The Costs and Benefits of Framing Educational Opportunity as a Private Good

• In Event: 16.031 - The Pursuit of Equal Educational Opportunity for Students of Color and the Competing Purposes of Schooling in the United States: Colonial Times to Today

Abstract

Is equal educational opportunity a public or a private good? This paper explores this question in the case of the NAACP’s movement for desegregation (1949-1954). Labaree argues that “for the desegregation movement, schools were critically important as a mechanism of social opportunity, [however]…Brown depicted education as a private good, whose benefits go to the degree holder and not to society as a whole” (Labaree, 2011, p. 387). Drawing on Labaree’s work, I show how the NAACP movement’s quest for equal education ultimately sought social mobility for individual African Americans.
Data sources include legal briefs and primary and secondary accounts of the NAACP’s struggle for desegregation. In this paper, I first situate the NAACP desegregation cases in their historical context. I then examine the 1949 petition that served as a precursor to the Briggs v. Elliot court case. Finally, I dissect the discourse used to characterize segregation in both the Briggs v. Elliot and Brown v. Board cases.
The cases reveal that when marginalized groups seek access into public spaces to which they have been historically denied access, they tend to seek their interests as a private good. This is evident in the petition drafted by Harry Briggs and signed by over 100 citizens of Clarendon County. The plaintiffs sought access to a bus, equal educational facilities, and later equal access to education for African Americans by way of integration. The group began its struggle for justice by arguing, “Separate schools for African Americans were ‘inadequate and unhealthy,’ ‘overcrowded,’ and ‘dilapidated’” (“Petition of Harry Briggs et al. to,” 2016). Since African-Americans had been denied access to an equal education, which was, in theory, public, the group petitioned and litigated in order to have their own rights actualized.
Similarly, much of the language and strategies categorizing the proceedings in Brown v Board aimed at exposing the ills of segregation and the harm it brought upon the African American child rather than documenting the negative effects of segregation on whites or American society as a whole. The NAACP wanted access to education as a commodity in order to advance their race, though doing so would ultimately requiring changing the society’s power structure. In his concluding statements, Chief Justice Warren asked, “Does segregation…deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does” (Warren, 1954, p. 5). This strategy, of narrowly focusing on the oppressed group is one example of how marginalized populations, such as African-Americans during the desegregation movement, engaged with the competing purposes of education reform. They ultimately asserted their equal rights to pursue private aims of schooling.
This study highlights the tension between seeking education as a private good for the purpose of social mobility and the use of rhetoric that exclusively applies to the marginalized group to advance the cause. This type of rhetoric can ultimately have a detrimental impact when marginalized groups seek access into public spaces. This is the challenge disenfranchised groups encounter when forced to seek public goods as private interests.

Author

• Britney LeAnn Jones, University of Connecticut