American Indian Control
When John F. Kennedy was elected to the presidency in 1960, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began to involve American Indians in policy decisions. The Office of Economic Opportunity and the Bureau of Indian Affairs supported the creation of the Rough Rock Demonstration School on the Navajo reservation, in part to preserve the Navajo language and culture. In addition, Navajo parents were again able to control the education of their children.
As the Civil Rights Movement grew in intensity in the 1960s, America Indian tribes began to participate in a Pan-Indian movement that recognized that tribes shared a common set of values and interests. The American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Indians of All Tribes led demonstrations demanding self-determination. At the same time, a Senate report, Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge, condemned previous federal educational policies for Native Americans. The report said “a careful review of the historical literature reveals that the dominant policy of the Federal Government toward the American Indian has been one of forced assimilation. … [because of] a desire to divest the Indian of his land” (Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, 1969, p. 9).
Federal policy began to change. Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1968 provided support for bilingual programs in Indian languages and English. In 1975, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which gave tribes the right to operate their own schools. The 1988 Tribally Controlled Schools Act gave grants to tribes to operate their own schools. In a complete switch of earlier policy for assimilation and the destruction of native cultures and languages, the 1990 Native American Languages Act promoted the preservation of traditional Native American languages.
African Americans
The education of African Americans is also built on a history of discrimination, but their relationship with the European colonizers was different than that of the American Indians. They were not the native inhabitants of the United States. For the most part, they had not chosen to immigrate to the United States, but entered involuntarily by force. They did not own land that the settlers wanted, but they were a critical source of labor necessary for the southern economy. Most African Americans were owned and sold, and had little control over their own lives. Until the early part of the 20th century, most African Americans lived in the South where before the Civil War it was illegal to attend school. Although literacy was a punishable crime for African slaves in the South, at least 5% of them were literate by the outbreak of the Civil War (Anderson, 1988).
Participation in Schools After the Revolutionary War
African American children in the North most often attended segregated and inferior schools. Charity schools for freed slaves opened at the end of the 18th century in Philadelphia, New York City, and Baltimore (Kaestle, 1983). African American children could attend Boston schools at that time, but most did not because of their poor economic situations and the hostile reception of them in schools. In 1798 a group of black parents petitioned the School Committee for a separate school to protect their children from the hostile environment. The School Committee did not accept the parents’ proposal at first, but it changed its position in 1806 and opened a segregated school with public funds and money from white philanthropists (Spring, 2011).
By the 1820s black parents decided that the segregated school was providing an inferior education for their children and began to demand better conditions and teachers. They petitioned the Boston School Committee in 1846 to desegregate schools. Even though the School Committee found the segregated schools unacceptable, it took no action to change those conditions or to require its public schools to be open to African American children. In response, Benjamin Roberts sued the city for excluding his daughter from all-white schools near their home. He lost his case before the Massachusetts Supreme Court when it ruled that the city had provided “a separate, but equal” school for his daughter. Not long afterwards, in 1855, however, the state legislature passed a law that prevented the segregation of schools based on race or religion, becoming the first state to outlaw school segregation. The Boston schools were integrated that year (Spring, 2011).
Education in the South
Before the end of the Civil War, former slaves in the South were fighting for universal education. They craved literacy but were unwilling to wait for the government to provide schools. They established and staffed their own schools with African American teachers throughout the South. The African American teachers, school officials, and other leaders adopted the common school ideal with the New England classical liberal curriculum. The curriculum in elementary schools included reading, spelling, writing, grammar, diction, history, geography, arithmetic, and music. In the black colleges, students studied Latin, Greek, mathematics, science, and philosophy (Spring, 2011).
Deeper Look Read about segregated schools in the South.
To pursue the goal of universal education, the former slaves sought the help of Republican politicians, northern missionary societies, the Union army, and the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had been created by Congress in 1865. However, it was very important to them that they control their own education, which was sometimes difficult as northern missionaries moved into the South to establish schools. When John W. Alvord was appointed the national superintendent of schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865, he discovered a system of at least 500 “native schools” as he traveled across the South (Anderson, 1988). These schools had been established and were being managed by ex-slaves who were committed to ensuring that African American children and adults would learn to read and write as soon as possible. In some communities, black churches developed Sabbath schools that offered literacy instruction in the evenings and on the weekends. In these schools, the speller was as prevalent as the bible (Anderson, 1988).
