Picking Through the Remnants of <em>Brown v. Board</em> to Realize the Ideal of Quality Public Education for All Children in the Post COVID-19 Era

Brown, above and beyond eliminating the “separate but equal” doctrine, presented many socio-legal principles that were abdicated or diluted during the government’s COVID-19 response. This Article will address several strands recognized throughout the opinion’s seventy-year history by the courts and legal commentators that were illuminated during this period. First, the pursuit of quality education remains elusive for people of color and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Second, public education continues to be an aspirational pathway to upward social mobility and building a democracy composed of educated citizens. Third, the anti-subordination construction, as opposed to the anti-classification interpretation, of the Fourteenth Amendment would have proven better suited to ensuring the educational progress of disadvantaged students, including those students who did not fall into an identifiable protected class. Fourth, the need for school districts with strained budgets to provide wraparound services in metropolitan and rural areas is analogous to the critique that Brown stopped short of taking a holistic approach to achieving quality public education. Desegregation in and of itself overlooked other contributing factors that negatively affected the goal of quality education. This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.