The Opportunity Gap Project
The background of this CUNY Graduate Center project is explained in the opening of the research report, “Echoes of Brown: The Faultlines of Racial Justice and Public Education,” authored by Michelle Fine, Janice Bloom, April Burns, Lori Chajet, Monique Guishard, Tiffany Perkins-Munn, Yasser Payne, and Maria Elena Torre:
Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, U.S. society still finds itself struggling over the meaning and fulfillment of that landmark decision. Recently, the national discussion about educational equity has focused narrowly on the “achievement gap” between racial/ethnic groups. In 2001, a group of school districts in New York and New Jersey formed the Regional Minority Achievement Network to study this “gap.” At their invitation, we created a multigenerational, multi-site team of researchers–adult and youth, suburban and urban–to research broadly how urban and suburban teens perceive the processes and consequences of the gap. In January of 2002, the Opportunity Gap Project was born.
Read the complete version of the report here:
Echoes of Brown: The Faultlines of Racial Justice and Public Education