16 December 2008
Two Education Revolutions
This article is excerpted from the IIP Publication Sketchbook USA, a richly illustrated volume that depicts Americans at work, at play, in their communities, and engaging in civic life. View and download the fully formatted Sketchbook.
Actions by the U.S. Congress and the courts set in motion two revolutions in American education in the last half century, bringing greater equality and opportunity to the schools.
Brown v. Board of Education
In large measure, the drama of the civil rights movement in the 20th century was played out in U.S. public schools.
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court had declared segregation legal under the doctrine of “separate but equal.” As late as 1950, African Americans could not attend white schools in 17 southern states. Black families had challenged segregation for decades, with little success, although a little-noticed 1947 lawsuit ended separate schools for Hispanics in California.
Beginning in the 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) traveled throughout the South, systematically gathering evidence and honing legal arguments that segregated schools were never equal and often desperately poor and neglected.
The celebrated lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, began in 1950, when the NAACP recruited 13 black parents to attempt to enroll their children in neighborhood schools. They were denied entrance, and the NAACP filed a lawsuit on their behalf. By the time the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown had been consolidated with similar cases from Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina, and the nation’s capital, the District of Columbia. The chief NAACP attorney was Thurgood Marshall, who became the first African-American member of the Supreme Court a decade later.
In a unanimous 1954 decision, the court declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Kansas and a few other states complied with the decision, but southern state school officials defied the court’s ruling, sparking a nationwide civil rights movement in ensuing years and a confrontation between the state and federal governments. The integration of Little Rock High School in Arkansas in 1956 required the dispatch of U.S. Army soldiers, and when black student James Meredith enrolled in the University of Mississippi, it triggered widespread rioting.
With the steady desegregation gains, as well as passage of the far-reaching Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, segregation in public schools had ended by the 1970s. The debate over equality in schools then shifted to issues such as residential patterns and divisions between poor and affluent school districts.
Although racial and ethnic problems persist in some school districts, Brown vs. Board of Education remains a milestone in how a democracy addresses major social and political problems.
The GI Bill
When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, few people had any inkling of the profound impact it would have on American higher education and on society as a whole.
The GI Bill of Rights, as it became known, provided unemployment benefits, home loans, and, most important, financial support for veterans returning from World War II to attend college or take vocational training. (The term “GI” referred to “government issue” and became synonymous with “soldier.”)
In the 1940s, little more than 20 percent of American military forces had secondary school diplomas, and only 3 percent had college degrees. Prior to the GI Bill, colleges were predominately private, elitist, liberal arts, and often highly discriminatory.
The GI Bill changed all that. As scholar Milton Greenberg points out: “Today, American universities are now overwhelmingly public (80 percent of enrollments); focused heavily on occupational, technical, and scientific education; huge, urban-oriented, suitable for commuter attendance; and highly democratic.”
No one anticipated the enormous enthusiasm with which returning veterans embraced the opportunity for a college education, especially when the bill paid tuition and living expenses for any school to which a veteran could gain admittance. In 1940, 160,000 people earned college degrees; by 1950, that number had leapt to 500,000. Veterans studying under the GI Bill totaled almost half of all college students in the late 1940s.
In addition to the 2.2 million veterans who attended college under this historic legislation, another 3.5 million took vocational training courses. By the time the initial GI Bill expired in 1956, the United States, according to Greenberg, had gained 450,000 trained engineers; 240,000 accountants; 238,000 teachers; 91,000 scientists; 67,000 doctors; 22,000 dentists; and more than 1 million other college-educated individuals.
Equally significant, GI Bill educational and home loan benefits created a large, skilled, upwardly mobile American middle class that would sustain the nation’s growth and development for decades to come. The GI Bill also lifted the educational expectations of the children of these veterans and established a strong belief in the value of learning as a lifelong pursuit.
Later versions of the GI Bill have continued to provide educational benefits for veterans, whether they served in peacetime or during conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.
