Long Island University Conference Looks "Beyond Brown: Taking Brown v. Board of Education into the 21st Century"

At one of many college and university conferences being held this spring to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision, the Department of Education at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus convened a national conference on April 1-3, 2005 to focus on the far-reaching positive impacts Brown has had and to ask the question: "What is Left to be Done?"

Speakers from California, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina described Brown's legacy and its long-term impacts on the civil rights movement, on Latino and Asian/Pacific Islander rights, on language and disability rights, and on the women's movement and gay and lesbian rights. The entire final day of the conference explored current equity issues, including re-segregation of schools and school funding litigations across the country, as well as high-stakes testing and the federal education law, NCLB.

Also, Dr. John Y. Lee, founder and director of the Urban Teacher Education (UTE) program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, discussed his successful efforts to improve teaching and school effectiveness in low-performing schools. UTE partnership schools–with 40% of the classroom teachers trained by UTE–have, on average, doubled their student achievement in math and reading in only a few years.

Dr. John Baugh, Professor of Education and Linguistics at Stanford, spoke on "Teaching for change: The role of schools to promote positive social change." He summarized the linguistic diversity in American classrooms and research that demonstrates the biases people with accents face in our society. He also presented strong evidence that we know how to create successful schools and students, but questioned whether we have the political will to do so.

The conference was co-chaired by Dr. David Ramirez, Dean of the Department of Education at LIU, and by Dr. Stefan Rosenzweig, from California State University, Long Beach. Dr. Ramirez is an internationally recognized researcher, educator and advocate, especially in the design and evaluation of education programs for language minority students.

For references to some of the many other organizations and events honoring the Brown anniversary, see Numerous Events.

Prepared by Molly A. Hunter, April 6, 2004
Copyright Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc. 2004