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Lessons Learned:
Making the Promise of Brown a Reality**
Vivian Gunn Morris and
Curtis L. Morris
It is very clear that for many
African-American children in this country, the promise of Brown is
not a reality. What characteristics of the valued segregated
African-American schools may be helpful as we attempt to change our
school system to meet the promise of Brown? Lessons learned from our
earlier work, The Price They Paid (Morris & Morris, 2002) will be
used as a framework for this discussion.
A. Lesson 1
African-American communities provided a good education for their
children long before the 1954 Brown decision and school
desegregation. African-American citizens in Tuscumbia established
the Osborne Academy in 1877. It was renamed Trenholm High School in
1921 and closed in 1969. Trenholm High was one of the valued
segregated schools that provided a good education for
African-American children both before and after Brown. This school
for African-American children possessed many of the characteristics
outlined in current educational literature (Morris & Morris, 2002b):
a) caring, competent, and committed teachers; b) small school
environments; c) rigorous curriculum; d) extra curricular
activities; e) strong family and community involvement; f) strong
leadership; and g) orderly classrooms. However, Trenholm and other
valued segregated African-American schools often lacked two
important factors: an adequate physical plant and adequate supplies
and equipment. Fifty years following the Brown decision, this state
of affairs continues to exist in many schools where the majority of
the students are African-American.
B. Lesson 2
The promises of equality of educational opportunities for
African-American children are not ensured merely by closing poorly
equipped, segregated school buildings and allowing African-American
children to sit next to white children in well-equipped,
desegregated, formerly all-white school buildings. This case study
of Trenholm High School and the recent report cards issued by
states, using the No Child Left Behind guidelines, communicate very
clearly that even in "blue ribbon schools," where the average
achievement of students is high, African-American and other students
of color, special needs students, and children from low-income
families are not achieving at the same levels of their white peers
on standardized tests. African-American citizens in the Trenholm
High community indicated that the desegregated school had an
adequate physical plant and supplies and equipment, but lacked: a)
caring, competent, and committed teachers; and b) strong family and
community involvement in the life of the school.
C. Lesson 3
Relationships can mean everything in improving the academic
achievement of African-American children. Small school environments
offer great promise for promoting positive relationships between
teachers and their students. Students and teachers in the Trenholm
High School community were neighbors. They attended the same
churches, grocery stores, and social events in the community. The
student were playmates and classmates of their teachers' and
principals' children. Their teachers and parents were friends and
belonged to some of the same social and civic clubs in the
community. This is rare in most communities today.
Ifill-Lynch (1998) noted that "the principles of small schools, in
which teachers and children know each other well is good for all
children" (p. 48). A commonality in the small high school is
powerful relationships (Ark & Wagner, 2000). They found that the
small schools they visited "were designed around relationships
between the students and the teachers, and the relationships among
the adults in the school" (p. 50). These schools boast nearly one
hundred percent completion and college acceptance rates. Every
student is connected to an adult in the building. Gladden (1998)
found that students in small schools are more involved in extra
curricular activities, are suspended less often, feel safer at
school, use drugs less often, and are truant less often than
students in larger schools. Trenholm High School and many valued
segregated African-American schools met the enrollment criteria of a
small school, i.e., not more than 350 at the elementary level and
500 at the high school level (Fine, 1999).
D. Lesson 4
What we need most to improve academic achievement in America is a
caring, competent, and qualified teacher in every classroom. How do
we prepare and retain these kinds of teachers in schools that enroll
African-American students? Where do we begin? First we must make
certain that preservice teachers are enrolled in high quality
preparation programs that ensure that they:
1. Possess a deep understanding of the subjects they teach;
2. Evidence a firm understanding of how students learn;
3. Demonstrate the teaching skills necessary to help all (emphasis
added) students achieve high standards;
4. Create a positive learning environment;
5. Use a variety of assessment strategies to diagnose and respond to
individual learning needs;
6. Demonstrate and integrate modern technology into the school
curriculum to support student learning;
7. Collaborate with colleagues, parents and community members, and
other educators to improve student learning;
8. Reflect on their practice to improve future teaching and student
achievement;
9. Pursue professional growth in both content and pedagogy; and
10. Instill a passion for learning in their students (Report, 2003,
p. 7).
One of the characteristics of highly effective teachers identified
as very critical in our case study and in the study of valued
segregated African-American schools was the attribute of caring.
This characteristic of quality teachers began to appear often in
mainstream teacher education literature in the 1990s and has become
a mainstay in descriptions of highly qualified teachers in the
twenty-first century. Gay (2000) described the characteristics of
both caring and uncaring teachers. She stated:
Caring teachers are distinguished by their high performance
expectations, advocacy, and empowerment of students as well as by
their use of pedagogical practices that facilitate success. The
reverse is true for those who are noncaring. Their attitudes and
behaviors take the form of low expectations, personal distance and
disaffiliation from students, and instructional behaviors that limit
student achievement. Just as caring is a foundational pillar of
effective teaching and learning, the lack of it produces inequities
in educational opportunities and achievement outcomes for ethnically
different students (p. 62).
