Another Op-Ed in the Times about the Supreme Court Case?
What is up with the Times and their op-eds? This one by John Miller, one of the parents in the recent Supreme Court case, appeared in today's Times. This is the second one on this topic in 2 weeks. I'm thinking the parents in this case must be getting a lot of blowback from the outcome because why in the world is the Times pushing this? I'm guessing it's both blowback and an opening salvo to let the Board know they shouldn't try it again.
With Justice Kennedy's deciding vote (but his separate opinion), he left open the door to use of race in determining school assignment. His opinion said that he did not agree with the use as stated by the district and he laid out, vaguely, how it might be used. It is up to the District and the Board to decide, as they roll out the enrollment plan, what the tiebreakers might be. Do they dare try to use race again in a more tailored fashion (i.e. break out by every single race rather than the previous white versus non-white) or do they abandon it altogether and try income (but with the cautions found in my previous post of the NY Times article on its use elsewhere in the country)?
I could argue against each of Mr. Miller's points but I'll just choose one:
"The School Board plan not only didn't achieve diversity, but by labeling every student white or nonwhite, it did not recognize how truly racially diverse a city Seattle is."
He's right; Seattle is an incredibly diverse city....that lives in segregated neighborhoods (by history, by choice, by income, you name it). If you cut off any route to diversify the schools, you will have segregated schools. Mr. Miller claims that the racial differences without the use of the racial tiebreaker are minimal (define minimal) but, as I have stated before, I believe we are just on the tail end of the last of siblings whose older siblings were the original users of the tiebreaker. We'll see over the next couple of years.
I feel from our discussions on high school assignment that assignment trumps diversity in what people want. That is neither good or bad, it is just how it seems to line up. The one thing that can't work is the inequity of offerings at the high school level. Just as the parents in the court case didn't want to be "forced" to go to a school they didn't want, parents in the south end should not be given lame options to save money on transportation. You can't ask them to put sweat equity into building up a school if the district isn't going to put effort into the curriculum, principal, etc. I am going to have faith in Ms. Santorno when she says this is what the district will do.
With Justice Kennedy's deciding vote (but his separate opinion), he left open the door to use of race in determining school assignment. His opinion said that he did not agree with the use as stated by the district and he laid out, vaguely, how it might be used. It is up to the District and the Board to decide, as they roll out the enrollment plan, what the tiebreakers might be. Do they dare try to use race again in a more tailored fashion (i.e. break out by every single race rather than the previous white versus non-white) or do they abandon it altogether and try income (but with the cautions found in my previous post of the NY Times article on its use elsewhere in the country)?
I could argue against each of Mr. Miller's points but I'll just choose one:
"The School Board plan not only didn't achieve diversity, but by labeling every student white or nonwhite, it did not recognize how truly racially diverse a city Seattle is."
He's right; Seattle is an incredibly diverse city....that lives in segregated neighborhoods (by history, by choice, by income, you name it). If you cut off any route to diversify the schools, you will have segregated schools. Mr. Miller claims that the racial differences without the use of the racial tiebreaker are minimal (define minimal) but, as I have stated before, I believe we are just on the tail end of the last of siblings whose older siblings were the original users of the tiebreaker. We'll see over the next couple of years.
I feel from our discussions on high school assignment that assignment trumps diversity in what people want. That is neither good or bad, it is just how it seems to line up. The one thing that can't work is the inequity of offerings at the high school level. Just as the parents in the court case didn't want to be "forced" to go to a school they didn't want, parents in the south end should not be given lame options to save money on transportation. You can't ask them to put sweat equity into building up a school if the district isn't going to put effort into the curriculum, principal, etc. I am going to have faith in Ms. Santorno when she says this is what the district will do.
Comments
He wrote:
"The School Board rejected this proposal on several occasions and also rejected a proposal by the Seattle Urban League that included race as a factor in high-school assignments but lessened its importance when contrasted with neighborhoods and other factors. As one board member said of the Urban League plan, 'I chose not to read it. I'd rather play with my bass lunker fishing game.'"
That quote is from Michael Preston, the Director from District V before Mary Bass. Mr. Preston has not served on the Board for nearly six years, but Mr. Miller couldn't note that by writing "As one former board member said".
Maybe I'm paranoid, but the villian of this piece is clearly the School Board, but the school board Mr. Miller writes about has not served for at least four years.
Mr. Miller clearly is giving an exteremly altered version of history, leaving out that the SSD was under threat of court ordered desgregation efforts, and that the tie-breaker was a huge step back from aggresive measures like busing.
