Fifty years ago the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board, declaring education to be the foundation of good citizenship and preparation for occupational success, rejected the doctrine of "separate but equal" as applied to schools. The Court extended the American ideal of common education for common citizenship to black school children. Although much progress has been made, black Americans in large metropolitan areas are again becoming isolated. In many urban districts, 80 percent of the students are minorities. The black-white academic achievement gap, which had narrowed significantly between 1954 and 1988, has widened. Outsourcing of manufacturing jobs has pushed many black families out of the middle class. Few young black students are acquiring the skills needed to compete for "knowledge work." Educational reforms that fail to address these problems cannot advance common citizenship. Neither "excellence" nor multicultural approaches, by themselves, reduce racial isolation or promote knowledge-work skills. More fundamentally, the "grammar" of schooling and curriculum makes it difficult for any school curriculum to prepare students for knowledge work. New "postcurricular" designs for teaching and learning that reduce racial and ethnic isolation and foster knowledge-work skills are thus urgently needed. The idea of the "networked common school" offers a framework for achieving these aims and advancing common citizenship through education.