The commission tasked with studying Delaware’s funding formula for public education on the heels of a report suggesting spending should be increased by upward of $1 billion annually has a large hill to climb.

That’s hampered by an information gap, after a recent survey determined that a large number of the commission members don’t feel they have enough of a grasp on the current or proposed funding systems to formulate a plan.

In recent years, Delaware has come under scrutiny for the way its public education system is funded.  like the Delaware NAACP and Delawareans for Educational Opportunity filed a lawsuit arguing that the state’s education system did not provide an adequate education to all students and therefore violated their rights.

A national consultant, the American Institutes for Research, completed an independent assessment of education funding in Delaware as part of , where it  that the state increase spending by as much as $1 billion to meet its 2030 educational proficiency goals.

After both Democratic and Republican members of the State Senate’s Education Committee raised concerns in a March meeting over how the sum would affect taxpayers, however, the legislature chose to create the Public Education Funding Commission (PEFC) to examine the recommendation.

In its Nov. 13 meeting, the commission released its anonymous survey about whether Delaware should try to reform and improve the longstanding unit count formula that determines state funding support for public schools statewide, or scrap it altogether and create a weighted student formula that many other states have moved to in recent years.

About 48% of respondents said they were neutral, not sure or needed more information. In comparison, 33% voted for improving the current system and 19% voted for creating a brand new system. Ten members of the 31-member commission, which includes legislators, Cabinet leaders, teachers, principals, support professionals, and community advocates, did not respond to the survey.

State Senator and Commission Chair Laura Sturgeon (D-Brandywine Hundred) made it clear that she wished the PEFC’s first two meetings would have provided the “foundational knowledge” necessary to make a decision to rebuild or remodel the current system.

The PEFC’s next two meetings will focus on how public education funding works in Delaware, and specific examples of what a total rebuild would look like, compared to a remodel with small or large changes. Sturgeon added that she hopes people will feel more comfortable choosing a direction after the December and February meetings.

Commission members’ need for more information comes after discussions about pushing back the timeline for issuing final recommendations, which  who argue that the state has been debating and studying the issue for nearly 20 years without making substantive changes.

The commission was slated to submit its first set of recommendations by Oct. 1, 2025, to be considered in the governor’s recommended budget for Fiscal Year 2027. However, the commission previously discussed submitting its recommendations in July 2026 instead, which would delay possible funding until the budget for Fiscal Year 2028.

Although future meetings aim to provide more knowledge, some members were quick to point out that their peers should be doing their own research on the public education funding system rather than waiting for the information to be given.

“Today, a lot of us have been really quiet, but we really need that input if we’re going to move forward and if we’re going to make these transformational changes that we really want in our education system, because it’s too important for us to sit back, be quiet and wait,” said commission member Marcus Wright, who is also a member of the Seaford School District Board of Education. “We’ve got to go out, we’ve got to do the work. We got to do some research on our own as well.”

Wright called on members to lean on those who are on the commission to help “gain the knowledge that you need so that we can move forward.”

Wright also pointed out that the commission doesn’t have much time to form its recommendations, and that the work is too important to do in two-hour blocks once every month.

Sturgeon agreed and called on members to voice their opinions more and said that the commission has also provided reading materials to help people feel more comfortable with the topic.

“I know we’re all super busy, and so just encouraging you to read what you can or ask questions,” Sturgeon said. “Call us, meet with us, meet with whoever, and then when you feel like you understand it well enough please voice your opinion, and please don’t be afraid of having an opinion and then changing your mind later.”

This was originally published on .

In September, St. Louis education nonprofit The Opportunity Trust launched the , a $1 million effort to help charter and district schools brainstorm ways to improve reading in the early grades. The four schools, selected from St. Louis City and County are Atlas Public School, Commons Lane Primary School in the Ferguson-Florissant School District, Premier Charter School and Barbara C. Jordan Elementary in the School District of University City.

The Emerson challenge is a direct response to work the St. Louis NAACP is doing to improve reading scores and close the literacy gap for Black students, said Jesse Dixon, an Opportunity Trust consultant and one of the project leaders for the challenge. The project is being funded by a $1 million donation from , an international automation technology and software company headquartered in St. Louis.

The NAACP branch recently filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against 34 St. Louis school districts because of disparities in reading proficiency for students of color. 

The branch also launched a campaign this year called Right to Read, which is working with superintendents, teachers, parents and nonprofits to get all third graders in the city and county of St. Louis reading well by 2030. Dixon said the Emerson challenge is building on the campaign’s principle that requiring instruction based on longstanding research about how children learn to read — the — is key to improving literacy.

“For years, teachers had been trained how to teach reading in ways that we’ve now since learned are counterproductive and actually hinder the progress of kids learning to read,” he said. “It … sent a strong message about how big a problem this was and how evident it’s become that we need to teach reading in this other way.”

Dixon said a big problem in improving St. Louis’s reading proficiency rates — which were at 18% for third graders in the city and 43% for third graders across the county — is how the science of reading is implemented.