Most planters resisted universal education for former slaves and impoverished whites. Their opposition was, in part, due to economics. The planters needed a workforce that would work for low wages; it depended heavily on child labor, which led to schools being opened as late as December. They supported low taxes, opposed compulsory school attendance, and discouraged universal public education. Eventually, they began to provide schools for low-income white students, but they failed to provide schools for black children in most communities. The gains made by African Americans in the 1860s were quickly stymied and the proportion attending school began to drop (Anderson, 1988).
Education at the Beginning of the 20th Century
Although ex-slaves had founded their schools with a classical curriculum, some leaders questioned the need for such advanced study. They argued that black children would be better served with training for the trades and learning their appropriate role in the Southern culture. With this goal in mind, Northerner Samuel Chapman Armstrong founded Hampton Institute in Virginia to prepare teachers. Most of Hampton’s early students had completed only the eighth grade. They were required to work long hours in a sawmill, on the school’s farm, or in the school’s kitchen or dining room to develop the ethic of hard work that Southern landowners expected of their laborers. One of Armstrong’s top students, Booker T. Washington, founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881 to extend Armstrong’s pedagogy.
Most African Americans had a different vision for their education. They saw Washington giving in to the white demands of industrialists who wanted a steady, complacent workforce at low wages. The primary spokesperson for a different vision, W. E. B. Du Bois, wanted no compromises with the powerful white elites. Instead, he wanted to challenge the oppressive southern economy. He argued that black education should be about preparing the African American leaders of the future. He supported the classical education that was available in black colleges like Atlanta and Wilburforce. While Washington supported segregated schooling, Du Bois became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—the organization that spearheaded the effort to desegregate schools later in the century. By 1915, the Du Bois supporters had prevailed; the Hampton-Tuskegee model began to lose favor among its previous supporters (Spring, 2011).
At the beginning of the 20th century, most African American children did not attend elementary school because no schools existed for them, and they were not allowed to attend the schools that white children attended. If they wanted a school, African American families in the South often had to build their own schools even though they paid local and state taxes to support white segregated schools (Spring, 2011). When African American children could attend school, their schools were usually inferior to those attended by white students. The schools lacked equipment and supplies. They were allocated textbooks after they had worn out their usefulness in the white schools. Families and leaders in the African American community turned to the courts for support in accessing resources for the education of their children.
School Desegregation
Nearly 100 court cases from 20 states and the District of Columbia were filed for equal education in the 19th century. African Americans in the North won a majority of their cases, prohibiting segregation in their public schools (Hendrie, 2000). Nevertheless, segregation continued in the South. After Homer Plessy was arrested for refusing to ride in the “colored” section of a train in Louisiana, he protested that his Fourteenth Amendment rights had been abridged. The United States Supreme Court disagreed, ruling in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that “separate but equal” facilities were legal. This decision supported the segregation of schools for the next six decades.
The NAACP decided to pursue a legal path toward desegregating public schools. Five cases from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Kansas, and the District of Columbia were percolating in the lower courts in the mid-1940s. The first four cases were argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953 by Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first African American Supreme Court justice. In 1954 the Court declared that “[i]n the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). The fifth case, Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), declared that the federal government could not segregate schools in the District of Columbia.
Most school districts did not respond to this mandate until after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Many white families fiercely resisted the desegregation of their schools. In cities like Little Rock, Arkansas, the National Guard protected African American students who were entering white schools for the first time. Virginia’s Prince Edward County School Board resisted desegregation, closing its public schools for five years. White families established private Christian schools or moved to the suburbs where the population was primarily white to avoid integration. The 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision moved desegregation efforts to another level when it upheld district-wide busing to overcome segregation.
As schools were desegregated, many African American teachers and principals who had worked in segregated schools were not invited to teach in the integrated schools, leaving many of them without jobs. However, the race of the students in schools did change in the three decades following the Brown decision. In the mid-1960s only 2% of black students attended integrated schools; by the late 1980s, 45% of them were in integrated schools (Frankenberg, Lee, & Orfield, 2003). During this period, rural and small-town schools across the South were integrated. The achievement gap between black and white students closed substantially, students of color had greater access to quality schools and college admission, and students were better prepared to work and interact in a multicultural society (Boger & Orfield, 2005). Even more dramatic than the desegregation of schools during this period was the dismantling of Plessy v. Ferguson and its resulting Jim Crow laws , which did not allow African Americans to use the same facilities as whites.