Reversals
by Nicholas Lemann
George W. Bush, whose father was often accused of being too cautious and incremental by conservatives, came into office six years ago with an ambition to remake nearly everything about American government. In some cases, like Social Security and immigration, he hasn’t been able to get the big changes he wanted. In others—Iraq, tax cuts, civil liberties, the environment, education—it seems clear that his successor, whoever it will be, will have to spend a good deal of time undoing what was supposed to have been Bush’s legacy. But the President has achieved one wholesale change that will likely endure for a generation: the construction of a distinctly right-wing Supreme Court.
Just before the end of the past term, the Court issued a decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, that signalled a complete departure from more than half a century of jurisprudence on race. The case is called Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, and it addresses a legal challenge to two city school systems—Seattle’s and Louisville’s—for consciously trying to achieve racial integration in assigning students to particular schools. Roberts, in his decision, is almost reverential toward the last major Supreme Court decision on race, which in 2003 upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s use of race as a factor in admissions. But the thrust of his argument—“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”—makes it impossible to imagine that he would have joined the majority in the Michigan case had he been on the Court at the time.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented in the Michigan case, wrote a concurring opinion in the Parents Involved decision that is far more confrontational than Roberts’s, and lays out once again his long-held view of race and the courts. We have a “color-blind Constitution,” he asserts, even though the Supreme Court refused to recognize this until its monumental, unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954. The essence of Brown, Thomas believes, is an absolute prohibition on taking race into account for any reason. “What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today,” he writes.
The Parents Involved decision—and, indeed, nearly the whole modern history of Supreme Court decision-making on race, including Brown—rests on one resonant passage in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which says, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” But, as a matter of history, the idea that the amendment was meant to make the country “color-blind” is wrong, and wrong in a way that is instructive for people thinking about American race relations today.
Within a few months of the end of the Civil War, most of the Southern state legislatures had reconvened and enacted “Black Codes” that returned blacks to a condition almost indistinguishable from slavery, and horrifying white-on-black violence had broken out across the region. The Fourteenth Amendment, proposed by Congress in 1866, was meant to insure the safety and the basic rights of the Southern states’ black residents. But in passing it Congress explicitly decided not to give African-Americans a federally guaranteed right to vote—that came an election cycle later, with the Fifteenth Amendment—and nobody thought that it would lead to integrated public schools or facilities. Black and white citizens sat in segregated galleries as they watched the members of Congress vote, and evidently the arrangement did not register as contradictory to the spirit of the amendment.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisNonetheless, the legislatures of all but one of the former Confederate states declined to ratify the amendment. Those of Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland voted against it. The amendment became law only because Congress put the Southern states under military rule and refused to end the occupation and reëstablish democracy until they voted for ratification. Even then it required the presence of the U.S. Army in the South to give the Fourteenth Amendment the force of law. As soon as the federal government stopped using troops as enforcers, in the mid-eighteen-seventies, the Southern states ignored the Fourteenth Amendment, and continued to do so for nearly a century. After Brown, many Southerners and conservatives argued that the amendment had nothing to do with integration, and that it was illegitimate, anyway, because of how it had been ratified.
By 1954, the country had begun to change its racial attitudes, and the Brown decision was able to read a new meaning—the absolute disapproval of segregated schools—into the Fourteenth Amendment. That decision, along with the civil-rights movement, pushed racial attitudes further along. By the seventies, white plaintiffs had begun filing lawsuits against widespread efforts to help blacks in education and employment, on the ground that these efforts discriminated against whites. The plaintiffs invariably cited the Fourteenth Amendment, too. That more than a century of litigation on race has centered on the meaning of a single passage in the Constitution should be taken as a sign that the passage doesn’t, and wasn’t intended to, contain a clear and perpetually useful instruction on how the country should conduct its affairs on racial matters. Justices Thomas and Stephen Breyer, who wrote the long dissent in the Parents Involved decision, argue for two clashing ideals: a “color-blind Constitution” and integration. Neither of these ideals has been more than briefly and episodically descriptive of reality, or has served, except momentarily, as the principle around which the politics of race was organized, because, alas, not many realms in American life have been either truly color-blind or truly integrated.
The Supreme Court, since it began hearing cases on busing and affirmative action in the seventies, has been cautious in its decisions on race—as a rule, the days of unanimous decisions are over—and other institutions in American society have followed its lead. As Breyer points out in his dissent in Parents Involved, the Seattle and Louisville plans that came before the Court were much less invasive than earlier attempts to achieve racial integration, via busing and other means, in those cities’ schools. The country has slowly ratcheted back a host of policies aimed at the twin goals of black advancement and racial harmony, but it has not abandoned them—and, until now, neither has the Court. In the legislative branch the Administration’s preference for simple, moralistic formulations is foundering. In the Supreme Court it is alive and well. The Court would do well to contemplate the landscape of the Administration’s wreckage before it considers any other radical solutions, and sweeps away an accumulated body of law and experience. ♦