05.17.11
“Fifty-seven years ago today, the Supreme Court declared that every child in this country deserved equal access to education – and that a separate education for black and white students was unjust and unconstitutional. Our federal education laws are rooted in the effort to uphold this promise, but, sadly, education inequalities still exist on many levels in this country. They exist when children in the poorest schools are denied access to great teachers and they exist when school districts allow dropout factories to fail our students. As far as we’ve come in the better part of a century since this decision was issued, we still have a long way to go toward real education equality for all Americans and closing the achievement gap.
“We have a tremendous opportunity as we work to rewrite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to hold true to the core principles of why the federal government has a role in education in the first place. There is a moral imperative to bring all of our students and their schools into the future, to do better by our neediest students, and to let history judge us not for what we wanted to do but for what we actually accomplished. It’s a challenge that can only be solved by bringing all the stakeholders to the table and making them part of the solution. In this political climate, it’s a challenge I take very seriously.”
Miller Statement on Anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education Landmark Decision
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Rep. George Miller, senior Democrat on the Education and the Workforce Committee, issued the following statement honoring the 57th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.“Fifty-seven years ago today, the Supreme Court declared that every child in this country deserved equal access to education – and that a separate education for black and white students was unjust and unconstitutional. Our federal education laws are rooted in the effort to uphold this promise, but, sadly, education inequalities still exist on many levels in this country. They exist when children in the poorest schools are denied access to great teachers and they exist when school districts allow dropout factories to fail our students. As far as we’ve come in the better part of a century since this decision was issued, we still have a long way to go toward real education equality for all Americans and closing the achievement gap.
“We have a tremendous opportunity as we work to rewrite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to hold true to the core principles of why the federal government has a role in education in the first place. There is a moral imperative to bring all of our students and their schools into the future, to do better by our neediest students, and to let history judge us not for what we wanted to do but for what we actually accomplished. It’s a challenge that can only be solved by bringing all the stakeholders to the table and making them part of the solution. In this political climate, it’s a challenge I take very seriously.”
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