In the year 1954 The U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional and therefore black students could not be refused enrollment into any once "white segregated school". Under this decision the NAACP supported multiple cases of black students that wanted to attend segregated white schools. In many history courses today, the subject of desegregation is praised as the ultimate(best) effort made for black education, and that the Brown v. Board of Education decision worked to abolish racial oppression in these schools. However, the desegregation movement was not very successful in helping the education of black people, because the movement was driven by this idea that white academia (schooling) was always better than schools organized by black educators.

    It is true that most black segregated schools were underfunded, lacked good facilities, and school supplies due to the fact that these black schools only received government funding from black taxpayer dollars and black community members that donated to individual schools, but there were still some segregated black schools that were better academically than those white segregated schools in the same neighborhood, however that aspect alone did not make black students stop trying to attend these white segregated schools. In Vanessa Siddle Walker's book, Their Highest Potential, she examines the history of one school, CCHS, in Caswell County North Carolina, and finds that in the last years before it was closed to desegregation, it was the best school in the county, but some student's parents still insisted that they attend a segregated white school "so they could get adjusted to being with whites"(Walker, 1996, pg 172). Unfortunately to some parents this plan seemed best for their children and in many ways  didn't work because white students, school administrators, parents, white community members, etc. were still heavily against desegregation, and made black students go back to CCHS. Many of the students when they returned were not able to graduate because the white segregated school they transferred to didn't offer as many courses as CCHS and so they missed their requirements to grasuate. CCHS had a better curriculum as well as faculty that were invested in the success of their black students, but this did not stop the closing of this school which was the case for many black schools in the South (Walker, 1996, 174).

    Desegregation was used to enroll black students into segregated white high schools, trusting that their facilities, faculty, administration, school supplies, and curriculum would be better than segregated black schools, this notion lead to the closing of multiple black segregated schools, and the unemployment of black faculty, administration members and principals. The desegregation movement in many ways degraded the existence of black segregated schools, and categorized them as schools where black students were not given a proper education because they were being taught by other black people. When the desegregation movement became more popular, white people began to reinforce this idea by refusing to hire black faculty and administration for integrated schools that had better or the same credentials of those white faculty and administration. In David Cecelski's book, Along Freedom Road, he explains that even though many black schools closed, there were some that were transformed into integrated schools, but when this happened white administrators “would remove plaques or monuments that honored black cultural, political or educational leaders. They hid from public view trophy cases featuring black sports teams and academic honorees”(Cecelski, 1994, pg. 9) These newly integrated schools, worked to erase any accomplishments of the black students in these black segregated schools. As a result of these actions the what Walker calls“national memory” commemorates desegregation for creating black educational advancement and discredits black segregated schools from accomplishing anything. The “national memory” is the dominant narrative of what desegregation did to public schooling, and this national memory does not include the success of black segregated schools or integrated schools erasing their accomplishments to suggest that these schools were nothing before white people were integrated into them.

    The desegregation movement was executed in a way that implied that the academic capacity of black administrators, educators, and students were not to the potential of those in white segregated schools; and a result of this ideology, black students continue to suffer in their desegregated schools today. When schools were desegregated, black students were given the opportunity to transfer to white schools, however these schools did not hire black faculty, and administration members, that would have been committed to the education of black students, instead these students learned under a white administration and faculty that thought of  them as not as academically advanced as their white classmates. So much that black students such as Ruby Bridges (1960) and the students of Little Rock Nine(1957) were forced to take entrance exams in order to attend these schools.  This ideology of black academic inferiority, grounded in the desegregation movement is what now prevents black students from gaining the same educational opportunities as their white classmates. For example, in a national study conducted in 2016, theorists found “that black students were 54% less likely than their white classmates   to be placed into gifted learning programs” (Weir, 2016, pg 44). In Tyrone C. Howard’s book Why Race and Culture Matter, he explains that both black and latino students are disproportionately more likely to be placed in special education programs because they are “placed into ‘judgement categories’ that are determined less on clinical judgement and more on individuals subjective interpretations”(Howard, 2010, pg. 21) . The educational achievement of black students today, in desegregated schools are still seen as inferior to white students, and because of this notion that black students are deficient, they lack educational opportunities or even assistance from white faculty members in assumption that these students won’t do well anyway.