“Many districts and charter schools have already adopted science of reading curriculum, and yet, we’re still not getting much better,” Dixon said. “These are well-intentioned, hardworking, smart educators and education leaders doing everything they can to try to catch these kids up and get them to be proficient, and something’s not working, and we need to learn what it is.”

Leaders of each selected school will receive $20,000 this year to brainstorm strategies and craft plans to improve early literacy. They can get up to $250,000 during the 2025-26 school year to implement those plans. The Opportunity Trust will also provide support from literacy experts.

Dixon said the school leaders will have to look outside St. Louis, to districts that have successfully implemented the science of reading and boosted literacy. 

“They can learn what’s working around the country and they can learn from each other,” he said. “At the end, [they will] write a plan for how to spend their quarter of a million dollars consistent with everything they’ve learned, and so that they can implement those practices next school year and get the kind of results we all know are possible.”

Dixon said St. Louis education officials and experts still don’t know what’s going wrong with schools that have adopted science of reading curriculum but seen no results.

“That’s part of the challenge — we don’t think any school in St. Louis has figured this out,” he said.

One of the selected schools, , incorporated curriculum materials based on the science of reading when it opened in 2021. The school serves more than 460 students from prekindergarten through fourth grade.

Colby Heckendorn, executive director and co-founder, said Atlas students scored slightly above average this spring, ranking in the 51st percentile for reading on the — a test that’s widely used in schools across the U.S.

“We feel good about that, but we still know and believe our students can do better,” Heckendorn said. “That’s why it’s important for us to continue to refine our practice and make sure that our teachers feel supported and have the training that they need.”

Heckendorn said he’s looking forward to collaborating with other schools to brainstorm strategies around reading instruction.

“I think that’s one of the things that’s going to be great about the literacy challenge — really reflecting on how we are best supporting our students who need more enrichment and to be pushed to the next level,” he said. “How are we supporting those students who are really struggling, to set them up for success as well? Those are things that our team is really excited to dig into and reflect on.”

Reading outcomes for American children are a source of national shame and a root cause of many of the country’s deep-seated issues and injustices. In the of U.S. fourth graders, only one-third were proficient in reading. These results reflect a longstanding problem with grave social consequences, a reality the Department of Justice recognized when it illiteracy a causal factor in delinquent behavior and incarceration more than 30 years ago.

The NAACP has been increasingly vocal about poor literacy outcomes. It passed a in 2014 and recently led a , but its new resolutions are particularly pointed. While they are not heavily prescriptive, their message is clear: Literacy is a civil right, and progress is a moral imperative. Children cannot read, and the culprit is the “widespread neglect of implementing evidence-based practices” in how literacy skills are taught. The resolutions call for “accountability and monitoring” of instructional practices as well as better training to ensure “teaching methods grounded in research-proven effectiveness” are implemented in all schools. The NAACP also calls on policymakers to “be aware of research-based strategies and use them in their policies.”

As local NAACP branches must uphold national resolutions, this work can begin immediately within the states. In recent years, , and have pushed for reform, yet change has been slow to reach classrooms, both in elementary schools and in universities. As I consider the continued barriers to progress, I believe the NAACP — and peer civil rights organizations including Children’s Defense Fund, Alliance for Excellent Education and National Urban League — are uniquely poised to dismantle them. 

Politics, for example, has been a notable obstacle to change. Structured literacy instruction was once considered a conservative cause, and while it has become a big-tent issue, many partisans cannot resist coloring it red or blue. This reflects the general atmosphere of American society — deeply divided by politics — but given the stakes, literacy advocates must call for a cease and desist of any form of politicization in the movement to improve reading instruction. The NAACP’s stance can help depoliticize conversations about reading instruction, as it joins standard-bearers from to the , from dyslexia advocates to houses of worship and from those living in poverty to those in the wealthiest zip codes in advancing change. 

At the university level, professors of education have long been arming teachers with methods that simply do not work for the majority of students. While the National Center on Teaching Quality has on this issue, many universities have ignored these critiques in the name of academic freedom. The NAACP takes teaching colleges to task, calling for an “evidence-based professional education system.” Leaders can — and must — ask universities why they are complicit in civil rights violations when they fail to hold their education departments accountable. These institutes of higher education should not be designated unless they align their programs and methods courses with the research consensus.��

NAACP activism also pressures education funders, particularly the federal government, to take initiative for better reading outcomes. Why should any school that receives federal funding — including public schools via the Title I program — be allowed to perpetuate civil rights violations by failing to use research-validated approaches to teach reading? Certainly, the U.S. Department of Education could institute corrective measures. Public or philanthropic funding could also address key voids in research and training. Educators deserve access to major research efforts to help them understand which curricula are most effective and usable in schools. Teachers should not be paying for professional development out of their own pockets to make up for training that was not current with the research. If America can spend billions of dollars overseas to fund wars, surely our leaders can find the money needed to ensure our children can read.

Lastly, NAACP advocacy may finally compel change in the unregulated K-12 product marketplace. Major publishers continue to put , with little accountability as to whether their materials actually help teach children to read. State departments of education create curriculum lists without considering which have evidence of working best, and how much time and preparation is required for full implementation of materials. School systems, at all levels, must demand effective, highly usable products that empower teachers, not salespeople.

