Overview

School choice, largely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The rhetoric of school choice, however, resembles that of segregationists following Brown v. Board, who closed public schools and funded private institutions to block African American students from integrating with their white peers. In Overturning Brown, Steve Suitts examines the parallels between de facto segregationist policies and the modern school choice movement to expose the dangers lying behind the so-called civil rights policies of Betsy DeVos and the education privatization lobbies. Economic and educational disparity has expanded exponentially in the years following Brown v. Board, and post-Jim Crow discriminatory policies drive inequality and poverty today. It is only through recognizing the smoke and mirrors that Suitts deftly exposes in Overturning Brown that we understand the risk America’s underprivileged youth face with school voucher programs and as public funds are funneled into charter schools and predominately white and wealthy private schools.

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9781588384201

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Steve Suitts's important new book, Overcoming Brown, shines a spotlight on the exodus of white middle-class families from our city schools to lily white suburbs and private schools nationally, leaving urban school systems re-segregated due to white flight after the forced busing of the 1960s and '70s. City exam schools and some charter schools further deplete urban schools of talent and racial diversity. By likening today's segregated school systems to the rise of white academies in the South post-Brown v. Board of Education, Suitts brings to light the scandalous divide of today's public schools education system. -- Katherine Scheidler, author, Standards Matter, professor, Framingham State University, Massachusetts Steve Suitts lifts the veil on the dirty little secret that undercut the intent and subsequent efforts to achieve meaningful school integration--that those of wealth, power, and political strength could benefit from loopholes and end-runs that feed on the instincts of people to resegregate by race and class. His explanations are instructive for present and future policymakers as they strive for genuine equity and for parents and the public at large who need to understand what is at stake. -- Glenn Koocker, Executive Director, Massachusetts Association of School Committees

Author Information

STEVE SUITTS is an adjunct at the Institute for Liberal Arts of Emory University and has been chief strategist for Better Schools Better Jobs, a Mississippi-based education advocacy project of the New Venture Fund. Suitts began his career as a staff member of the Selma Project. He was founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union; the executive director of the Southern Regional Council; and program coordinator, vice president, and senior fellow of the Southern Education Foundation. He is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution and Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement. He was the executive producer and one of the writers of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a thirteen-hour public radio series that received a Peabody Award.

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