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Friday, June 29, 2007

Juan Williams(!) has a good one today on the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision against racial quotas: Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education

...In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision? Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hypersegregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation.

Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?

His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards...

Powerline has analysis here. Some details are worth noting:

...in Seattle, Jill Kurfirst was unable to enroll her son Andy Meek in Ballard High School's special Biotechnology Career Academy because he is white. Andy suffered from certain learning disorders but had made good progress in middle school due to hands-on instruction. His mother and middle school teachers thought that the smaller biotechnology program provided his best hope for continued success. He was accepted into this competitive program but because the high school was more than 51 percent white, he lost out due to his race.

In Kentucky, Joshua McDonald was assigned to a kindergarten 10 miles from his house. His mother tried to have him transferred to a school nine miles closer. The school had space for him, but Joshua was not allowed to switch because of the "impact" his inclusion would have on the school's racial balance...

The only scary thing here is that the decision should have been so close. Wow. The NPR radio voice this morning sounded absolutely despondent. That made my day.

3 Comments

Quality Op-ED by Juan Williams. I have heard him speak on this a number of times on NPR. His book is worth checking out as well.

The op-ed by Williams gets to the heart of so much that is basic, he's to be applauded. And yet too, the evidence has been there for such a lengthy period of time now that what he articulates is more an acknowledgement than an insight; his op-ed serves to blow away the smoke and fog created by some popular illusions and long sustained by an array of ideological fundamentalists.

Today's civil rights struggle is the movement for school vouchers, charter schools and education reform. Mayor Corey Booker is fighting for this cause in Newark,NJ where the city schools are a disaster. Racial and economic fairness in education will depend upon activism on the state and local level to improve schools rather than any Supreme Court ruling.

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