The increased attention on rising segregation in the education sector caused the call for school desegregation in Boston. The segregation had racially categorized students, making the skewed provision of education opportunities highly evident. “Brown v. Board of Education” was among the main causes of school desegregation in Boston (Suitts, 2020). Brown v. Board of Education case began when Oliver Brown, the primary plaintiff, filed a complaint against the Board of Education in Topeka, after his daughter Linda got denied enrollment to a white elementary school. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court unanimously deemed segregated schools illegal. In the case, the court made a finding that school segregation violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection provision (López & Burciaga, 2014).
Additionally, the Racial Imbalance Act caused school; desegregation in Boston. Although the Brown v. Board of Education ruling triggered school desegregation, schools in the state fully integrated in the later years. In 1965, Massachusetts passed the “Racial Imbalance Act,” requiring all its public schools to observe desegregation (Miscellany, 1965). The act tasked the state Board of Education with investigating and resolving racial disparities in public schools. Perhaps the strongest racial balance law in the country, the act defined racial imbalance as any school with a nonwhite enrollment exceeding 50% of the entire population.
The Supreme Court indicated consistently that racially segregating schools breached the 14th Amendment’s “Equal Protection Clause.” For African Americans, the ruling meant the removal of obstacles to equal education (Savage, 2018). To incorporate Boston’s public schools, Judge Garrity permitted the busing of black pupils to largely white schools and white students to predominantly black schools. Garrity argued that the Boston School Committee had the major duty for desegregating the city’s public schools, as it had done so in the past. Garrity considered all of the options for reversing the segregation that had been in place for a long time. He said that “busing, redistricting with contiguous, the pairing of schools, involuntary student and staff assignments, noncontiguous boundary lines, and any other procedures, some of which may prove unpalatable to both school authorities, teachers, and parents will get implemented as necessary. For the American civil-rights movement, the ruling became a turning point in the law. In the light of the court ruling and the enacted legislation, school desegregation was necessary to diversify classrooms and reduce achievement and opportunity inequities.
The desegregation of schools in Boston had immediate and long-term consequences. The desegregation led to a 2.9 percent increase in the student graduation rate for every extra year of learning in a desegregated school. Students in desegregated schools outperformed those in segregated ones on academic success. African Americans who attended desegregated became less likely to end up in prison by the age of 30 (Manheim & Nunnally, 2020). Five years in desegregated schools resulted in improved annual wages and 195 additional hours of employment each year. Desegregation also resulted in considerable long-run benefits in black adults’ health.
Students and parents increasingly came to accept compulsory busing, resulting in reduced racial tensions. The Boston school system had to raise taxes or reduce services for pupils to make up for the reduction in revenue. The increase in black teachers in Boston’s public schools contributed significantly to the increased graduation rates in the city’s desegregated schools.
References
López, G. R., & Burciaga, R. (2014). The Troublesome Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. Educational Administration Quarterly, 50(5), 796–811. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161×14551410
Manheim, F. T., & Nunnally, S. C. (2020). Black High Schools of High Quality Prior to Desegregation. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3703258
Miscellany. (1965). THE MASSACHUSETTS LAW ON RACIAL BALANCE. Equity & Excellence in Education, 3(4-5), 43–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020486650030407
Savage, M. (2018). Beyond Boundaries: Envisioning Metropolitan School Desegregation in Boston, Detroit, and Philadelphia, 1963-1974. Journal of Urban History, 46(1), 129–149. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144218801595
Suitts, S. (2020). The Supreme Court Is Overturning Brown v. Board of Education. Southern Spaces. https://doi.org/10.18737/w17161.2020
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