In the immediate wake of this morning's decisions, school districts around the country are understandably concerned about their future ability to design, or continue to implement, plans to provide all of their students with an integrated education. An article in the Cincinnati Enquirer illustrates the worries of many communities: "Cincinnati Public Schools uses race as one of several factors in assigning students to its magnet schools, elementary schools that use specialized styles of education such as Montessori or Paidiea methods, or focus on particular subjects such as foreign languages." Given the reversal of the Seattle and Louisville plans today, what does the future hold for districts like Cincinnati?
It is important for these districts to realize that there is no need to be overly hasty in responding to these decisions, nor is there need to despair entirely. Certainly, the Court's dismantling programs that were the result of two communities' hard work and commitment to equal opportunity is a disappointment. But today's rulings were not a complete loss for those committed to fighting segregation and racial isolation in schools. A majority of the Court did recognize the importance of racial diversity in education, and found the pursuit of such diversity to be a compelling governmental interest. Although the particular combination of strategic elements in the Seattle and Louisville plans were found to be unconstitutional, five justices agreed that race can be used as a component of school integration efforts. Some options still available to schools were delineated by Justice Kennedy (in addition to several race-neutral strategies, which a majority of the court found to be unaffected by today's decision), and in the coming days and weeks, communities, local governments, and civil rights experts should take their time in working together to find effective, permissible plans to implement for their students.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Where do we go from here?
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
News Roundup: The Value of Integration
Two recent stories in the news illustrate what's at stake in the Seattle and Louisville cases.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch recently reported that 16 school districts involved in a voluntary student transfer program have unanimously voted to extend the program for five years. Under the St. Louis program, over 8000 African American students from St. Louis attend school in the surrounding counties, and hundreds of white students from the counties attend magnet schools in the city. After reauthorizing the program, one superintendant hailed the program as a "very special thing."
Democratic Presidential candidate former Senator John Edwards also released a statement highlighting the importance of diversity in America's schools. Edwards stated, “On top of the damage the Court has already done this term, the decision expected tomorrow in the school diversity cases could set back the cause of ensuring that every child has an equal chance to succeed. As someone who grew up in the segregated South, it hurts me to say that more than 50 years after the Brown decision, we still have two school systems - one for people who live in the right neighborhoods and one for everyone else. We used to believe the Constitution required school desegregation, but now this Court is on the verge of making the radical decision that the Constitution prevents elected school boards from voluntarily desegregating schools.”
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
California school system also at risk
In the Los Angeles Times, Charlotte Hildebrand reminds us that the Supremes aren't the only ones pondering the future of voluntary desegregation plans. Read about the legal challenges to LAUSD's magnet school program here.
And a progressive desegregation decision of a different sort was rendered by the Huntington Beach Fourth of July parade board.
Not Integrated Enough: New York City Schools
Yesterday, in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Seattle and Louisville cases, the New York Post’s headline story, “NOT WHITE ENOUGH,” described an eleven year old student denied entry from IS 239, Mark Twain School. The article stated that the student would have been admitted to the magnet school but for “racial quotas established in 1974 by a federal judge who ordered the school’s desegregation” and attempted to connect the story to the Seattle and Louisville cases. The Post noted that “The U.S. Supreme Court currently is considering a case that could end racial quotas in schools nationwide, including Mark Twain.”
Despite the Post’s contentions, the history of integration in IS 239 is substantially different from Seattle and Louisville. IS 239 was ordered to integrate after District Court Judge Weinstein found both de facto and de jure segregation. Both Seattle and Louisville implemented voluntary programs to combat de facto segregation in districts where they was either no history of de jure segregation, or where de jure segregation had fully disappeared. Therefore, the Supreme Court’s decision in the Seattle and Louisville cases will have little or no bearing on the IS 239 court order. It is also clear that under the court order, IS 239 has become a relatively integrated school. The majority of schools in New York City, not under such orders, have become increasingly segregated over the past thirty years.
IS 239 was ordered to desegregate by federal court order in 1972. In the ten years preceding the order, white enrollment at the Mark Twain School had dropped from 82% to only 18% of the total enrollment. The judge in the Mark Twain case, Hart v. Community School Board of Brooklyn, N.Y. Sch. D #21, attributed this change to both housing patterns and series of rezoning and school assignment decisions which had the “the natural and foreseeable consequence of decreasing the white student enrollment at Mark Twain.”
In order to counteract this combination of de jure and de facto segregation at IS 239, the court directed the involved parties to develop plans which would insure that the racial balance at Mark Twain remained within 10 percentage points of the district wide average. Two years later, the court accepted the plan proposed by the school board, under which the board would revise its school assignment policies to ensure a uniform racial balance throughout the district and establish IS 239 as a magnet school.
Thirty years after the court order in Hart, racial diversity at IS 239 has increased and remains constant. According to statistics published by the New York State Department of Education, approximately 53% of the school’s eighth grade class is white, 25% Asian, 12% African American, and 11% Hispanic. The situation at IS 239 stands in sharp contrast to the rest of New York City Public Schools. According to Association of the Bar of the City of New York’s (ABCNY) amicus brief in the Seattle and Louisville cases, New York’s public schools are the sixth most segregated in the nation for African American students, and the third most segregated for both Hispanic and Asian students.
The New York City Public Schools have, for the most part, failed to end segregation and its students suffer as a result. Segregated schools, points out the ABCNY, are “institutions of concentrated disadvantage that systematically fail minority students.” According to the New York Court of Appeals, public schools with the highest percentage of minority children “have the least experienced, the most uncertified teachers, the lowest-salaried teachers, and the highest rates of teacher turnover.” Indeed the majority of New York City Public Schools illustrate “what a twenty-first century American city’s school system may look like, absent the ability to consider race” to avoid segregation in the public schools.
To learn more about the effects of segregation on New York City Public Schools, read
http://www.nycbar.org/pdf/report/NYCBAR_Amicus_Brief.pdf