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Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement
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About Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy Of The
Product Description School choice, widely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The strategies and rhetoric of school choice, however, resemble those of segregationists who closed public schools and funded private institutions to block African American students from integrating with their white peers in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. In Overturning Brown, Steve Suitts examines the parallels between de facto segregationist practices and the modern school choice movement. He exposes the dangers lying behind the smoke and mirrors of the so-called civil rights policies of Betsy DeVos and the education privatization lobbies. Economic and educational disparities have expanded rather than contracted in the years following Brown, and post-Jim Crow discriminatory policies drive inequality and poverty today. Suitts deftly reveals the risk that America and its underprivileged youth face as school voucher programs funnel public funds into predominantly white and often wealthy private schools and charter schools. Review Steve Suitts's important new book, Overcoming Brown, shines a spotlight on the exodus of white middle-class families from our city schools to lily-white suburbs and private schools nationally, leaving urban school systems resegregated due to white flight after the forced busing of the 1960s and '70s. City exam schools and some charter schools further deplete urban schools of talent and racial diversity. By likening today's segregated school systems to the rise of white academies in the South post- Brown v. Board of Education, Suitts brings to light the scandalous divide of today's public schools education system. ― Katherine Scheidler, author, Standards Matter, professor, Framingham State University, Massachusetts A masterful, highly readable account of an American tragedy. ― Booklist Overturning Brown is required reading for anyone interested in the current education debate and the history of public education in the United States. ― The Progressive In this slim but heavily researched volume, Suitts shows the parallels between the current school choice movement and the segregationists of the not-so-distant past. The echoes are striking, and perhaps not as well known as they should be… Segregation in public schools continues to be a problem; school choice has made it worse. Suitts's work reminds us that the language and policies of choice have lent themselves to enshrining segregation rather than fighting it. ― Forbes A powerful argument against the "virtual segregation" of schoolchildren enabled by vouchers, credits, and other instruments. As civil rights activist and attorney Steve Suitts convincingly demonstrates, Brown v. Board of Education barely put a dent in unequal public schooling. Indeed, writes the author, more than half of American states now use vouchers to support private schools with public funds, making it likely that inequality will continue for a long time to come. ― Kirkus Reviews With painstaking research and a controlled but passionate pen, Steve Suitts brilliantly exposes the ties that link the current “school choice” movement with its segregationist origins. Advocates of charter schools and taxpayer vouchers use the language of social justice, but Overturning Brown documents the depressing reality: “School choice” has become the twenty-first-century version of the “freedom of choice” plans used by whites to subvert school desegregation efforts in the 1950s and '60s. It is also a sobering reminder that the struggle for racial and economic justice must be renewed with each succeeding generation. ― Dan Carter, Educational Foundation, professor emeritus, University of South Carolina Suitts presents a damning portrait of the historic motivations behind school privatization. Teachers, policymakers, and progressive activists would do well
