The notion that public schools are a powerful engine of social reform is central to the ideologies of compensatory education and racially balanced schools as means for achieving integration. Today, all questions of property, income, and occupational distribution are seen to be answered by increased access to meritocratic competition. (DE)

Because of changing concepts of equal and effective education and challenges to traditional assumptions of the desirability of integration and racial mixing, there is now much uncertainty as to the meaning of the Brown decision, especially in Northern cities. (EH)