Caroline Hoxby is a professor of economics at Harvard University working in the areas of labor economics, local public
finance, and the economics of education. She is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and is a
Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Professor Hoxby believes that Brown v. Board was something to celebrate and that "the legal part was a triumph."
However, its implementation in primary and secondary schools has not progressed to the extent that the supporters of Brown would have
wanted. "I think its crafters would have been astonished to know that, fifty years later, American primary and secondary schools would
look the way they look."
When considering this problem, one must look at major city schools that are supposedly integrated. These are some of the
most expensive schools in the world, and yet segregation is still pervasive. Furthermore, there are still many all-black public schools
that lack sufficient resources. "Parents know that the schools are not good…. They’re fully aware that this is not what American
education is meant to be, and they feel they can’t escape the schools their kids are in." This broaches the question of where all of the
money is going.
Hoxby explains that simply because "resources are starting to flow towards those schools does not alter the fundamental
fact that the parents in those schools and the children in those schools do not have strong political representation, and people have
had low expectations for them, so that they are eminently exploitable." As a result, "the resources flow towards them, but not to them."
According to Hoxby, there are two challenges to progress that we now face in American education. The first is nostalgia,
referring to the tendency to focus on the past in a way that prevents progress. The second is an "opposition to education reform which
is most likely to help African American children." Hoxby believes that this is the central civil rights issue for today and that she is
"really waiting for people to get angry enough to decide to, in a way, stop looking back and start looking forward." This is the time,
she says, "to decide we have got to go forward in a different way."
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