Society has established that the profit motive must not override civil and human rights, a principle affirmed by decisions to end slavery, create child labor laws and codify access to a free and appropriate public education. The right to read belongs in that same pantheon of liberties. As Maya Angelou put it, “The elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.” By demanding important changes in American education, the NAACP brings its powerful pulpit to bear in heeding Angelou’s call.

The branch filed a complaint Aug. 19 with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against 34 school districts in the city and county of St. Louis because of disparities in reading proficiency for Black students.

It’s the second time the St. Louis NAACP is bringing student literacy into the spotlight. Earlier this year, the organization launched a campaign called Right to Read that also focuses on improving reading scores for Black students in city and county schools.

Adolphus Pruitt, the organization’s president, said federal officials will assess the complaint, and if it’s within the office’s jurisdiction, will launch an investigation to determine whether the argument is valid.

In the complaint, the organization said low reading proficiency rates for St. Louis Black students “underscores the urgent need for targeted interventions in the region’s schools.”

“The districts are facing one of the steepest post-pandemic climbs, with significant learning losses that require immediate and sustained attention,” it said. “Addressing these challenges will require a comprehensive approach, potentially involving increased funding, innovative teaching strategies, enhanced support services and community engagement to improve educational outcomes for the region’s students.”

If the complaint is valid, the office “would ask the school districts to take certain actions to remediate things,” Pruitt said. “We’re very early in the process.”

In 2023, reading proficiency scores were at 42% for all Missouri third graders, but only  21% for Black third graders, according to state data.

In St. Louis Public Schools — one of the districts included in the complaint — 14% of Black third graders scored as proficient in reading on standardized tests, versus 61% of their white classmates. The district didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

The chapter is calling on community members to help boost student literacy. At a press conference Aug. 20, representatives asked the public to support existing reading programs, create new initiatives and dedicate personal time to participating in literacy activities with children.

Pruitt said that since the filing, he has heard mostly positive feedback from local nonprofits and educators.

“They’ve called in and said, ‘We think you’re doing the right thing. We’re glad to see it.’ Of course, we got some comments from people who say we’re barking up the wrong tree,” Pruitt said. “That’s especially with some of the districts that are predominantly white. Even though their kids — Black or white — are performing poorly.”

In addition to the 34 districts, the complaint names the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Pruitt said state education officials have to be kept accountable along with schools for low reading scores.

“They’re the ones who make sure that the districts are performing,” he said. “It’s like an employee is doing something that they’re not supposed to be doing, and you got a supervisor that’s managing him — well, you have to look at the management.”

The department recently focused on improving literacy in a called Missouri Read, Lead, Exceed, which aims to increase evidence-based literacy instruction — part of the science of reading. The state also passed a literacy law last year, requiring schools to create success plans for students with reading deficiencies.

The St. Louis NAACP’s Right to Read is designed to help close the literacy gap between Black students and the state average. There’s a focus on third grade because that 1 in 6 children who aren’t reading proficiently by then won’t graduate from high school on time.

Pruitt said that by 2030, the NAACP branch wants all children in the city and county of St. Louis to receive the materials and support they need to help get them reading well by third grade. But he realized the Right to Read campaign wouldn’t achieve that goal without help from the Office for Civil Rights.

“We just need to get more people involved in doing certain things,” Pruitt said. “We [filed the complaint] because once we saw the enormity of the problem, Right to Read —  strictly on an emotional and volunteerism point — is not going to work.”

Family members and NAACP President Derrick Johnson spoke of the violent threats endured for years following the decision, which outlawed separating children into schools by their race. 

President Joe Biden met with the delegation of two original plaintiffs, about 20 descendants and NAACP leadership “critical in fighting for these and other hard-won freedoms for Black Americans,” according to a White House official. 

Several family members reiterated the struggle to make good on �����Ƿɲ�’s promise of quality education for all is far from over. 

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Cheryl Brown Henderson, youngest daughter of namesake plaintiff Oliver Brown, just after leaving the Oval Office. “… We’re still fighting the battle over whose children we invest in.”

In the private meeting, family members said they urged the President to continue that fight and support HBCUs. President Biden thanked them for taking on the risks required to push back on Jim Crow and segregation, including risking “your life, your livelihood, your home,” said Brown Henderson.

At least one litigating family’s home was burned to the ground in South Carolina. Many others lost jobs, compounding the challenges Black families faced in trying to build economic wealth less than a century after the fall of slavery. 

One descendant urged the President to consider a national holiday commemorating the landmark court decision so that its significance and history would not be lost.

“We have yet to fulfill the promise of Brown,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, adding that teaching “adequate” history is being threatened in multiple states. Last month, the organization for its “anti-indoctrination” law and alleged discrimination against Advanced Placement African American Studies courses.

“So the fight continues,” Johnson said. “It is a political fight. It is a legal fight. It is a moral fight, to ensure that we have a future that’s reflective of the demographics of this country today and not the demographics of 1950.” 

Earlier this week, scholars at Stanford University and University of Southern California unveiled troubling research that school segregation steadily increased in the last three decades. Experts say there’s an urgent need to reform how students are sorted into schools – four states require, and nearly all allow, districts to enforce attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing or sundown town boundaries from nearly a century ago. 