By the mid-1980s federal court sanctions for integration began to be lifted. After the Supreme Court allowed federal courts to end desegregation plans with Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell in 1991, many federal courts prohibited school districts from voluntarily using race-conscious assignment policies to maintain diversity in their schools (Boger & Orfield, 2005). Because of de facto segregation in many communities, neighborhood schools were often comprised of students of the same race. Segregation in schools began to return to pre-1970 levels. At the beginning of the 21st century African American and Latino students were again much more likely than other students to attend schools that are characterized by poverty and their peers are predominantly other students of color. Half of the nation’s schools are highly segregated white schools, but the degree of poverty in those schools is considerably less. Although the ability to attend less impoverished schools provides all students a better chance at being successful in school and life, the one-time goal of integrating schools has been abandoned (Boger & Orfield, 2005).
Latinos
Whether Mexican American students could attend the same schools as whites depended on whether they were classified as white. There was no common agreement on the race of Mexican Americans. In 1897, Texas courts ruled that Mexican Americans were not white. However, California classified them as Caucasian until 1930 when the Attorney General categorized them as American Indians (Spring, 2001). As a result of not being white, most Mexican American children attended segregated schools through the first half of the 20th century. The same separate but equal laws applied to them as to African Americans.
African American students often had to be protected by the National Guard as they desegregated schools in the 1960s.
The Battle for the Use of Spanish
In addition to being in segregated schools, Mexican American students often were not allowed to speak Spanish in school. To ensure that teachers would deliver instruction in English, states passed laws to that effect. In 1918 Texas made it a criminal offense to use any language other than English for instruction. Often, students were forbidden to use Spanish at any time while they were in school. In the last half of the 19th century, Mexican Americans sent their children to Catholic or nonsectarian private schools, both of which were more likely to provide bilingual instruction, to escape the anti-Mexican attitudes of public schools (Spring, 2011).
Many Mexican American children were not attending school at the beginning of the 20th century, in part, because farmers were not willing to release them from work in the field to attend school. On the other hand, many school officials wanted them in schools to Americanize them and rid them of their cultures and language (Spring, 2011).
Deeper Look Read more about Latino education.
Concerned about discrimination against Mexican American students in public schools, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) called for bilingual instruction and the maintenance of Mexican cultural traditions in schools as early as 1929. However, the English-only laws were not repealed until 1968 when the federal government supported bilingual education as an option for teaching English-language learners (Spring, 2011). As the federal policy has moved away from support of bilingual education in recent years, some states have now returned to laws prohibiting bilingual education and the use of any language other than English for classroom instruction.
Mexican American families were fighting for the right to attend white schools at the same time that African Americans had turned to the courts for assistance. In the 1930s the Texas courts upheld the right of school boards to provide segregated education for Mexican Americans. The first breakthrough for integration occurred with the 1947 Mendez v. Westminster School District decision that required a California school district to allow a Mexican American girl to attend the white school. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) was established in 1967 to continue suing for the civil rights and equality of Mexican American students. Court cases since then have focused on discriminatory practices in the funding of schools, the sole use of English in classrooms, and the disproportionate placement of Spanish-speaking children in special education classes as a result of biased tests or tests being given in English.
Equity for Puerto Ricans
Education for students in Puerto Rico has been interrelated with a history of occupation by the United States. Puerto Rico had just received its autonomy from Spain when it came under the control of the United States as part of the spoils (along with the Philippines and Guam) from the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century. With the 1900 Foraker Act, Congress established a colonial government to replace military rule in Puerto Rico and appointed the first U.S. Commissioner of Education for Puerto Rico. Just as with American Indians, the federal policy was to Americanize Puerto Ricans through education. Because the language of instruction was to be English and many Puerto Rican teachers spoke only Spanish, teachers from the United States were hired. Not only were students expected to learn English; they were also supposed to learn American ways. Educational policies required celebration of the U.S. patriotic holidays, such as the Fourth of July. Students were required to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag and study U.S. heroes. Local textbooks were replaced with U.S. textbooks. When new teachers applied for a teaching certificate, their test included an English examination (Spring, 2011).
Puerto Ricans were not interested in becoming Americans and losing their own native language and culture. In 1912, the Puerto Rican Teachers Association began to defend Spanish as the language of instruction. When a student at San Juan’s Central High School was expelled in 1915 for collecting signatures in support of instruction in Spanish, a student strike was sparked (Spring, 2011). Calls for nationalism and independence were common. Congress granted Puerto Ricans citizenship in 1917, which obligated them to serve in the military, but did not grant the right to vote in elections.
