The 60 years since Brown in D.C. have demonstrated another truth. There is no correlation between dollars invested in education and student achievement in schools where the money is spent.
When Brown v. Board of Education, the 9-0 Warren Court ruling came down 60 years ago, desegregating America’s public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C.
In the shadow of the Capitol, Gonzaga was deep inside the city. And hitchhiking to school every day, one could see the “for sale” signs marching block by block out to Montgomery County, Maryland.
Democratic and liberal Washington was not resisting integration, just exercising its right to flee its blessings by getting out of town.
The white flight to the Washington suburbs was on.
When this writer graduated in 1956, all-white high schools of 1954 like McKinley Tech, Roosevelt, Coolidge and Anacostia had been desegregated, but were on their way to becoming all black.
Across the South, there was “massive resistance” to Brown, marked by the “Dixie Manifesto” of 1956, Gov. Orval Faubus’ effort to keep black students out of Little Rock Central High in 1957, and the defiance of U.S. court orders to desegregate the universities of Mississippi and Alabama by Govs. Ross Barnett and George Wallace.
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