Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference

2. We're All for Equality in U.S. School Reforms: But What Does it Mean?

2 WE’RE ALL FOR EQUALITY IN U.S. SCHOOL REFORMS: BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN? Martha Minow W hen a group of parents sought to include their religious holiday in the set of public school holidays, the school board voted ten to zero against the proposal. When an applicant asked the Board of School Examiners to offer the examination required for public school teaching applicants on a day other than her religious Sabbath, the Board refused her request and prevailed in court over her legal objection. The outcomes were similar , but the two events, both in the United States, are separated by one hundred years. It was Ida Cohn, an Orthodox Jewish applicant, who failed in her challenge to the Saturday exams for public school teachers in Buffalo, NewYork, in 1905 (Cohn v. Townsend 1905), while it was a group of Muslim parents who failed to convince the school board in Baltimore, Maryland, to add Eid el-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, to the school holiday calendar in 2005 (“Parents Push Public Schools to Be More Muslim-Friendly,”Associated Press, December 5, 2005; “Religion and Ethics,” BBC, September 30, 2005). Each event arose in the midst of unprecedented levels of immigration to the United States (Suárez-Orozco and Qin-Hilliard 2004), and each reflected debates over how the nation should respond to national, ethnic, religious, and racial differences, so their parallels are not perhaps too surprising. Nor, perhaps, are the results surprising given the pressures toward assimilation and the conscious and unconscious fears of long-term residents about the newcomers.Yet during the intervening time, social movements and legal advocates in the United States have tackled issues of race. Other social movements and legal advocates have addressed similar (and different) issues of language, gender, and disability. Following the lead taken by the civil-rights movement on behalf of African Americans, diverse advocates pushed for accommodations for members of minority religions, immigrants, students learning English, and students with disabilities. Converging around the idea of equal opportunity as an organizing framework for schooling, there are disagreements among advocates, school administrators, and other commu21 nity members about what precisely “equal opportunity” does and should mean. Yet rather than simply fight over this question time after time, current advocates , school administrators, parents, and students now have greater chances to install their own vision due to the proliferating options of schooling in America. These options include innovations within public school systems , such as magnet and pilot schools, that offer specialized programs and permit parents and students to elect particular school assignments. Charter schools offer another source of innovation and variety. These are funded by the public but created and governed by entrepreneurial groups—whether composed of teachers, parents, corporations, or religious groups—who propose and manage new schools. Still more options come within reach for many families as communities, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, experiment with publicly financed vouchers to pay for private school tuition. This new era of diversification in education allows parents and students to express their preferences among many options. Through innovation and competition, communities are developing a range of schools; some offer a science and math curriculum, and others offer a focus on the arts. Still others invite students to sort themselves by ethnicity, or gender, or even sexual orientation, as the schools offer specialized programs in Arabic studies or English immersion for new immigrants; some promote themselves by creating all-female classrooms. NewYork has created the Harvey Milk School, a high school that offers a safe space for gay, lesbian, and transgendered youth who have faced harassment in the mainstream schools.1 The legacy, or ghost, of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka’s (1954) constitutional prohibition of legally mandated racial segregation in schooling as a denial of equal protection of the law hangs over these innovations. Equality has become the overarching concern in the design and evaluation of school programs, but people with opposite visions lay claim to the legacy of the Brown decision. Hence, people supporting the expansion of the Harvey Milk School claimed to be heirs of Brown in pursuing equal educational opportunity for students who had been denied their chances in the past.Yet protestors who mobilized against the school’s expansion named it a “separate but equal” solution and claimed it abandoned the integrative vision of Brown (“Protests Mar Opening of Expanded Harvey Milk School,” New York Times, September 9, 2003, B3; Minow 2004). Four members of the U.S. Supreme...