Social Science Research and Educational Equity: Opportunities Seized and Lost in the Context of School Desegregation.

The 50th Anniversary of Brown provoked both celebration, and critical reassessment among social scientists and legal scholars. Legal experts re-examined the role of the courts, and the appropriateness of litigation as a strategy to obtain equality of educational opportunity (Joondeph, 1998). Similarly, academic reassessments of school desegregation have examined the role and adequacy of social science evidence in shaping educational policy, and, in informing the judicial process on matters of educational equity (Wells, Holme, Revilla, & Atanda, 2004; Welner, 2006). The academic analyses also reveal mixed assessments of the effectiveness of Brown in achieving educational equity, and of the role of social science evidence in furthering that cause. Whatever arguments are advanced, it is undeniable that the Brown decision had a tremendous impact on the education of African American and other minority student populations. Early proponents of school desegregation anticipated that school integration would, for African American students, result in equitable access to the full benefits of schooling. As Wells (2002) recently noted, in Brown, the plaintiff's emphasis was on the negative effects of not only the resource inequalities experienced in segregated schools, but also on students' exclusion from important social networks. Ironically, early social science research on school desegregation was not grounded in the same set of understandings that guided the plaintiffs and the Court (Clark, 1988; Wells, 2002). This paper examines why this occurred and analyzes the apparent disconnect between the problem of segregation, the aims of Brown, and the subsequent research on school desegregation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]