Tensions increased in the 1920s when a Puerto Rican who supported the United States’ assimilation policies became the Commissioner of Education. He pressed his predecessor’s policies even further. He required seniors to pass an English examination before they could graduate. He banned school newspapers in Spanish. Teachers were required to use English in teacher meetings and informal discussions with students. Protests by teachers, professors, and college students expanded. College students were expelled for participating in anti-American marches and professors were warned to stop supporting student protests (Spring, 2011).
The efforts to change U.S. educational policies in Puerto Rico resulted in the Padin Reform of 1934, which restricted English instruction to high schools. Spanish could be used at other levels. However, textbooks continued to be printed in English. After the Teachers Association had successfully lobbied the Puerto Rican legislature to pass a bill requiring the use of Spanish, President Harry Truman vetoed it. After Puerto Rico was granted commonwealth status in 1951, Puerto Ricans gained greater control of their school systems, restoring Spanish as the language of instruction (Spring, 2011).
Asian Americans
The first Chinese migrants arrived in California in the 1850s to join the gold rush as free laborers. They faced a great deal of hostility and discrimination from the dominant white population. The courts considered Chinese immigrants as having the same status as American Indians, and policies related to citizenship continued to discriminate against Asians. It was not until 1943 that the Chinese Exclusion Law was rescinded, allowing Chinese immigrants the right to become naturalized citizens (Spring, 2011).
When the court ruled in 1885 that native-born Mamie Tape had equal access to public schooling, the California legislature responded by allowing school districts to establish segregated schools for Asian Americans. By 1905, the segregated system in San Francisco was broken as Chinese youths were admitted to the regular city high school (Spring, 2011). Southern courts retained Asian American children in segregated schools attended primarily by African Americans. The family of a Chinese American girl argued that she was not black and therefore should be able to attend the white school. However, the court ruled in 1924 that she was not white and gave schools the authority to determine the race of their students (Spring, 2011).
After the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, the number of Asian immigrants began to grow. School
When John F. Kennedy was elected to the presidency in 1960, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began to involve American Indians in policy decisions. The Office of Economic Opportunity and the Bureau of Indian Affairs supported the creation of the Rough Rock Demonstration School on the Navajo reservation, in part to preserve the Navajo language and culture. In addition, Navajo parents were again able to control the education of their children.
As the Civil Rights Movement grew in intensity in the 1960s, America Indian tribes began to participate in a Pan-Indian movement that recognized that tribes shared a common set of values and interests. The American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Indians of All Tribes led demonstrations demanding self-determination. At the same time, a Senate report, Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge, condemned previous federal educational policies for Native Americans. The report said “a careful review of the historical literature reveals that the dominant policy of the Federal Government toward the American Indian has been one of forced assimilation. … [because of] a desire to divest the Indian of his land” (Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, 1969, p. 9).
Federal policy began to change. Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1968 provided support for bilingual programs in Indian languages and English. In 1975, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which gave tribes the right to operate their own schools. The 1988 Tribally Controlled Schools Act gave grants to tribes to operate their own schools. In a complete switch of earlier policy for assimilation and the destruction of native cultures and languages, the 1990 Native American Languages Act promoted the preservation of traditional Native American languages.
African Americans
The education of African Americans is also built on a history of discrimination, but their relationship with the European colonizers was different than that of the American Indians. They were not the native inhabitants of the United States. For the most part, they had not chosen to immigrate to the United States, but entered involuntarily by force. They did not own land that the settlers wanted, but they were a critical source of labor necessary for the southern economy. Most African Americans were owned and sold, and had little control over their own lives. Until the early part of the 20th century, most African Americans lived in the South where before the Civil War it was illegal to attend school. Although literacy was a punishable crime for African slaves in the South, at least 5% of them were literate by the outbreak of the Civil War (Anderson, 1988).
Participation in Schools After the Revolutionary War
African American children in the North most often attended segregated and inferior schools. Charity schools for freed slaves opened at the end of the 18th century in Philadelphia, New York City, and Baltimore (Kaestle, 1983). African American children could attend Boston schools at that time, but most did not because of their poor economic situations and the hostile reception of them in schools. In 1798 a group of black parents petitioned the School Committee for a separate school to protect their children from the hostile environment. The School Committee did not accept the parents’ proposal at first, but it changed its position in 1806 and opened a segregated school with public funds and money from white philanthropists (Spring, 2011).