Family members called out the press’s failure to accurately document challenges to �����Ƿɲ�’s implementation and racial educational inequities being played out in schools today. They also voiced criticism for the administration’s military and war spending in comparison to education priorities. This week and late last month signed a for aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and other countries. 

“The truth about education in America? Are the kids from the Indian reservations … in West Virginia, or my mother’s hometown in South Carolina [getting quality education]? I say no. Tell me I’m wrong,” said Nathaniel Briggs, son of the namesake plaintiff in . “We’ll spend millions of dollars to buy an airplane and a bomb, but not on education.” 

Thursday’s event was the first of several NAACP and White House engagements commemorating the anniversary. Tomorrow, seven decades to the day since the court issued the Brown decision, the President will share remarks at the African American Smithsonian. 

The St. Louis NAACP recently launched the “Right to Read” campaign, which focuses on improving proficiency and educational equity for students of color. Its mission: By 2030, all children in the city and county of St. Louis will receive the materials and support they need to help get them reading well by third grade.

The campaign began with a Jan. 17 screening of a film it’s named after, called . The documentary follows Oakland-based NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, who filed a petition with the school district demanding change because of low reading scores. LeVar Burton, who hosted the television series Reading Rainbow for 23 years, was an executive producer.

The St. Louis NAACP will soon launch a listening tour to get feedback from superintendents, teachers, parents and nonprofits about how to improve student reading.

Education chairman Ian Buchanan said the chapter plans on partnering with local school districts in the coming months in order to reach that goal. 

“This extreme crisis in literacy has impacted Black and brown students more acutely than others. And so, given this reality, we want to take a stand and put a line in the sand to say, ‘Hey, we know that we can do better and we know that we can do better collectively,’ ” Buchanan said. “So this is a call to action for all school districts to recalibrate, to recommit and to be more deeply committed to improving literacy scores.”

With more than 16,500 students, St. Louis Public Schools has had bleak reading scores for the past 10 years. But the disparity between Black and white students has been skyrocketing. In 2013, 19% of Black third graders scored as proficient in reading on standardized tests, versus 43% of their white classmates. But by last year, that disparity had increased by 23 points, to 14% versus 61%.

that students with low literacy rates have a higher risk of dropping out of high school, entering poverty or becoming involved in the criminal justice system.

“You have a young African American, male or female, who may be a parent, who dropped out of high school — their literacy level is extremely poor and there’s no way that didn’t create this burden, blocking (them) from opportunities and being successful in the long haul,” chapter president Adolphus Pruitt said. “So we thought of economic empowerment and literacy as being one in the same.”

Missouri’s reading proficiency scores have also declined over the last decade. For third graders, scores dropped from 48% in 2013 to 42% in 2023. These results prompted a new literacy law to be passed last year, requiring schools to create success plans for students with reading deficiencies.

The law is part of a comprehensive plan, , that aims to increase evidence-based literacy instruction, part of the science of reading.

Buchanan said Right to Read’s initial goal is to close the literacy gap between Black students and the state average. There’s a focus on third grade because that 1 in 6 children who aren’t reading proficiently by then won’t graduate from high school on time.

Even school districts in higher-income communities have wide gaps between Black student reading proficiency and the state average. 

For example, just 9% of students in the Kirkwood School District qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, but only 33% of Black students were reading proficiently at the end of third grade in 2023, according to state data. 

“The data tells us that all we really need to do in order to first eliminate the gap between Black students and the state average is to move, on average, one or two students per third grade, per school, per year to proficiency,” Buchanan said.

Other local nonprofits that are committed to boosting student literacy are partnering with Right to Read this year. For example, parent advocacy group has been managing a literacy campaign called Bridge 2 Freedom since last summer. 

The campaign distributes books, hosts essay writing contests and is part of a free parent academy that teaches families to become better advocates for their children and connects them to services and academic resources.

“A lot of our parents who come into the program didn’t know that they had rights. They didn’t know the right questions to ask,” said CEO Krystal Barnett. “They didn’t know that they could ask for their kids’ reading scores. They didn’t even know that a report card was not an accurate depiction of what a child can do in school.” The academy, she said, “puts people in the position to make different decisions and to get better results.”

More than 300 parents have participated in Bridge 2 Hope’s parent academy. Other organizations around the U.S. have pursued similar paths of making parents education advocates, such as Oakland REACH, which worked with its local NAACP branch to push the Oakland Unified district to adopt a research-based reading program.

Barnett added, “I think the Right to Read will open the eyes of people about what strong reading instruction can actually do for a child.”

Another St. Louis initiative is training older adults as tutors to help advance student reading proficiency. The Oasis Institute partners seniors with students in kindergarten through third grade who need academic or social emotional support. A found that the parent-led tutoring effort produced similar gains in reading for youngsters as instruction from classroom teachers.

Nonprofit is also teaming up with Right to Read. The organization was launched in 2020 as a local chapter of the , a national organization that has more than 300 branches across the U.S. 

