Did we just segregate our schools again?

[Dakatsu]

I just heard this, the supreme court reversed Brown v. Board of Education. I could be wrong, but wasn't that the case that said segregated schools violated the constitution???

I sure hope I read this wrong...

[Foil]

No, no, no. From what I understand, they declared that public schools can't try to maintain integration by looking specifically at students' race.

As a former inner-city school teacher, I'm curious to hear some of the different points of view on this, because the question to me is something like, \"Does the end (integrating our public schools), justify the means (using students' race as a determining factor to achieve the integration)?\"

[Duper]

here's a better question.

Why is integration even an ISSUE these days??

Good grief, I live in a town that has 52 lanuages to deal within the school system. Let's see someone try to segrigate THAT.

I saw the same thing on national news the other night Dak. I could not believe what I was hearing. .... why are we visiting this again??? (the nation that is, not us here)

[Foil]

Why is integration even an ISSUE these days??

Good grief, I live in a town that has 52 lanuages to deal within the school system.

You may not see it where you live, but believe me, it's still a huge issue in many places.

(Just for example, the school where I taught was over 99% African-American, whereas a school just about two miles away has very few African-Americans at all.)

[Lothar]

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

From the same article:

In both the Seattle and Louisville districts, school planners were reassigning kids from their neighborhood schools to new ones based on racial composition, even if it was involuntary. The schools argued that the diversity test established by 2003's Grutter v. Bollinger decision allowed them to sort in this way--i.e., that their programs yielded educational and social benefits.

Chief Justice Roberts argued that these efforts were invalid because the districts "have not carried their heavy burden of showing that the interest they seek to achieve justifies the extreme measures they have chosen--discriminating among individual students based on race." Grutter said schools must "narrowly tailor" programs to serve a "compelling interest" based on a "highly individualized, holistic review."

The schools in this case were using "a binary conception of race" that recognized only white or black. As for the Brown precedent, that ruling said it is unconstitutional to deny students opportunities based on government-enforced racial segregation. The segregation here was concocted by the education bureaucrats themselves.

The talking heads will say Brown v Board was "reversed" because they like stirring up trouble against their political enemies, and because they consider racial desegregation a moral imperative -- they read Brown v Board to say "you must FORCE kids to be desegregated."

In reality, the case didn't REVERSE Brown v Board of Education. The case UPHELD it, as well as upholding Grutter (which was only a few years ago.) Brown v Board said that it was illegal for the government to force schools to be segregated, thereby denying certain students certain opportunities. This case said it's also illegal for the government to force DEsegregation based on race, which also denies certain students certain opportunities. Better stated, the government can't force desegregation without meeting the standards set forth in the Grutter case (ie, a narrowly-tailored program that serves a compelling interest.) So there may be some school districts in which racial desegregation is still legal, just not in the form it took in Seattle and Louisville.

When I was in elementary school in Denver, our district sent white kids to schools in black neighborhoods, and vice versa, just to expose us to kids with different skin colors. They didn't seem to care that:

1) This turned my 5-minute walk to school into a 45-minute bus ride, costing me an hour and 20 minutes I could've spent with my family every day. In other words, it imposed a heavy burden on students.

2) The school 5 minutes from my house had almost as many hispanics as whites. I was already exposed to a fair bit of racial diversity, just not the particular white-black diversity they were looking for. In other words, while it probably had some benefit, the benefit was slight.

That school district did away with the forced desegregation policy about 15 years ago. I think my younger siblings are better off for it. (And it's not like they go through life never seeing black people. There are some black families in our church, with lots of kids who are about the same ages as my siblings.)

I think Grutter sets forth a good precedent. If there's a compelling reason to do some sort of very limited racial whatever, OK, go for it. Maybe in the schools Foil was talking about, some of the white kids and some of the black kids could trade schools for 2 years. It would be a fairly limited burden, could vastly benefit the kids in those two particular schools, and could possibly be tailored narrowly enough to work.