Color

• At the time of the 1954 ruling, 17 U.S. states had laws permitting or requiring racially segregated schools.
• With Brown, the justices overturned decades of legal precedent that kept Black Americans in separate and unequal schools.
• As a professor of education and demography at Penn State University, I research racial desegregation and inequality in K-12 schools.

Recent setbacks

• The decision followed the COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated racial inequalities in the U.S.
• Meanwhile, politicians and school boards have banned or removed books by authors of color from school libraries and restricted teaching about racism in U.S. history.
• I believe these legal setbacks amid the current political climate make finally realizing the full promise of Brown more urgent.

Resistance to Brown ruling

• The Brown vs. Board of Education decision did not immediately change the nation’s public schools, especially in the completely segregated South, where there was massive resistance to desegregation.
• Resistance was so fierce in the first decade after Brown that compliance with desegregation orders at times required federal troops to escort Black students to enroll in formerly all-white schools.

While only 2% of Southern Black K-12 students attended majority white schools in 1964 – 10 years after Brown – the number had grown to 33% by 1970. The South surpassed all other regions in desegregation progress for Black students.

Segregation persists

• At the time of Brown, about 90% of students were white and most other students were Black.
• Today, according to a 2022 federal report, 46% of public school students are white, 28% are Hispanic, 15% are Black, 6% Asian, 4% multiracial and 1% American Indian.
• Based on my analysis of 2021 federal education data, public schools in 22 states and Washington, D.C., served majorities of students of color.
• In 2021, approximately 60% of Black and Hispanic public school students attended schools where 75% or more of students were students of color.

Benefits of diversity

While Brown was an attempt to address the inequality that students experienced in segregated Black schools, the harms of segregation affect students of all races. Racially integrated schools are associated with reduced prejudice, enhanced critical thinking or simply building cross-racial friendships that teach children how to work effectively with others.
White students are the least exposed to students of other races and ethnicities, and therefore they often miss out on the benefits of diversity. Nearly half of white public school students attend a school in which white students are 75% or more of the student body.

Factors that exacerbate segregation

• How those boundaries are drawn or redrawn can exacerbate or alleviate school segregation.
• A high level of income and racial segregation also exists between neighboring school districts.
• And district secession – when schools leave an existing school district to form a new district – is linked to higher segregation.
• One study found that areas with more students enrolled in charter schools were associated with higher school segregation.

Potential solutions

• For the rest of the country, voluntary integration efforts are attempts to finally achieve the goals of the Brown decision.
• Finally, since reducing residential segregation could also reduce school segregation, some efforts have combined school desegregation and housing integration policies.

Erica Frankenberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Cranberries are a staple in U.S. households at Thanksgiving – but how did this bog dweller end up on holiday tables?
• But as a plant scientist, I’ve learned much about cranberries’ ancestry from their botany and genomics.

New on the plant breeding scene

• Humans have cultivated sorghum for some 5,500 years, corn for around 8,700 years and cotton for about 5,000 years.
• In contrast, cranberries were domesticated around 200 years ago – but people were eating the berries before that.
• Today, Wisconsin produces roughly 60% of the U.S. cranberry harvest, followed by Massachusetts, Oregon and New Jersey.

A flexible and adaptable plant

• Like roses, lilies and daffodils, cranberry flowers are hermaphroditic, which means they contain both male and female parts.
• The flower’s resemblance to the beak of a bird earned the cranberry its original name, the “craneberry.”

• They can also be propagated sexually, by planting seeds, or asexually, through rooting vine cuttings.
• This is important for growers because seed-based propagation allows for higher genetic diversity, which can translate to things like increased disease resistance or more pest tolerance.
• These pockets serve a biological role: They enable the berries to float down rivers and streams to disperse their seeds.

Reading cranberry DNA

• The cranberry is a diploid, which means that each cell contains one set of chromosomes from the maternal parent and one set from the paternal parent.
• It has 24 chromosomes, and its genome size is less than one-tenth that of the human genome.
• Insights like these help scientists better understand where potentially valuable genes might be located in the cranberry genome.
• Researchers are developing molecular markers – tools to determine where certain genes or sequences of interest reside within a genome – to help determine the best combinations of genes from different varieties of cranberry that can enhance desired traits.

Ripe at the right time

• Fresh cranberries are ready to harvest from mid-September through mid-November, so Thanksgiving falls within that perfect window for eating them.
• In recent decades, the cranberry industry has branched out into juices, snacks and other products in pursuit of year-round markets.

Serina DeSalvio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Usually it’s conditions like heat and drought that lead to this stress, and when they’re stressed, plants might not grow as large or produce as much.
• Similarly, improving the ability of plants to survive stress often results in plants that produce less because they put more energy into protection than into growth.
• I have been studying how the plant hormone ethylene regulates growth and stress responses in plants.

Ethylene is a plant hormone

• Ethylene was first discovered as a gaseous plant hormone over 100 years ago.
• Since then, research has shown that all land plants that have been studied make ethylene.

Ethylene as a way to ‘prime’ plants

• My lab focuses on how plants and bacteria sense ethylene and on how it interacts with other hormone pathways to regulate plant development.
• For this experiment, we’d exposed the seeds to ethylene gas for several days to see what effect this might have.
• They had larger leaves as well as longer and more complex root systems than plants that had not been exposed to ethylene.

• My colleagues and I wanted to know if diverse plant species showed growth stimulation when exposed to ethylene during seed germination.
• We tested the effects of short-term ethylene treatment on germinating tomato, cucumber, wheat and arugula seeds – all grew bigger.
• Studies have looked at how plants grow after priming at various ages and stages of development.

How does it work?

• One is that ethylene priming increases photosynthesis, the process plants use to make sugars from light.
• Correlating with the increase in photosynthesis is a large increase in carbohydrate levels throughout the plant.
• Understanding the mechanisms for this is more important than ever and could help improve crop production to feed the world’s population.

Brad Binder receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.