To mark the 55th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling striking down the “separate but equal” doctrine around public education, Sam Chaltain of the Forum for Education and Democracy has written this piece for Politics Daily questioning how much has really changed since 1954.

We may have taken the legal steps towards parity in public education but we haven’t yet achieved anything like equality between the the educational opportunities we afford to children of priviledge versus those we afford to low-income and minority students:

In practice, integrated schools today remain as much of a dream now as they were 50 years ago, and the subject of segregation has all but disappeared from the national conversation about education reform. Worse still, many of the newest and most promising schools in our nation’s cities are actually increasing the racial stratification of young people and communities – not lessening it.