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^{Brown Speech?}

Measuring the Impact of Brown v. Board

Douglas S. Reed

The key question here is, did Brown do anything? Did it really matter? If we answer yes, then the question is, what good did Brown do?

James Patterson's wonderful book neither glosses over the good things Brown did nor denies the inadequacies of the people and the institutions who sought, designed, and implemented it. I would like to spand on some of the themes that emerge from his retelling and that merit discussion beyond the framework and chronology of Brown and its progeny. The first distinction worth making is the difference between racial oppression and racial conflict, because what Brown did needs to be situated in that context. Second, there is the subject of rights consciousness: questions about whether one pursues one's rights within legal institutions or outside legal institutions, and what it means to have a right and fight for a right in courtrooms or in the street. Finally, I will look at notions of racial neutrality. This raises the issue of a color-blind Constitution and the problem of metrics; that is, how do we measure social outcomes and the impact of politics on different groups?

[Exclamation mark in the margin above]

First, racial oppression and racial conflict. Professor Patteron's book goes back and forth on the subject of whether the pursuit of integrated schools was the right way to puruse racial progress for African Americans in the mid twentieth century. This is the "
on the one hand and on the other hand" school of historical research. On the one hand, some argue that educational quality in and of itself is sufficient. Schools for African

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Douglas S. Reed is Assistant Professor of Government, Georgetown University. M.A., M. Phil., Ph.D., Yale University. Author, On Equal Terms: The Constitutional Politics of Educational Opportunity (Princeton University Press, 2001); "Not in My Schoolyard: Localism and Public Opposition to Funding Schools Equally," 82 Social Science Quarterly (March 2001); "Twenty-Five years after Rodriguez: School Finance Litigation and the Impact of the New Judicial Federalism," 32 Law and Society Review (March 1998); "The People v. The Court: School Finance Reform and the New Jersey Supreme Court," 4 Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy (Fall 1994); "Court-Ordered School FInance Equalization: Judicial Activitism and Democratic Opposition," in William J. Fowler, ed., Developments in School Finance 1996 (National Center for Educational Statistics); and recipient of awards from the National Academy of Education, the Brookings Institution, Yale University.

BROWN V. BOARD: ITS IMPACT ON EDUCATION, AND WHAT IT LEFT UNDONE 17