At this point Pundits and analysts are still trying to figure out what the new Supreme Court decision on integration really means. In limiting racial decisions in schools, our justices have put some school administrators in a tailspin and involved many others in some serious head-scratching. What they want to know is "What does this decision mean for my school?"
Both decisions involve cases in which students were forced to attend certain schools because of their race for the purpose of maintaining racial balance. Their parents were suing for their children's right to attend school without race being a factor. The Supreme Court agreed that the Constitution guarantees equal rights to all children, and went on to rule that equal means equal: a child has the right to be who he is without reference to which race he happens to belong to.
So what does this mean in practical terms? The Supreme Court stated that school design cannot be crafted to manipulate student enrollment so as to attain racial balance. "Schools must be colorblind" is the message.
Does this mean that schools cannot do anything to achieve racial balance? Does it really mean "Forty years of progress undone in a single day" as some are saying? For any school system that has been relying on coercive measures such as school asignment based solely on race, there is little doubt that things will return to the way they once were: de facto segregation taking place in many schools. For schools using non-coercive measures, such as magnet programs, the message is also clear: these schools will see no threat so long as they are colorblind in their admissions process.
How this will affect practical issues such as African-American literacy remains to be seen. Commentators have been quick to point out that the original purpose of Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education was to attain the "equal" part of the "Separate but equal" doctrine. Now that this has been attained, so the thinking goes, we can safely resegregate.
There is a major problem with this sort of thinking, and anyone who hasn't caught onto it need only step into the classrooms of the inner city in any US metropolis. Do that, and you will see the problem: the schools we maintain for our poor children (and that's pretty much our children of color) are not like the schools we maintain for our middle- and upper-class children. Most of them just don't have the budget to hire the kind of superb teachers they need in order to address the huge and urgent needs these children have, let alone the money to repair their windows, air conditioners, and bathrooms. As for classroom supplies, what they get is whatever the teachers buy out of their own salaries. (I'm one of the lucky fiew. I do teach in an inner city school, but we have all sorts of wonderful programs to help our kids, programs that few inner city schools can afford. And since it's a magnet school, our teachers and class offerings are also fairly high-quality.) Te tax base of most inner-city schoos is made up of poor people, so they don't have the money to run a decent school operation.
The idea behind busing was simply to put middle-class students into the schools attended by children of color, the thinking being that once this happened the middle-class parents would see to it that their children got a quality education--and since their children were attending the schools of the poor, the poor would soon have the same high-quality education the rich had been getting all along. And though it didn't always work out as planned, I'd say that overall the result was a step in the right direction.
So will this set the clock back 40 years? Maybe. No Child Left Behind has demanded accountability. If in addition to this the Bush administration will put its money where its mouth is and give poor inner-city schools the money to do the job right, then the progress we've made will not go down the drain. But I'm not holding my breath.
Both decisions involve cases in which students were forced to attend certain schools because of their race for the purpose of maintaining racial balance. Their parents were suing for their children's right to attend school without race being a factor. The Supreme Court agreed that the Constitution guarantees equal rights to all children, and went on to rule that equal means equal: a child has the right to be who he is without reference to which race he happens to belong to.
So what does this mean in practical terms? The Supreme Court stated that school design cannot be crafted to manipulate student enrollment so as to attain racial balance. "Schools must be colorblind" is the message.
Does this mean that schools cannot do anything to achieve racial balance? Does it really mean "Forty years of progress undone in a single day" as some are saying? For any school system that has been relying on coercive measures such as school asignment based solely on race, there is little doubt that things will return to the way they once were: de facto segregation taking place in many schools. For schools using non-coercive measures, such as magnet programs, the message is also clear: these schools will see no threat so long as they are colorblind in their admissions process.
How this will affect practical issues such as African-American literacy remains to be seen. Commentators have been quick to point out that the original purpose of Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education was to attain the "equal" part of the "Separate but equal" doctrine. Now that this has been attained, so the thinking goes, we can safely resegregate.
There is a major problem with this sort of thinking, and anyone who hasn't caught onto it need only step into the classrooms of the inner city in any US metropolis. Do that, and you will see the problem: the schools we maintain for our poor children (and that's pretty much our children of color) are not like the schools we maintain for our middle- and upper-class children. Most of them just don't have the budget to hire the kind of superb teachers they need in order to address the huge and urgent needs these children have, let alone the money to repair their windows, air conditioners, and bathrooms. As for classroom supplies, what they get is whatever the teachers buy out of their own salaries. (I'm one of the lucky fiew. I do teach in an inner city school, but we have all sorts of wonderful programs to help our kids, programs that few inner city schools can afford. And since it's a magnet school, our teachers and class offerings are also fairly high-quality.) Te tax base of most inner-city schoos is made up of poor people, so they don't have the money to run a decent school operation.
The idea behind busing was simply to put middle-class students into the schools attended by children of color, the thinking being that once this happened the middle-class parents would see to it that their children got a quality education--and since their children were attending the schools of the poor, the poor would soon have the same high-quality education the rich had been getting all along. And though it didn't always work out as planned, I'd say that overall the result was a step in the right direction.
So will this set the clock back 40 years? Maybe. No Child Left Behind has demanded accountability. If in addition to this the Bush administration will put its money where its mouth is and give poor inner-city schools the money to do the job right, then the progress we've made will not go down the drain. But I'm not holding my breath.
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