Abstract

Romance of the Ghetto School

Walking into limitless numbers of all-African American or African American and Latino schools in almost any Northern New York City these days, visitors old enough to have lived through the optimistic years of 1954 to 1968 sometimes interpret what they see today as evidence of an abandonment by white America that germinated in the former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush eras. In fact, however, the practical invalidation of the U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education was assured approximately twenty years ago in two important cases, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez and Milliken v. Bradley. In Rodriguez, which began as a class-action suit filed in 1968, parents of children in the impoverished and mostly Latino Edgewood district, which includes apart of San Antonio, sought relief from a school-funding system based on local wealth that afforded their schools less than half as much per pupil as the nearby white and wealthy district known as Alamo Heights.