Founder Lisa Greening said Turn the Page STL is a network of nonprofits with one goal in mind: improving St. Louis students’ reading proficiency. 

The organization is especially focusing on the area’s lowest-performing districts, where Greening said Black and brown children still receive an inequitable education.

“We have the resources here in St. Louis. We’re just not connecting with each other,” she said. “I don’t know anything more important than a child being able to read, because that is one of the most critical self-determinants of life.”

Buchanan said pulling together resources across the St. Louis community to help dissolve systemic inequities is essential.

“Literacy is an issue across the board, even with affluent students,” he said. “But one of the things that history tells us is that when white America has the flu or a cold, Black America has pneumonia.”

In , scholar Leslie T. Fenwick, tapping seldom-seen transcripts from a series of 1971 U.S. Senate hearings on the topic, writes that the loss of Black educators post-Brown was “the most significant brain drain from the U.S. public education system that the nation has ever seen. It was so pervasive and destabilizing that, even more than half-century later, the nation’s public schools still have not recovered.”

While Black students now represent about 15 percent of K-12 enrollment, just 7 percent of teachers and 11 percent of principals are Black. Research shows that this dearth of Black educators has consequences: One 2018 study, for instance, found that Black students who had by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college. Those who had two were 32 percent more likely.

What’s more, Fenwick says, current threats over issues such as Critical Race Theory are cut from the same cloth as the threats that Black educators faced post-Brown.

74 contributor Greg Toppo spoke with Fenwick, an education policy professor and dean emerita of the School of Education at Howard University, about the Senate hearings, the backlash to Brown and ways to bring Black teachers back into the classroom.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Can you take us back to the moment when you first learned about this history?

Leslie T. Fenwick: I learned this history on my own as part of my disgust with a Politics of Education class that I was taking as a doctoral student. The professor decided that the class on the politics of education would not discuss Brown! Instead, we were going to start at a different point, the [the 1971 decision that upheld busing to achieve integrated schools]. And I remember being outraged by that. If there’s any place where we should be unpacking Brown, it should be in that class. Additionally, the faculty member opened the class with this roster of statistics reflecting disparities in education between Blacks and whites, but I was concerned that there was no framing for these statistics, and that without the framing, there was kind of a tacit reinforcement of some racist assumptions about Blacks and intellectual and academic underachievement. So after class I marched to the library, almost in protest, saying to myself that I was going to bring back some statistics and facts to inform this faculty member about education disparities and also to make the case for why we should be discussing Brown. And as I’m looking for resources in the library — I’m literally in the stacks because this is before the Internet — I come across these on the displacement of Black principals. And I start reading them. And that’s where I learned about this history. I carried those transcripts around for quite some time, looking for someone to write the book that I ended up writing.

Those 1971 Senate hearings feel like a hidden history. Why are they not more widely known?

These [Senate hearing] transcripts have been cited at least 100 times in work by scholars and journalists, but no one has written in depth about the most prominent focus of the transcripts, which was Black educators’ superior academic credentials and professional experiences, and how they were replaced by lesser-qualified whites. I wasn’t expecting to find that. … This is the thrust of the hearings. And yet in all the work that cites the hearings, there’s not a focus on these Black educators’ exceptional academic credentials.

You paraphrase testimony from the hearings, writing that as school desegregation slowly played out post-Brown, “White principals and teachers became its direct beneficiaries, while Black educators were its primary prey.” Reading that, I wondered, “Who were the hunters?”

We’re talking about life in the 17 dual-system states, although outside of those states, there are jurisdictions that also have . And we see, even in the North, this is happening too. But en masse, it’s happening in the 17 racially segregated states, from Delaware down to Florida, over to Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, etc. And the hunters become governors, mayors, state legislatures — not individual legislators, but legislatures — and also locally elected officials: mayors, but also school superintendents and school boards. Remember, this is a time still after Brown of a lot of racial constriction. The customs of racism and Jim Crow are alive and well, which means that Blacks experience difficulty and barriers to voting. So that means local officials, school board members, superintendents in the states and jurisdictions where they are elected — and certainly state legislatures and governors [are involved]. And so without full voting rights extended to Blacks, those controlling the state and local levers of power and policy are almost all white and mainly committed to maintaining the segregationist hold on schools. And these are the individuals and entities that facilitate, through the use of state budgets and the use of state codes and statutes, the firing, dismissal and demotion of Black principals and teachers.

You write that Thurgood Marshall in 1955 noted that Black educators’ jobs needed to be protected. Did he and the legal team go into Brown with this possibility on their minds?

There was a that led up to Brown that were about disparities in paying Black and white teachers. Again, Black teachers with more credentials would make less money in the 17 dual-system states than white teachers with certificates. Thurgood Marshall and many of his team litigated those cases … Marshall and his team knew Black educator displacement was likely to happen. Remember, prior to Brown they’re going to Southern and border states, and they’re litigating all the cases around pay inequalities and voter registration. They knew the parameters of Jim Crow very well. In fact, early on, Marshall establishes the of the NAACP to provide funding for legal support to the Black principals and teachers whom he thought would be illegally targeted and lose their jobs as a result of white backlash to Brown.

