Each year the ACLU of Maine teaches over 100 workshops to students, which gives us plenty of chances to cite both new and old decisions by the Supreme Court. Hypotheticals can be fun, but students routinely tell us that they enjoy hearing about real cases - and why wouldn’t they? Disputes that make it to the Supreme Court are often fascinating, and the big cases involving students tend to be particularly juicy and ripe for debate.

It’s usually not hard for us to get students excited when we cite a case like Morse vs. Frederick (more commonly known as “the Bong Hits For Jesus case”) or Bethel vs. Frasier (involving a student’s in-school speech that opened with “I know a man who is firm” and continued down from there). But oddly enough, the one case that doesn't immediately launch a debate is arguably the most important student case of all-time: Brown vs. Board of Education.

This past weekend marked the 60th anniversary of Brown, the landmark decision that struck down racial segregation in schools as unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. Perhaps it is a testament to how far we’ve come that students often react to the Court’s ruling with a somewhat bewildered look that is loosely translatable to “well, duh.” Unlike the student rights cases in the decades to follow, Brown is not a controversial decision by today’s standards and the famed line that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” is awfully hard to debate against.

But here’s the problem: Brown vs. Board of Education is not the historical footnote we might like to think it is. Without diminishing in any way the obvious importance of that ruling in 1954, we must recognize that in 2014 the issue at the core of Brown still persists: students of color still face unequal treatment at school, and in some cases, still face segregation.

Though the problems of racial discrimination today may be more subtle and less visible than they were 60 years ago, their effect is still undeniable. We talk a lot at the ACLU about the school-to-prison pipeline, a complex interaction of policies and practices that push students out of the educational system and into the criminal and juvenile justice systems. This pipeline is a problem for all students, but its effect on students of color is drastically worse. With black students facing suspension and expulsion at a rate three times higher than white students, can we really declare victory against “inherently unequal” education?

The ACLU has been commemorating the 60th anniversary of Brown in a number of different ways this week, and we encourage you to check out our resource page at ACLU.org for much more analysis of how far we’ve come and how far we have left to go. You’ll find a timeline of related events, a collection of stories and reactions, and a great panel discussion featuring some of the ACLU’s top legal minds explaining why Brown is still so relevant to young people today.

If we reduce the Supreme Court’s unanimous holding in Brown to one sentence, it’s a rather cut-and-dry case about segregated schools being bad. But if we look deeper, if we read more about the case and the ruling, we quickly see that it’s about much more. It’s about equal treatment for all people, and it’s about a structure of discrimination that can affect young people in far more pervasive and enduring ways than the defenders of the status quo inevitably try to claim.

When we talk to students about equal protection under the law - which we frequently do – this is how we contextualize Brown vs. Board of Education. It’s not a hot-button topic like school searches or free speech. It doesn’t lend itself to the mock trials or attorney debates that we often use with other cases. But the fundamental question at the heart of Brown - whether students of color deserve the exact same treatment as everyone else - is very much a relevant one, even in 2014.

Whether we're young or old, that's a lesson we all should remember.