By the 1820s black parents decided that the segregated school was providing an inferior education for their children and began to demand better conditions and teachers. They petitioned the Boston School Committee in 1846 to desegregate schools. Even though the School Committee found the segregated schools unacceptable, it took no action to change those conditions or to require its public schools to be open to African American children. In response, Benjamin Roberts sued the city for excluding his daughter from all-white schools near their home. He lost his case before the Massachusetts Supreme Court when it ruled that the city had provided “a separate, but equal” school for his daughter. Not long afterwards, in 1855, however, the state legislature passed a law that prevented the segregation of schools based on race or religion, becoming the first state to outlaw school segregation. The Boston schools were integrated that year (Spring, 2011).
Education in the South
Before the end of the Civil War, former slaves in the South were fighting for universal education. They craved literacy but were unwilling to wait for the government to provide schools. They established and staffed their own schools with African American teachers throughout the South. The African American teachers, school officials, and other leaders adopted the common school ideal with the New England classical liberal curriculum. The curriculum in elementary schools included reading, spelling, writing, grammar, diction, history, geography, arithmetic, and music. In the black colleges, students studied Latin, Greek, mathematics, science, and philosophy (Spring, 2011).
Deeper Look Read about segregated schools in the South.
To pursue the goal of universal education, the former slaves sought the help of Republican politicians, northern missionary societies, the Union army, and the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had been created by Congress in 1865. However, it was very important to them that they control their own education, which was sometimes difficult as northern missionaries moved into the South to establish schools. When John W. Alvord was appointed the national superintendent of schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865, he discovered a system of at least 500 “native schools” as he traveled across the South (Anderson, 1988). These schools had been established and were being managed by ex-slaves who were committed to ensuring that African American children and adults would learn to read and write as soon as possible. In some communities, black churches developed Sabbath schools that offered literacy instruction in the evenings and on the weekends. In these schools, the speller was as prevalent as the bible (Anderson, 1988).
Most planters resisted universal education for former slaves and impoverished whites. Their opposition was, in part, due to economics. The planters needed a workforce that would work for low wages; it depended heavily on child labor, which led to schools being opened as late as December. They supported low taxes, opposed compulsory school attendance, and discouraged universal public education. Eventually, they began to provide schools for low-income white students, but they failed to provide schools for black children in most communities. The gains made by African Americans in the 1860s were quickly stymied and the proportion attending school began to drop (Anderson, 1988).
Education at the Beginning of the 20th Century
Although ex-slaves had founded their schools with a classical curriculum, some leaders questioned the need for such advanced study. They argued that black children would be better served with training for the trades and learning their appropriate role in the Southern culture. With this goal in mind, Northerner Samuel Chapman Armstrong founded Hampton Institute in Virginia to prepare teachers. Most of Hampton’s early students had completed only the eighth grade. They were required to work long hours in a sawmill, on the school’s farm, or in the school’s kitchen or dining room to develop the ethic of hard work that Southern landowners expected of their laborers. One of Armstrong’s top students, Booker T. Washington, founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881 to extend Armstrong’s pedagogy.
Most African Americans had a different vision for their education. They saw Washington giving in to the white demands of industrialists who wanted a steady, complacent workforce at low wages. The primary spokesperson for a different vision, W. E. B. Du Bois, wanted no compromises with the powerful white elites. Instead, he wanted to challenge the oppressive southern economy. He argued that black education should be about preparing the African American leaders of the future. He supported the classical education that was available in black colleges like Atlanta and Wilburforce. While Washington supported segregated schooling, Du Bois became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—the organization that spearheaded the effort to desegregate schools later in the century. By 1915, the Du Bois supporters had prevailed; the Hampton-Tuskegee model began to lose favor among its previous supporters (Spring, 2011).
At the beginning of the 20th century, most African American children did not attend elementary school because no schools existed for them, and they were not allowed to attend the schools that white children attended. If they wanted a school, African American families in the South often had to build their own schools even though they paid local and state taxes to support white segregated schools (Spring, 2011). When African American children could attend school, their schools were usually inferior to those attended by white students. The schools lacked equipment and supplies. They were allocated textbooks after they had worn out their usefulness in the white schools. Families and leaders in the African American community turned to the courts for support in accessing resources for the education of their children.
