of the dual goals of individuality and civic responsibility for our citizens is most pervasively accomplished in our nation’s public schools. Central to this vital accomplishment is equity in schooling for all citizens, and on that front, our record is less than stellar, having been tarnished too often by past inequities in racial, ethnic, and gender issues.

We need to talk about this history and we need to learn from our experiences.

Segregation of our schools resulted in massive losses in human potential within our society. Desegregation improved this condition but it never was complete nor was it without losses of its own.

We need to understand these losses and gains and position ourselves to benefit from the lessons learned.

Many trends in schooling today suggest a contemporary tendency to resegregate our schools through the application of policies and practices such as stratification of students into specialized curricula, differentiated programmatic funding, and endorsement of charter schools. All of these efforts seemingly are done to accomplish honorable goals, but with potential for terrible consequences relative to our interests to achieve equity for all through public education.

We need to delve deeply into these contemporary tendencies and be sure that we are not repeating mistakes of the past and, more importantly, that we are moving definitively toward our stated or espoused goals for creating equal educational opportunities for all children in this country.

What are we to make of evidence linked to current educational policies and practices regarding the application of student discipline in schools, the debates over content of our curricula, the mandates for performance standards by our students and our schools, and the implications of the school choice movement? Have we learned enough from our past experiences to prevent our making serious policy mistakes concerning practices such as these in today’s schools?

This symposium is designed to seriously examine examples of past inequities in our schools, including a local case study, and to distill from these studies lessons we can use to improve our educational practices for today and tomorrow.

Dr. Don Creamer
Dr. Jennifer Sughrue

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Posted: September 24, 1999
By The Educational Policy Institute of Virginia Tech
sjanosik@vt.edu