Gary Orfield is a professor of education and social policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and founding
co-director of the Civil Rights Project. School desegregation and the implementation of civil rights laws have been central issues
throughout his career. Professor Orfield works with the government and courts on issues related to his research.
Professor Orfield begins by denying the common claim that the Brown decision had no effect on elementary or secondary
education. He notes that, during the late '60s and early '70s, there were "places in the South that had no significant segregation of their
schools and entire metro areas for thirty years" and "During the Civil Rights era, between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, the
educational achievement gap closed very substantially." The problem arose with the implementation of high stakes testing in 1983.
Raising the stakes on tests and holding back students from social promotion results in "very large increased costs, no benefit, and
increased dropout rates."
Professor Orfield argues that we actually have two different segregation issues. The first is Southern apartheid, which
is the issue that Brown addressed and remains important because many blacks are from the South. The second issue is that Brown has not
made an impact on the Latino population, which has "the worst graduation and college rates." It will not work to ignore segregation and
come up with a reform based on coercive sanctions and breaking up public school systems. There is no simple educational solution or
marked mechanism that can make substantial changes.
Currently, there is no real assistance available to high poverty minority schools. Neither the states nor the district
provide useful solutions, and although the Law requires that all schools have qualified teachers, sanctions being placed on the school
are encouraging teachers to leave. Even the student’s right to transfer schools proves unhelpful because the districts are only full of
segregated, high poverty schools. Professor Orfield finds fault in the conservative policy, because it serves to "compound the problem
of segregation and basically blame the problem on the children and their teachers."
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