Fifty years after the landmark Brown v. Board decision, America is still struggling with segregation in public education.

The black-white "achievement gap" continues to confound educators, parents, and students. Disproportionate educational funding, lack of parental involvement and pre-school preparation, poverty, lingering racism and even the negative effects of popular culture are pointed to as contributing causes.

To make matters worse, there now exists an alarming trend toward re-segregation of public schools along racial and economic lines, according to experts.

In America's largest cities, hundreds of neighborhoods and schools remain completely segregated by race. But even in schools that exhibit an ideal racial balance, students of color are disproportionately represented in lower level classes.

Today, the pioneering work begun by Kenneth and Mamie Clark continues at the Northside Clinic they founded in Harlem. Here, counselors, teachers and administrators work to neutralize the negative effects of neglect, poverty and racism that might otherwise condemn these children to leading unproductive lives.

There is a consensus among educators that early intervention and education for all children will enable more of them to compete and achieve in school later on. The costs of such early education, however, are often prohibitive, and federal funding for pre-school education has fallen drastically short of the mark.

Throughout the country, programs sponsored by organizations including the National Council of Community and Justice and the Study Circles Resource Center promote face-to-face dialogue between diverse community groups as pipeline for developing new plans of action to deal with some of these problems. But it is clear to many scholars that much more work needs to be done to truly equalize educational and social opportunity in this country.

Fifty years after the Brown decision and forty years after the passage of the Federal Civil Rights Act, mistrust and ignorance of cultural differences between Americans of varying races continue to plague our communities. Perhaps, it is what also prevents more of us from reaching our full potential.