Education and racial equity in the U.S.: Dates to remember

The Common School
1838 Horace Mann, Secretary of Massachusetts Board of Education, launches The Common School Journal, pioneering the idea that free public education, with instruction by professional teachers, should be provided in schools for children of all backgrounds.

The Kalamazoo Case
1875 Michigan Supreme Court rules that the Kalamazoo School Board could raise taxes to pay for free public high school, setting a national precedent.

Plessy v. Ferguson
1896 Supreme Court legalizes racial discrimination with "separate but equal" doctrine; segregation based on race is ruled legal as long as facilities are deemed of equal quality.

The Souls of Black Folk
1903 W.E.B. Du Bois publishes this collection of essays in which he advocates for liberal arts education for Blacks, in contrast to Booker T. Washington's focus on vocational education in the Black community.

Stanford-Binet IQ test
1916 New test launches era of intelligence testing to sort students in schools. The test promotes the notion that individual intelligence is inborn and can be scientifi cally determined and represented by a single test score.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
1954 Supreme Court rules, "In the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Supreme Court also states that schools are to desegregate with "all deliberate speed."

U.S. Civil Rights Act
1964 Legislation empowers the federal government to withhold federal funding for school districts that discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or national origin.

Head Start Act
1965 Signed into law by President Johnson, this act provides comprehensive early childhood education and assistance to low-income families.

First magnet school opens
1968 McCarver Elementary opens in an African American neighborhood in Tacoma, Washington with the goal of desegregating by offering an advanced curriculum that would appeal to affluent and White students.

San Antonio Indepedent School District v. Rodriquez
1973 Supreme Court rejects the argument that education is a right protected by the Constitution and the view that the funding system based on local property taxes is discriminatory.