The school bells are ringing again, and students are strolling into classrooms across the country.
But not everyone wants kids to go to well-funded, resourced, and caring environments. Some lawmakers are trying to gut public schools under new labels of “school choice”, “local control”, and “meritocracy”. Some are banning books instead of funding schools.
The struggle for education equity is not new. In the past, parents, students, and community leaders across the country risked their livelihoods, safety, and freedom to challenge legalized segregation. Every protest, every organizing meeting, every parent who refuses to settle for crumbs is part of a much bigger legacy.
Take Sylvia Mendez’s family, who in Mendez v Westminster (1946) challenged segregation in Mexican-American schools. This laid the groundwork for Brown v Board of Education (1954) and paved the way for the Little Rock Nine, who walked through angry crowds in 1957 to integrate their high school.
This history matters because it shows the blueprint. The struggle for desegregation teaches us that it was ordinary people, acting together, who forced extraordinary change. This included families organizing carpools when buses were blocked, parents showing up at school board meetings demanding change, communities fundraising to buy supplies when schools are underfunded, and neighbors standing guard to protect children walking into hostile buildings.
In recognizing and uplifting the past, we remember anything is possible. What comes next though, is imbedding a world where communities do not have to take these extreme actions for basic decency. When history repeats, we know we can win, but what happens if we stop historical harms altogether? When we achieve liberation – when we have shared prosperity, self-determination, and social protections – what does that mean for our schools?
How does our education system ideally look like? Do we have a computer in every classroom? Do we have a mental health professional in every classroom? Do we focus on skill-building and critical thinking, not rote memorization? Do we connect theory to practice in literature, not just science? When we start to ask and answer these questions together, we not only fight injustices, we build the future.
We can honor those who walked before us: Sylvia Mendez, the Little Rock Nine, and the countless unnamed students and families how bore the weight of systemic injustice to force open doors.
We can celebrate the parents still organizing against school closures in low-income neighborhoods, the teachers still forming coalitions to demand fair pay, and the students still leading walkouts to protest book bands and call for culturally relevant curricula.
If desegregation taught us anything, it’s that the system will not hand us justice. It never has. The fight for equity in education has always come from, and will always be from, collective courage, community organizing, and a stubborn refusal to back down.
Our fight for liberation in education will be from our collective dreaming of what’s next.
