Attorney Cornell Brooks to be new leader of the NAACP

Cornell William Brooks, an attorney and minister from Northern Virginia, will lead the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization at a time when the NAACP is experiencing a resurgence in influence and recruitment but struggling with budget issues.

Brooks, whose appointment was announced Saturday, becomes the 18th person to oversee the Baltimore-based group, which includes more than 2,000 local units nationwide. As CEO, the 53-year-old Brooks follows Benjamin Jealous, whom many credit for helping to modernize the NAACP and return it to prominence.

Read more: Attorney Cornell Brooks to lead NAACP

Are charter schools adding to desegregation in the United States?

As the nation marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision Saturday, single-race classrooms are getting a fresh look from education researchers alarmed by what they see as a second segregated public school system piling atop the first.

About 5% of U.S. students attend charter schools, which began as a late 20th-century attempt by educators and entrepreneurs to create what they believed to be higher quality, more innovative alternatives to public schools.

With the Obama administration's blessing and start-up money behind it, charters are poised for further exponential growth. The problem with that, critics say, is that charter systems pay more attention to student achievement than to racial diversity when both are important.

Charter advocates counter by listing a number of limitations on their recruitment, including the facts that they typically draw from already-segregated traditional schools and that school choice means just that — parents don't have to pick them. At the same time, there's a new movement to open charter schools that emphasize both achievement and racial balance.

This week, ahead of Saturday's anniversary of the high court's 1954 ruling that forced integration of public schools, renowned UCLA desegregation researcher Gary Orfield released a report on the state of racial balance in U.S. schools. The segregation of Latino students has soared, the report finds, with black and Latino students most likely to share poor schools and white and Asian children more likely to share middle-class ones.

That's the fallout from the 2007 Supreme Court decision ending the practice of assigning students to schools based on race, and federal courts dropping oversight of school districts' desegregation plans, the report says. But Orfield insists charter schools should seek diversity — and states should enact laws that make them do so — by recruiting by socioeconomic status that often follows racial patterns. It's important because a half-century of research shows segregation robs children of opportunity, he says.

Read more: Charters add layer to ongoing Brown v. Board debate

Paulette Brown to Become the First Black Woman President of the American Bar Association

This August, Paulette Brown will become the first Black woman to serve as President of the American Bar Association(ABA). Brown will serve as president-elect for one year before taking over as president in August 2015.

A native of Baltimore, she attended Howard University with the intention of becoming a social worker, but later decided on studying law. After graduating from Howard, Brown received her law degree from the Seton Hall University School of Law, and has been practicing law since 1976. She is also a partner in a New Jersey law firm where she specializes in labor law, employment law and commercial litigation.

“When I first started going to court and so forth,” said Brown, “I had the usual experiences. ‘Are you the defendant? Are you the court reporter? Are you the plaintiff? No? Well then, who are you then?’ It never occurred to them that I could be the lawyer.

“Her ascension to the presidency just opens the door for so many African-American females to even believe that that is possible,” said Alicia Wilson, the fundraising committee co-chair for the Alliance of Black Women Attorneys of Maryland.

“She has broken down barriers and opened up doors and kept them open for a whole host of African-American women attorneys,” she added.

Brown said she believes that her selection by the ABA leadership as its next president carries with it a great responsibility. Though the term of ABA president only lasts one year, Brown said she is determined to set goals that she can produce tangible results within the term length of her position.

Read more: Paulette Brown to Become the First Black Woman President of the American Bar Association

Segregation gains ground 60 years after Brown v. Board of Ed.

Progress toward integrated classrooms has largely been rolled back since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision 60 years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Blacks are now seeing more school segregation than they have in decades, and more than half of Latino students are now attending schools that are majority Latino.

In New York, California and Texas, more than half of Latino students are enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more, the report found. In New York, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan, more than half of black students attend schools where 90 percent or more are minority.

Project co-director Gary Orfield, author of the “Brown at 60” report, said the changes are troubling because they show some minority students receive poorer educations than white students and Asian students, who tend to be in middle-class schools. The report urged, among other things, deeper research into housing segregation, which is a “fundamental cause of separate-and-unequal schooling.”

Although segregation is more prevalent in central cities of the largest metropolitan areas, it’s also in the suburbs. “Neighborhood schools, when we go back to them, as we have, produce middle-class schools for whites and Asians and segregated high-poverty schools for blacks and Latinos,” Orfield said.

Housing discrimination — stopping or discouraging minorities from moving to majority-white areas — also plays a role in school segregation and “that’s been a harder nut to crack,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which argued the Brown case in front of the Supreme Court.

Read more: Segregation gains ground 60 years after Brown v. Board of Ed.

Read the report: Brown at 60 Great Progress, a Long Retreat and an Uncertain Future

16-Year-Old Grace Bush Graduates From College Before High School

Grace Bush earned her degree in criminal justice, with honors, from Florida Atlantic University. The catch is that she had not even graduated high school yet! Congrats Grace!

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