Educational Stratification

Between-School Stratification

Between-school stratification has roots in the late 1880s with the emergence of public schooling where racial groups including African Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and Asians were not afforded the same educational opportunities as most White people. As a result, most non-White children were not allowed to attend schools with White peers. Separate schools were created throughout the United States and its territories to support White supremacy and reinforce the low social status of all others. During enslavement, African Americans in the South were denied formal and informal schooling, and after Reconstruction, they were not allowed to attend schools with White children. Instead, with limited public support and unequal funding, separate schools were created for African American children, establishing unequal educational systems.

Mexican Americans and Asian Americans during this time were also often excluded from attending schools with White children in the United States. During the late 1880s, Chinese children were not allowed to attend public schools in northern California. When this practice was challenged in 1884 regarding Mamie Tape, a Chinese child who was born in United States, the California Superior Court ruled that this exclusion violated the equal protection clause of the [Page 436]Fourteenth Amendment. However, several school districts in the state, including San Francisco's, created separate Chinese primary schools after this judicial decision.

Native Americans were forcefully relocated from their indigenous land to communities west of the Mississippi, and they were subjected to separate schools including boarding schools that took children away from their communities so they would assimilate into White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.

For many years, federal and state laws supported separate schooling. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision upheld the practice of having separate passenger accommodations on railroads for African Americans and Whites. This case provided the legal precedent for “separate but equal” accommodations in all public institutions including schools. Despite the language used by the Plessy court, separate schools were inherently unequal. School segregation reflected a two-tier educational system where African American schools lacked the funding, school buildings, textbooks, and supplies-ensuring that most students were provided a poor education.

The fight against legalized segregation was pursued by Mexican Americans and African Americans. Mendez v. Westminster (1946) was a class action suit challenging school segregation for 5,000 Mexican American children in California. The U.S. District court decided that separate schools violated students' rights under the equal protection clause of the Constitution, but this case did not reverse the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The most prominent federal case to end school segregation was pursued by the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). That organization mounted a legal battle to end legalized segregation in all public institutions including schools throughout the early and mid-20th century, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. In 1955, the Supreme Court decided that segregated schooling was unconstitutional and ordered the dismantling of separate schools by race, allowing African Americans the right to attend schools with White children. This case was pivotal in promoting public school integration for all racial groups, especially in the South.

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