The 1970s Education: Chronology

1970:     February 8 At a Birmingham rally, former Alabama governor George Wallace urges southern governors to defy federal education integration orders.

1970:     May 4 Four students are killed and eight wounded at Kent State University in Ohio by National Guard troops at a rally protesting the Vietnam War.

1971:      Census data shows the proportion of Americans with high-school diplomas has risen from 38 percent in the 1940s to 75 percent.

1971:      African Americans, who make up 11 percent of the total U.S. population, represent just 7 percent of the college population.

1971:     April 20 The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rules that busing to achieve racial balance is constitutional in cases where local officials permitted segregation to occur.

1972:     January 18 Sixteen African American protestors interrupt an examination in a Stanford University course taught by Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Shockley to object to his allegedly racist theories.

1972:     March 18 Twenty-nine men and women draw lots and begin living together in a University of Michigan housing unit to "break down some of the barriers between the sexes."

1972:     March 19 The U.S. Supreme Court rules that state colleges and universities cannot expel a student for campus distribution of material that administrators deem offensive.

1973:     April 4 The U.S. District Court in Atlanta orders a compromise school integration plan.

1973:     September 11 Eight hundred thousand students nationwide are unable to return to school because of teacher strikes.

1973:     November 13 The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare rejects college desegregation plans filed by state systems in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

1974:     January 17 The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare says racial discrimination still exists in the schools in Topeka, Kansas, the site of the landmark 1954 educational desegregation lawsuit Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

1974:     January 21 The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously that a San Francisco school district must provide English-language instruction for Chinese students.

1974:     June Federal judge Arthur Garrity rules that the Boston School Committee has deliberately segregated schools by race; he orders a plan exchanging students between white South Boston and black Roxbury school districts.

1974:     September 14 White mobs in Boston shout racist remarks to buses carrying African Americans to their schools. Violence ensues. A month later, Massachusetts governor Francis Sargent calls out the National Guard to restore order in South Boston.

1975:     January 5 The Educational Testing Service reports women with doctorates are discriminated against in matters of salary and promotions in higher education.

1975:     February 25 The U.S. Supreme Court rules that school-board members are liable for damages if students prove their rights were denied.

1976:     January 26 Court-ordered busing in Detroit begins without incident.

1976:     February 24 Federal judge Arthur Garrity imposes a 20 percent quota for black administrators in the Boston school system.

1977:     January 17 A Boston Schools Department report asserts the quality of public education has deteriorated since the start of busing.

1977:     April 19 The U.S. Supreme Court rules that school officials can spank students without violating their constitutional rights.

1978:     February 21 The U.S. Supreme Court leaves standing a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that the University of Missouri cannot refuse to recognize Gay Liberation, a student homosexual group, as an official campus organization.

1978:     April 7 New York City drops its 1977 plan of assigning teachers on the basis of race.

1978:     June 28 The U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of Allen Bakke, who was protesting as unconstitutional the special-admissions policy of the medical school at the University of California, Davis.

1979:     June 11 The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously that federally funded colleges do not have to admit all handicapped applicants nor make extensive modifications to accommodate them.

1979:     August 15 The Ann Arbor, Michigan, school board approves a program to teach "Black English" to all twenty-eight teachers at Martin Luther King Elementary.

1979:     September 10 Cleveland, Ohio, schools desegregate, capping off a six-year court battle.