Do you give Marshall’s legal team any culpability for being naive in their strategy?

I don’t hold the Brown decision, nor the men who were the geniuses behind that decision, culpable. But what I do hold culpable is white resistance and the ability of local and state leaders to, in a swoop, use state statutes and budgets to support their segregationist agenda in the face of Brown, which would become the law of the land. Brown was right: There is no place in an American democracy for segregation. There is no reason Black citizens should not be able to access tax-supported institutions. There is no reason we should have, in this great country, racially segregated customs and laws. Brown was a great and brilliant decision. But there was powerful backlash to the decision that continued for at least 25 years. Sadly, I think it’s still continuing. In fact, the current death threats against superintendents who have initiated race equity initiatives, the physical intimidation of school board members, the threats against teachers and to burn books — when I was writing Jim Crow’s Pink Slip and then looking at the current news, it’s the same script, and that really shocks me.

You’ve anticipated my next question: Reading your book, I felt like the conversations we’re seeing now about CRT and pushing students away from subjects that make them uncomfortable are a direct result of this history. Can you reflect on that?

I wrote the book to push against this myth that there are not enough Black teachers, because after Brown, Blacks fled the profession to pursue fields and careers that were previously unavailable. Well, the history doesn’t say that, nor do U.S. Labor Department statistics show that. And we’re still living with this history: Of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers, about 7 percent are Black. About 11 percent of the nation’s 93,000 principals are Black. And less than 3 percent of the nation’s almost 14,000 superintendents are Black. And so I ask myself, and I ask the reader: Where would we be if these generations of Black educators, who were more credentialed than their white peers who replaced them, who had a personal commitment to end anti-Black racism, who had put their lives on the line to lead voter-rights campaigns in their communities, who were committed to a representative democracy — what if they hadn’t been fired? What if they had been in place during a critical time in our nation’s history and were part of building integrated schools? Where might we be as a nation now?

As you write, they weren’t just teaching, they were also politically active.

Many of these principals and teachers were establishing voting-rights campaigns in their locales. They were establishing NAACP chapters. This was their activism. And in other literature, they’re called community activists and community leaders. But more specifically, their community activism was devoted to helping Blacks get registered to vote and working with the NAACP on lots of equality issues. And so they were threats. These Black educators were cornerstones of political activism even in the face of threats to their own lives.

So in 2022, if the dearth of Black teachers isn’t a recruitment issue, what’s the solution?

When the Nixon administration was pressured about this as a result of the Senate hearings in the ‘70s, the response of the administration was not pro-integration. They designated $3.2 million to the retraining of Black educators for integrated schools. Well, Black educators didn’t need retraining. On a near one-to-one basis, they were more credentialed than the white educators who replaced them. So, the Nixon administration’s retraining investment is literally used to usher Black principals and teachers out of the profession. I go into great, great detail and cite the federal documents that show how they were ushered out of the field. So we need a counter-investment, and particularly in institutions that produce large percentages or numbers of Black and other educators of color. I always say that even in 2022, HBCUs, which are 3 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities, are producing 50 percent of the nation’s Black teachers — and two HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions), one in Texas and one in Florida, produce 90 percent of the nation’s Latinx teachers. So we do need some financial investment in the institutions that are producing teachers of color. And we need to examine, I think, any other structural barriers preventing Black and other teachers of color from entering the profession, either as teacher education students or novice teachers.

It strikes me that it’s such a vicious cycle: If you’re a Black student and don’t see Black teachers, your incentive to do this work, to see yourself in this job, just gets reduced. And that feeds into an ongoing cycle.

We know that academic and social benefits accrue to African-American, Hispanic/Latinx students when they’re in highly diverse-staffed schools. They’re less likely to be expelled, less likely to be misplaced in special education, more likely to graduate high school, more likely to apply for college, have reading and math achievement that’s excellent in certain grades. And so we are losing out on some academic achievement, not just for Black and brown students, but possibly for all students. I say in the book, over and over again, that all children benefit from having diverse models of intellectual authority.

See previous 74 Interviews: professor Daryl Scott on teaching the history of race in America; author Amanda Ripley on losing trust in schools; professor Seth Gershenson on the importance of teacher diversity; author Paul Tough on higher education myths; and the full archive of 74 interviews.

The plan, released in April, seeks to make Black student success a top priority for the governor and state education department. It also calls for equitable educational funding statewide and for the elimination of the digital divide, among a dozen other strategies.��

It provides clear action steps in a state where Black students trail their white and Hispanic peers on virtually every educational measure, as evidenced by test scores out of the Indianapolis Public Schools: Last year, just in the district passed both the math and English sections of the state exams.

NAACP Education Committee member Carole Craig, who co-edited the report, said substantive change requires a new way of thinking about this group.��

“First, we must agree that all Black children can succeed,” she told The 74. “If we don’t make a serious difference in the next couple of years, we are crippling the ability of this state to have a viable working class, to be a part of a global economy for all of its citizens.”

Most jobs require at least two years of education beyond high school, she said: Those who fail to graduate or pursue college will be unqualified.��

Russ Skiba, professor emeritus at Indiana University, praised the NAACP’s proposal for its concrete answer to an educational crisis that has gone largely unaddressed for decades.

