About the author
Notebook editorial board member Eva Travers is a professor at Swarthmore College.
Fifty years after Brown, same issues still confront Philadelphia
Court decisions have shaped the School District's erratic pursuit of racial equity.
by Eva Travers
Fifty years ago the Supreme Court ruled school segregation to be illegal, but it took another quarter century until school segregation in Philadelphia was challenged in the courts, and that case is still unresolved.
As the nation reflects on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Commonwealth Court Judge Doris Smith-Ribner, who has presided over Philadelphia's school desegregation case since 1991, noted that the Brown decision "has been the guide that I have followed throughout these years in handling this litigation."
"And we're all aware this is the 50th anniversary of Brown and there are celebrations all over the country, but we're still struggling," she added.
In Philadelphia, as in other districts, the path toward racial equity offered by the Brown decision has not always been followed and has frequently been blocked by the actions - or inaction - of other courts and elected officials.
Ordered to eliminate segregation
The Philadelphia desegregation case began in 1970 when the state Human Relations Commission filed a complaint against the School District for running a segregated school system. The next year, the Commission ordered the District to eliminate racial segregation by 1974-75, an order that was never complied with.
The District responded by attempting to integrate only some District schools through two voluntary approaches. The District established magnet schools with more or less equal numbers of Black and White students (even though White students made up a minority of students in the District) and implemented voluntary busing - primarily busing of Black students to schools in Northeast Philadelphia. Ultimately, neither strategy reduced overall school segregation in the District substantially.
In most Northern school districts, mandatory integration had been all but foreclosed by the Supreme Court in rulings that followed Brown. In two key cases from the North in 1973 and 1974, the Court established the precedent that "intent to segregate" on the part of the district or the state had to be legally established for the district to be ordered to desegregate. That precedent was behind Philadelphia's use of voluntary desegregation measures.
In another groundbreaking decision in 1977, however, the Supreme Court ruled that a court could order a state to pay for educational programs to repair the harms caused by segregation. As a result, providing additional funds for educational improvements - rather than shifting students - became the way to address racial inequality in many Northern urban districts.
Case focuses on equal opportunity
In 1983, the Philadelphia School District and the Human Relations Commission agreed for the first time that educational quality and the improvement of education for Black students could be a central goal of the desegregation plan. The District, however, moved slowly to implement reforms that equalized opportunities for students in racially isolated schools, citing a lack of state funds as the reason.
In February 1994, three years after Judge Doris Smith took over the Philadelphia case, she issued a hard-hitting ruling that stated, "The School District is failing or refusing to provide an equal educational opportunity and a quality education to children attending racially isolated minority schools." The students in these schools received less experienced teachers, inferior school buildings, less spending on educational improvement, and fewer opportunities to move to magnet schools, according to Judge Smith.
Quoting the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, she added, "...it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be able to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."
Judge Smith appointed an Educational Team to make recommendations to remedy the racial disparities in achievement and opportunity.
The 40 reforms she ordered for racially isolated schools included all-day kindergarten, smaller class size, facilities improvement, professional development for teachers, parental involvement strategies, more instructional materials, and a curriculum based on systemwide standards. She subsequently ordered the state to foot the bill to carry out these remedies.
While Superintendent David Hornbeck made some headway on implementing these remedies in the mid-1990s, in 1996 the state's Supreme Court overturned Judge Smith's order that the state pay hundreds of millions of dollars for reforms. With the School District facing annual budget crises and cutbacks, the lack of funding limited the possibility of new initiatives.
The 2002 state takeover has not resolved all the School District's financial woes, but increased funding has provided some respite from years of cutbacks and allowed CEO Paul Vallas to launch some new initiatives aimed at ensuring equity. In March, Judge Smith approved a request to let the Human Relations Commission and other parties to the case monitor the District's progress for three years and to end the court case if the District makes progress in reducing racial disparities.