School Desegregation
Nearly 100 court cases from 20 states and the District of Columbia were filed for equal education in the 19th century. African Americans in the North won a majority of their cases, prohibiting segregation in their public schools (Hendrie, 2000). Nevertheless, segregation continued in the South. After Homer Plessy was arrested for refusing to ride in the “colored” section of a train in Louisiana, he protested that his Fourteenth Amendment rights had been abridged. The United States Supreme Court disagreed, ruling in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that “separate but equal” facilities were legal. This decision supported the segregation of schools for the next six decades.
The NAACP decided to pursue a legal path toward desegregating public schools. Five cases from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Kansas, and the District of Columbia were percolating in the lower courts in the mid-1940s. The first four cases were argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953 by Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first African American Supreme Court justice. In 1954 the Court declared that “[i]n the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). The fifth case, Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), declared that the federal government could not segregate schools in the District of Columbia.
Most school districts did not respond to this mandate until after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Many white families fiercely resisted the desegregation of their schools. In cities like Little Rock, Arkansas, the National Guard protected African American students who were entering white schools for the first time. Virginia’s Prince Edward County School Board resisted desegregation, closing its public schools for five years. White families established private Christian schools or moved to the suburbs where the population was primarily white to avoid integration. The 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision moved desegregation efforts to another level when it upheld district-wide busing to overcome segregation.
As schools were desegregated, many African American teachers and principals who had worked in segregated schools were not invited to teach in the integrated schools, leaving many of them without jobs. However, the race of the students in schools did change in the three decades following the Brown decision. In the mid-1960s only 2% of black students attended integrated schools; by the late 1980s, 45% of them were in integrated schools (Frankenberg, Lee, & Orfield, 2003). During this period, rural and small-town schools across the South were integrated. The achievement gap between black and white students closed substantially, students of color had greater access to quality schools and college admission, and students were better prepared to work and interact in a multicultural society (Boger & Orfield, 2005). Even more dramatic than the desegregation of schools during this period was the dismantling of Plessy v. Ferguson and its resulting Jim Crow laws , which did not allow African Americans to use the same facilities as whites.
By the mid-1980s federal court sanctions for integration began to be lifted. After the Supreme Court allowed federal courts to end desegregation plans with Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell in 1991, many federal courts prohibited school districts from voluntarily using race-conscious assignment policies to maintain diversity in their schools (Boger & Orfield, 2005). Because of de facto segregation in many communities, neighborhood schools were often comprised of students of the same race. Segregation in schools began to return to pre-1970 levels. At the beginning of the 21st century African American and Latino students were again much more likely than other students to attend schools that are characterized by poverty and their peers are predominantly other students of color. Half of the nation’s schools are highly segregated white schools, but the degree of poverty in those schools is considerably less. Although the ability to attend less impoverished schools provides all students a better chance at being successful in school and life, the one-time goal of integrating schools has been abandoned (Boger & Orfield, 2005).
Latinos
Whether Mexican American students could attend the same schools as whites depended on whether they were classified as white. There was no common agreement on the race of Mexican Americans. In 1897, Texas courts ruled that Mexican Americans were not white. However, California classified them as Caucasian until 1930 when the Attorney General categorized them as American Indians (Spring, 2001). As a result of not being white, most Mexican American children attended segregated schools through the first half of the 20th century. The same separate but equal laws applied to them as to African Americans.
African American students often had to be protected by the National Guard as they desegregated schools in the 1960s.
The Battle for the Use of Spanish
In addition to being in segregated schools, Mexican American students often were not allowed to speak Spanish in school. To ensure that teachers would deliver instruction in English, states passed laws to that effect. In 1918 Texas made it a criminal offense to use any language other than English for instruction. Often, students were forbidden to use Spanish at any time while they were in school. In the last half of the 19th century, Mexican Americans sent their children to Catholic or nonsectarian private schools, both of which were more likely to provide bilingual instruction, to escape the anti-Mexican attitudes of public schools (Spring, 2011).
Many Mexican American children were not attending school at the beginning of the 20th century, in part, because farmers were not willing to release them from work in the field to attend school. On the other hand, many school officials wanted them in schools to Americanize them and rid them of their cultures and language (Spring, 2011).
Deeper Look Read more about Latino education.