“What is so impressive about this plan is that it’s a blueprint,” said Skiba, former director of The Equity Project at Indiana University, which provides evidence-based information on school discipline, school violence, special education and education equality. “It says, essentially, that if we are serious about addressing the gaps in our schools, which grow into gaps in our society, make no mistake, then these are the things that need to happen.”��

NAACP Education Chair Garry Holland said the report contains nothing new, that the data has been available for years. 

So, too, he said, has the funding to bring positive change. What hasn’t materialized, at least not yet, is a concerted, sustained, statewide effort to improve these students’ educational experience. 

“When you look at professional development, cultural competency, anti-bias training, does the school have the will to do these things and help these children?” he asked. “Money has been made available through ESSA (federal Every Student Succeeds Act) for that to happen. We know you have the resources. But do you have the will?”

Shawnta Barnes, an educational consultant who worked in Indianapolis Public Schools for three years ending in 2018, is among those trying to build that resolve. Barnes, who helped shape the NAACP’s plan, is now promoting it to local districts, presenting it not as a critique of their current practice, but as an opportunity to improve.��

“Each of us has been assigned to different school districts and have been going out and having intimate conversations about it,” said Barnes, the mother of two boys enrolled in Washington Township Schools in Indianapolis. “We don’t want any school to feel we are attacking them. It’s more of, ‘This is our plan and how can we help you?’ We’re here to talk to schools, see if they are willing to work with us … and help them get grants and connect them with resources. We are a partner… and we will be down at the Statehouse fighting for the policies to be passed.”

The NAACP’s plan faces numerous hurdles, among them that Black students are spread throughout many districts, even within Indianapolis, meaning advocates will have to sell the proposal to each one.��

Aleesia Johnson, superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools, the state’s largest, has already pledged to address the disparity. Her district, which serves 31,000 students, including those in charter schools, spent the 2021–22 school year designing a tiered support system for those campuses that have three consecutive semesters of “F” state-designated letter grades and are at the bottom of critical education metrics.��

These schools overwhelmingly serve Black and Hispanic students.��

In addition to expanding its tutoring program, her district has already partnered with two groups it hopes will improve student success: One is recognized for its anti-racist approach to learning and the other focuses on school district transformation.

“Unfortunately, the findings of the NAACP report on Black student achievement are not surprising,” Johnson said in a statement to The 74. “The results are all too common among school districts across the country.”

Looking to repeat anti-CRT victory��

Though the NAACP’s plan faces numerous challenges, proponents take heart in an earlier, surprise win: The same coalition that managed to in Indiana earlier this year — including the Urban League, Equity Project, Indiana State Teachers Association and Indiana Black Legislative Caucus, among many others — also supports the NAACP’s plan. 

Critical race theory, which examines how American racism has impacted a wide range of the country’s systems and institutions, has become a catch-all phrase made popular by and politicians trying to around issues of race. Many thought the same type of anti-CRT legislation passed in would be embraced in Indiana, which considered a ban on that could make students feel guilt or discomfort because of their race or ethnic background.

But several gaffes from Republican legislators — Sen. Scott Baldwin said educators in teaching about Marxism, Nazism and fascism, for example —��and pressure from advocacy groups ensured its ��

Those same activists are already pushing for the NAACP’s success. 

Brandon Brown, CEO of The Mind Trust, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit that has helped launch dozens of new schools in the city, including many charters, is hopeful about the plan’s prospects. He said there is a growing acknowledgment from critical stakeholders that racial achievement gaps are unacceptable. 

“The NAACP has gotten a wide variety of audiences with state-level leadership who have been amenable to the data and strategies they laid out,” he said. 

The civil rights group is not yet collaborating with specific legislators to further its agenda. But it does have a list of priorities it hopes to achieve: It seeks full-day kindergarten — right now, children are not required to attend school until age 7 — and quality preschool for all, a revised school funding formula focused on equity, the creation of a legislative Department of Education equity officer and funding for “grow-your-own” school programs designed to recruit and retain Black teachers. 

“Each of these legislative items require the advocacy efforts of all of the voting citizens of Indiana and especially those organizations that lobby and have connections with legislators,” Craig said. 

Been here before

But some of what the NAACP proposes mirrors what was already agreed to by the state as part of its . Unfortunately, Indiana has struggled with the benchmarks established through the Obama-era directive. 

Indiana’s ESSA plan was first implemented in the 2017-18 school year and pledged to “ in English/language arts and mathematics for all student groups by 50 percent by 2023 for high school and by 2026 for elementary and middle school.” But the state couldn’t meet the commitment — COVID alone marked a major setback — and has since . 

“It’s one thing to have it in the law,” said Mark A. Russell, director of education and family services for the Indianapolis Urban League, speaking of ESSA. “It’s another to have it enforced. The patterns that are so prevalent for Black students have continued unabated. In fact, they have worsened since ESSA was first adopted.”

And it’s not the only time the state has failed to live up to a prior pledge. Indiana passed a in 2004 that was supposed to better prepare teachers for the classroom. But, so far, it has not materialized, activists say. 

