Our Work — Brown's Promise

It’s time to fulfill Brown’s Promise.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education that schools segregated by race will never achieve true equality. Nearly 70 years later, exposure to racial, ethnic, cultural, and economic diversity is even more important to our children’s educational and civic futures. But progress toward ending segregation peaked in the 1980s and we have been backsliding ever since.

Schools today are more racially segregated than they were in the 1970s. We can change that.

Shared schools.
Shared success.

The research is clear: diverse classrooms help students of all races and backgrounds do better in school and beyond. For students of color and students from low-income backgrounds, the effects are especially powerful for one simple reason: resources.

In an idealized vision of America, all schools would have equitable access to crucial school assets ranging from money and facilities to experienced educators and extracurriculars. We all know that’s not the reality of our country today.

Schools and districts with high numbers of students of color and students living in poverty are under-funded, over-reliant on novice teachers, and less likely to provide rigorous coursework. Across the country, many school district boundaries have been gerrymandered to reinforce patterns of segregation and inequality in resources.

Money matters. Facilities matter. Technology matters. Teachers matter. College and career pathways matter. Proximity to power matters. Diversifying schools remains one of the only proven strategies to expand access to those resources. At a time when division and disunity threaten the fiber of our democracy, it’s also the best way to foster understanding and collaboration across racial, ethnic, cultural, and economic lines.

This work has never been easy. We must avoid mistakes of the past, when the brunt of early integration efforts was borne by communities of color. But together we can.

We can’t keep letting artificial school district and attendance boundaries separate students from opportunity—and from each other.

We created Brown’s Promise, housed at the Southern Education Foundation, to support local partners with:

Research

Identifying and addressing existing and new research needs
Litigation and Advocacy

Developing and refining legal theories, remedies, and policy solutions; supporting strategic advocacy campaigns
Collaboration

Fostering relationships and knowledge-sharing between experts and advocates working on school diversity and resource equity
Communications

Reinvigorating a national discussion about the importance of ending school segregation and providing communications resources for local partners