Back to the Main PageAs we collectively face the millennium, many Americans have come to understand and appreciate the need to acknowledge the accuracy of past predictions of an increasingly diverse society in the 21st Century. The future success of our democratic society will depend heavily on our ability to create or establish unity within diversity. This has been and will be an important mission of our common goals.
How can the legacies of segregation and desegregation help us understand the current trend that some are calling the re-segregation of the public schools?
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.
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.
Posted: September 24, 1999
By The
Educational Policy Institute of Virginia Tech
sjanosik@vt.edu