Deeply-grooved roadblocks to racial equity in K-12 education — and ways to surmount them — were the focal point of a compelling, livestreamed Berkeley Conversations event with four experts on Monday. Prudence Carter, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, used key historical moments to show where she said opportunities to recalibrate a “continual cycle of accumulated disadvantage” went awry. She described why Black and Latinx veterans could not access the GI Bill as readily as their white counterparts after World War II, why integration was never fully realized after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and how the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act based achievement and attainment on test scores that correlate strongly with school districts’ wealth and income.  “We had some desegregation, but we never got to integration, which entails a fundamentally deeper level of inclusion, bringing groups away from the margins by centering their own political and economic realities,” Carter said. Christopher Edley Jr., a Berkeley Law professor and the school’s former dean, co-chaired the congressionally-chartered national Equity and Excellence Commission from 2011 to 2013. He noted that, given the current direction of federal courts, state constitutions provide a fertile area to assert educational equity rights. Citing a lack of oversight for failed policies, Edley said it is “an expression by the political bodies that they weren’t really serious about accountability,” and that lawyers must help hold accountable those responsible for effectively implementing “the promises made by statutes and regulations.”