Concerned about discrimination against Mexican American students in public schools, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) called for bilingual instruction and the maintenance of Mexican cultural traditions in schools as early as 1929. However, the English-only laws were not repealed until 1968 when the federal government supported bilingual education as an option for teaching English-language learners (Spring, 2011). As the federal policy has moved away from support of bilingual education in recent years, some states have now returned to laws prohibiting bilingual education and the use of any language other than English for classroom instruction.
Mexican American families were fighting for the right to attend white schools at the same time that African Americans had turned to the courts for assistance. In the 1930s the Texas courts upheld the right of school boards to provide segregated education for Mexican Americans. The first breakthrough for integration occurred with the 1947 Mendez v. Westminster School District decision that required a California school district to allow a Mexican American girl to attend the white school. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) was established in 1967 to continue suing for the civil rights and equality of Mexican American students. Court cases since then have focused on discriminatory practices in the funding of schools, the sole use of English in classrooms, and the disproportionate placement of Spanish-speaking children in special education classes as a result of biased tests or tests being given in English.
Equity for Puerto Ricans
Education for students in Puerto Rico has been interrelated with a history of occupation by the United States. Puerto Rico had just received its autonomy from Spain when it came under the control of the United States as part of the spoils (along with the Philippines and Guam) from the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century. With the 1900 Foraker Act, Congress established a colonial government to replace military rule in Puerto Rico and appointed the first U.S. Commissioner of Education for Puerto Rico. Just as with American Indians, the federal policy was to Americanize Puerto Ricans through education. Because the language of instruction was to be English and many Puerto Rican teachers spoke only Spanish, teachers from the United States were hired. Not only were students expected to learn English; they were also supposed to learn American ways. Educational policies required celebration of the U.S. patriotic holidays, such as the Fourth of July. Students were required to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag and study U.S. heroes. Local textbooks were replaced with U.S. textbooks. When new teachers applied for a teaching certificate, their test included an English examination (Spring, 2011).
Puerto Ricans were not interested in becoming Americans and losing their own native language and culture. In 1912, the Puerto Rican Teachers Association began to defend Spanish as the language of instruction. When a student at San Juan’s Central High School was expelled in 1915 for collecting signatures in support of instruction in Spanish, a student strike was sparked (Spring, 2011). Calls for nationalism and independence were common. Congress granted Puerto Ricans citizenship in 1917, which obligated them to serve in the military, but did not grant the right to vote in elections.
Tensions increased in the 1920s when a Puerto Rican who supported the United States’ assimilation policies became the Commissioner of Education. He pressed his predecessor’s policies even further. He required seniors to pass an English examination before they could graduate. He banned school newspapers in Spanish. Teachers were required to use English in teacher meetings and informal discussions with students. Protests by teachers, professors, and college students expanded. College students were expelled for participating in anti-American marches and professors were warned to stop supporting student protests (Spring, 2011).
The efforts to change U.S. educational policies in Puerto Rico resulted in the Padin Reform of 1934, which restricted English instruction to high schools. Spanish could be used at other levels. However, textbooks continued to be printed in English. After the Teachers Association had successfully lobbied the Puerto Rican legislature to pass a bill requiring the use of Spanish, President Harry Truman vetoed it. After Puerto Rico was granted commonwealth status in 1951, Puerto Ricans gained greater control of their school systems, restoring Spanish as the language of instruction (Spring, 2011).
Asian Americans
The first Chinese migrants arrived in California in the 1850s to join the gold rush as free laborers. They faced a great deal of hostility and discrimination from the dominant white population. The courts considered Chinese immigrants as having the same status as American Indians, and policies related to citizenship continued to discriminate against Asians. It was not until 1943 that the Chinese Exclusion Law was rescinded, allowing Chinese immigrants the right to become naturalized citizens (Spring, 2011).
When the court ruled in 1885 that native-born Mamie Tape had equal access to public schooling, the California legislature responded by allowing school districts to establish segregated schools for Asian Americans. By 1905, the segregated system in San Francisco was broken as Chinese youths were admitted to the regular city high school (Spring, 2011). Southern courts retained Asian American children in segregated schools attended primarily by African Americans. The family of a Chinese American girl argued that she was not black and therefore should be able to attend the white school. However, the court ruled in 1924 that she was not white and gave schools the authority to determine the race of their students (Spring, 2011).
After the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, the number of Asian immigrants began to grow. School