The media soon left, and Alex went back to the same underfunded school. “The poor people have lost again, not only in Texas but in the United States, because we definitely need changes in the educational system,” Demetrio Rodriguez told one of the reporters that Alex recalls descending on their home. The racist notion that children in poverty could not benefit from additional or even equal resources may well have influenced the court’s decision. A New York Times news article from 1970 included this startling line: “In the case of a slum child,” it read, citing supposedly cutting-edge research, “his chances of learning to read were quite limited, even though large amounts of money might be devoted to his education.”įifty years ago this year, the Supreme Court cited some of that same research to rule against the Rodriguez family. This idea was spreading, appearing in academic journals and publications like the Atlantic and the Washington Post. Maybe - most insidiously - poor children of color weren’t likely to succeed in school no matter how well-funded their schools. In fact, maybe schools weren’t actually a key factor in what students learned.

Board of Education of the 1970s,” as a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal put it.īut as the case wound its way through federal court, a nascent counter-idea was blossoming: Maybe, an influential cadre of social scientists claimed, it didn’t matter how much money schools spent.

Civil rights groups were hoping - and some reporters expecting - it to be the “ Brown vs. The lawsuit, filed by Rodriguez and a number of other parents, remarkably, had reached the U.S. Three or four students shared one textbook. Alex recalls the third floor of his elementary school being condemned when it rained, water would pour down the stairs.

In 1968, his father, Demetrio, had sued the state of Texas for underfunding his son’s school district, which was predominantly made up of low-income and Mexican American families. In a way, the reporters were there because of him.

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