The start of this week saw the end of an extraordinary, ordinary life. Linda Brown, who was 75, sat at the center of one of the most consequential court cases in our nation's history. Brown vs. Board of Education not only upended the legal cover for state-sanctioned segregation in America, it also served as the foundation of a new promise of equality.

Unfortunately, today, more than 60 years after Brown was handed down in 1954, that promise is not yet fully realized in Dallas or the rest of the nation.

For Linda Brown, it all began with a desire to attend a school just a few blocks from her house at a time when schools in Topeka, Kan., were segregated according to race. Linda's father sued, and that case was eventually added to cases from Delaware, Washington, D.C., Virginia and South Carolina that had emerged from the NAACP's decades-long legal fight to dismantle segregation.

It's worth noting here — because of its relevance to our lives in Dallas today — that a significant portion of the NAACP's strategy was aimed at improving educational opportunities for students regardless of their race. A good education can change the trajectory of a person's life, so improving educational opportunities sits at the center of the struggle over civil rights, equal opportunity and improved quality of life for all Americans.

That struggle continues in our community, because segregation persists. When desegregation was enforced by law, white families fled. Today, 95 percentof students in DISD schools are minorities. White students still in the district are clustered in a handful of schools.

The result is a school system that is essentially segregated, where too many schools underperform — only 38 percent of DISD students hit the postsecondary readiness standard on state assessments — and where a student's ZIP code can, therefore, become a determining factor in his or her life success.

DISD wants to reverse this reality. It's working on innovative approaches, from merit pay to choice schools, that show encouraging signs of driving improvement.

Those successes, however, also highlight how far we still need to go to ensure every child has a quality education. Linda Brown's father sued to open up educational opportunities for all, and that is a legacy we need to still live up to.

Correction, 3:39 p.m. March 29, 2018: An earlier version of this editorial misidentified the subject of a photo as Linda Brown. The photo has been replaced.

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