UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Sixty years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision barred segregation in public schools and 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, schools are once again approaching levels of racial and economic segregation not seen since the late 1960s.
With that backdrop, the Penn State College of Education will host a conference on “Education and Civil Rights, Historical Legacies, Contemporary Strategies and Promise for the Future” on June 6 and 7 in the Lewis Katz Building on the University Park campus. Conference speakers, who include attorneys and a U.S. district judge as well as academics, will examine the country’s legacy of segregation and inequality, and how to ensure equity in public education in the future.
“Education, as many reformers have proclaimed, is the civil rights issue of our time,” said conference organizer Erica Frankenberg, an assistant professor of education at Penn State.
Lani Guinier, the Bennett Boskey professor of law at Harvard Law School, will be the keynote speaker on Friday evening, June 6.