[Guest post by DRJ]
Recent Supreme Court opinions have made it clear that public schools shouldn’t consider race and yet, in an ironic twist, many school districts still struggle under decades-old federal desegregation orders that require just that:
“Officials in Shelby County, Tenn., complain they’ll have to spend millions to satisfy a federal judge’s “arbitrary” desegregation order. It’ll mean busing minority students up to an hour away and replacing hundreds of white teachers with black ones, they say.
In Huntsville, Ala., under a similar court order, students can transfer from a school where they’re in the racial majority, but not the other way around.
And in the Tucson, Ariz., Unified School District, students could move from one school to another only if the change improved “the ethnic balance of the receiving school and (did) not further imbalance the ethnic makeup of the home school.”
But wait: Hasn’t the U.S. Supreme Court consistently moved away from using race as a factor in deciding where kids should go to school? Didn’t the high court recently put an exclamation point on that trend, ruling that two districts’ heavy reliance on race in student assignment policies violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection?
Yes, and yes. But there are still hundreds of districts across the country, from the Northeast to the Southwest, that operate under federal court desegregation orders—some more than four decades old.”
Not only does Ruth Bader Ginsburg realize there are inconsistencies in the Supreme Court’s recent opinions on race and its prior desegregation rulings, but (perhaps for the first and only time) I agree with her conclusion:
“The question of these districts came up this past year as the Supreme Court heard arguments involving voluntary diversity plans in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. In June, the court ruled that student assignment policies in those two districts relied too heavily on individual students’ races and, so, were unconstitutional. But in those two districts there were no orders to remedy past state-sponsored segregation.
On the other hand, districts operating under integration orders may set policies that explicitly consider race. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg acknowledged the “anomaly” of demanding that such districts work diligently toward racial integration, but once it’s achieved mandating that race be ignored.
“What’s constitutionally required one day gets constitutionally prohibited the next day,” she said. “That’s very odd.”
My town’s schools were put under a desegregation plan over 40 years ago and it was just released from that order in recent years. We successfully desegregated in one generation and that’s a good thing, but courts shouldn’t be in the business of running school districts for decades.
At this point, if desegregation hasn’t worked in some communities then it’s time to try something else.
– DRJ