East Los Angeles Course Examines Educational Inequality
Is education now on "equal terms" as called for in the landmark 1954 Brown Vs. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision ending school segregation? This spring, students in Jorge Lopez's "Youth and Justice" course at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles used the Facing History approach and resources to explore this and other questions about educational equality-looking at examples from history and their own school today. Roosevelt High School, the second largest high school in the United States, is now nearly 99% Latino. In the years before the formal end to segregation it had a much more diverse student body. For example in 1930s, the school had a Japanese American male student body president, and an African American female vice-president.
In collaboration with UCLA's Institute for Democracy Education and Access (IDEA), and its Teaching to Change L.A Initiative, Lopez developed a course centered around the struggle leading up to and the legacies of the Brown Vs. Board of Education decision which ended school segregation. Facing History program staff Eftihia Danellis and Alan Stoskopf worked with Lopez to develop a Facing History unit, which provided students with the necessary vocabulary and historical context for this study. This unit on eugenics included readings from Facing History's resource book Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement that explains the roots of racism in the United States, and how this effected educational policies in the U.S.
One reading from Race and Membership that resonated with the students was about the experience of Malcolm Little. In the reading, young Malcolm Little's teacher advised him not to aspire to be a lawyer-because that was not a realistic goal for an African American. (The teacher used a racial slur.) Malcolm later said, " ...but I realized that whatever I wasn't, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become what I wanted to be."