“We are still trying to make sure it was being enacted,” said Gwendolyn J. Kelley, NAACP Education Committee member and the report’s lead editor. “It was as if a law was passed and put on the shelf and no one was monitoring it.”

But even more than monitoring existing laws or adding new ones, Kelley and other NAACP leaders face an even tougher battle: ending the state’s tradition of failing to recognize Black students’ talent.

“The whole idea of high expectations for children is key,” Kelley said. “When people’s mindsets change, they will implement all of the strategies we have in place.”

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.

Late Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction in a suit challenging the employer portion of Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act, suspending enforcement of the law in the workplace. The Obama-nominated judge wrote in his Honeyfund v. DeSantis : 

“In the popular television series Stranger Things, the ‘upside down’ describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world. Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down. Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.”

A separate lawsuit filed Thursday morning challenges the portion of the law that applies to colleges and universities.

A federal lawsuit filed Thursday charges that a Florida law designed to “fight back against woke indoctrination” by limiting classroom discussions of race and gender violates the constitutional free speech rights of college students and professors.

Florida’s Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees (Stop W.O.K.E.) Act took effect July 1. It prohibits workplaces and schools from requiring training or instruction that may make some people feel they bear “personal responsibility” for historic wrongdoings because of their race, gender or national origin.

But Jerry Edwards, staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida, one of the legal organizations behind the case, said the law unconstitutionally censors the free expression of higher education students and educators.

“The Stop W.O.K.E. Act is a shameful result of propaganda and fearmongering,” he said in a statement. “A free state does not seek to curtail the inalienable right to free expression in its college and university classrooms.”

The Florida Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Florida is one of 17 states that have sought to restrict how educators cover topics related to race and gender, according to a . 

However, it’s the only state that applies its censorship law to higher education, said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program.

“There is a longstanding history in the Supreme Court and courts across our country of recognizing the freedom of professors, lecturers and educators in higher education to determine what to teach and how to teach it,” she told The 74. 

Seven Florida professors and one undergraduate are named as plaintiffs, represented by the national ACLU, ACLU of Florida, NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the law firm of Ballard Spahr. The suit names the state university system’s board of governors and several other officials as defendants. It requests an injunction seeking an immediate halt to enforcement of the bill in colleges and universities.

Plaintiff Russell Almond is an associate professor teaching statistics at Florida State University and covers how to use race as a variable in empirical research. Provisions in the Stop W.O.K.E. Act that prohibit educators from presenting “colorblind” ideologies as racist put his teachings in jeopardy, the lawsuit charges.

Another professor, Dana Thompson Dorsey, will teach a course in “Critical Race Studies: Research, Policy and Praxis” at the University of South Florida this school year. She fears that explaining how racism is embedded in American institutions — a central aspect of the scholarly framework — could put her in violation of the law. While the Sunshine State does not explicitly ban Critical Race Theory, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office has said the law is intended to .

“In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida,” DeSantis said after he signed the bill into law in April.

The act forces many educators to present foundational principles of their disciplines in a “false light,” presenting them as “disputed when it’s honestly not,” said Watson. 

Plaintiff Johana Dauphin, a senior at Florida State University, worries that she will be ill prepared for graduate school if the law interferes with her professors’ ability to convey key understandings that students in other states receive.

“I fear that this law will cause my professors to avoid discussing race and gender altogether, which will result in my perspective and lived experience as a Black, female student being effectively minimized and erased in the classroom,” said Dauphin. “As a student, I deserve to see myself and the issues that impact me — including issues around race and gender — reflected in my classroom discussions.”

Thursday’s filing marks the third lawsuit the ACLU has brought against a statewide censorship law. Similar cases in Oklahoma and have yet to be decided.

A previous legal challenge seeking to prevent the Stop W.O.K.E. Act from taking effect was dismissed by a federal judge in June. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker clarified in a 23-page order that he was not “determining whether the challenged regulations are constitutional, morally correct or good policy.” Rather, the four plaintiffs — two professors, a student and a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant — .

Other lawsuits challenging the Florida law remain undecided. At an early August hearing, Walker appeared to arguments leveled against the state by several businesses, including a Ben & Jerry’s franchise. The federal judge emphasized the vagueness of a particular section that labels training discriminatory if it causes an employee to believe a person of “one race, color, sex, or national origin cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, color, sex or national origin.”

“Apparently, I’m a person of below-average intelligence, because I have no idea what that means,” said Walker.

John Ohlendorf, an attorney representing the state, defended the provisions: “The state of Florida has a compelling interest in preventing employers from forcing employees to listen to speech that suggests one race is inherently superior to another.”

The case brought Thursday is “framed differently” than prior challenges, Watson said. It has yet to be assigned, but it’s possible Walker could be the one to review it. Should that happen, the ACLU hopes for a speedy ruling, as he has moved in a matter of weeks on previous decisions around the bill. 

“We’re confident the Stop W.O.K.E. Act unconstitutionally infringes upon academic freedom and students’ right to learn,” said Watson. “I’m not able to comment predicting what the court may say.”