Completing a high quality teacher preparation program is only the
first step in enabling novice teachers to become highly qualified
teachers of African-American children and other children of color.
Second, during the recruitment process, new teachers should be
interviewed by the principal, existing teachers, and parents. The
new teachers should have an opportunity to tour the premises in
order to make certain that a particular school is the right match.
Such a match cannot be made if a teacher is interviewed and hired by
the district's human resources office and assigned to a school. This
also means that prospective employees should be interviewed in more
than one school setting in order to find the most appropriate match
(Johnson & Birkeland, 2003).
Once new teachers are hired, they must be engaged in a high quality
induction and mentoring program that ensures that they will be
retained and able to move toward being a highly effective master
teacher. One of the most successful induction and mentoring programs
is the model implemented by the New Teacher Center (NTC) at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, where they have maintained a
teacher retention rate of 94% as compared to the national average of
50% (Villar & Bloom, 2004). This induction model is not a "buddy
system" where a veteran teacher merely checks on a novice teacher
occasionally and asks: "How are you doing?" This often means
providing only emotional support (which is very important) with
little attention given to classroom instruction. But in the NTC
model, veteran exemplary teachers are released full-time to provide
intensive support to 12-15 beginning teachers over a two-year
period. These mentors meet with each beginning teacher from 1.5 to 2
hours weekly to provide assistance with teaching strategies, lesson
planning, and identification of curriculum resources. They also help
new teachers to establish professional learning goals, conduct
classroom observations, offer teaching demonstrations, coach
teachers in methods and student and parent interactions, and provide
emotional support.
Villar and Bloom assessed the impact of the NTC mentoring and
induction program student achievement gains in classrooms of new
teachers participating in the NTC program compared to gains in
classrooms of non-participating new teachers, mid-career teachers,
and veteran teachers. Students in NTC classrooms demonstrated
achievement gains approaching those of the mid-career teachers'
classrooms, surpassed those of students assigned to veteran
teachers, and far-surpassed those in classrooms of new teachers who
did not participate in the NTC program. This is the kind of
induction and mentoring program that is needed in schools that
enroll African-American children.
Principals and veteran teachers at the school site are critically
important in ensuring that new teachers stay in the profession,
especially at schools with high enrollments of African-American
children, other children of color, and children from low-income
families. Johnson and Birkeland (2003) note that in order to retain
new teachers in the profession, school leaders must: "ensure that
new teachers have an appropriate assignment and a manageable
workload, that they have sufficient resources with which to teach,
that their principals and fellow teachers maintain a stable school
and orderly work environment, and that they can count on colleagues
for advice and support" (p. 606). Lastly, top level school district
officials, college administrators, state department education
personnel and local, state, and federal policymakers must be willing
to allocate the resources that are required to support the
initiatives necessary to ensure that the promise of Brown is a
reality in schools for all children.
In Fifty Years After Brown v. Board of Education, Carroll, Fulton,
Abercrombie, and Yoon (2004) made some similar recommendations as
reported in our lessons learned. They listed the things that we must
do as a nation to make the promise of Brown a reality for all
children in all our communities:
1. Acknowledge unequal school conditions and marshall the political
will to seek solutions;
2. Listen to what teachers and students tell us about conditions in
their schools;
3. Establish school standards that sustain quality teaching and
learning for every child;
4. Establish funding adequacy formulas based on per-pupil needs in
lieu of per-pupil averages;
5. Use better data to report on the relationship between school
conditions and student performance;
6. Hire well-qualified teachers and principals, support them, and
reward them for their performance; and
7. Hold officials publicly accountable for keeping the promise of
educational equity (p. 6).
In a recent study, Jerome Morris (2004) reports on his investigation
of two predominately African-American elementary schools in
low-income urban communities that are very successful in educating
their students. What is very interesting about his findings is that
the two successful schools that he studied (in 1994-1997 and
1999-2002) have some of the same characteristics as the valued
segregated African-American schools that existed before Brown, e.g.,
school personnel reaching out to families, intergenerational and
cultural bonding, significant presence of black teachers in the
schools, African-American principals serving as cultural and
academic leaders in the community, and successful African-American
schools as pillars in black communities.
We had many successful schools for African-American children before
Brown, and we have some in the twenty-first century, but not nearly
enough. We know enough to ensure an equitable education for all
children in this country, and we have the financial resources to
support the needs of our schools. The question is: Do we have the
will to make the promise of Brown a reality in this country? Will it
take fifty more years to attain that goal?
We cannot afford to wait! |
