You want to have the
You want to have the cake or eat it?
Critical to note here is the spokesman for the Century Foundation says they're waiting for the Supreme Court to decide on "the explicit use of race in education," yet the plan they are protesting against does not use race as a factor.
What they are complaining about is (in their eyes) a disparate impact on white people. For the last few years, Black folks have been called "oversensitive" when we make similar complaints.
The current standard is, when lodging a civil rights complaint minorities must not only prove actual damage suffered but intent to cause those damages. My position here is the plaintiffs should be made adhere to the same standard.
From the NY Times
Boston School Plan Isn't Biased Against Whites, Judge Rules
By SARA RIMER
In the latest chapter in Boston's 30-year battle over school desegregation, a federal judge ruled yesterday that the city's school assignment plan did not discriminate against white students.
The judge, Richard G. Stearns, ruled that the plan, which reserves 50 percent of the seats in elementary and middle schools for children from outside the neighborhood, is constitutional.
The plan is intended to equalize educational opportunity in a city that still bears the vestiges of a segregated school system.
While the plan does not use race as a factor in assigning schools, it is intended to create diversity. Under the system, parents still have choices where their children will go, and, in fact, 80 percent got their first or second choice this school year. But some pupils were unable to attend their neighborhood schools.
School officials adopted the plan in 1999 in response to legal challenges to the district's use of race in school admissions. School districts nationwide are searching for ways to maintain diversity in the face of such challenges.
But a group of white parents filed suit, charging that by reducing the number of seats available to their children in their own neighborhoods, the school district was discriminating against them.
Frances S. Cohen, the lawyer for the Boston School Committee, praised Judge Stearns' ruling.
"This is a firm line that we can hold onto, that a race-neutral policy intended to promote parental choice and diversity is constitutionally permissible," Ms. Cohen said, noting that in the past two decades federal courts have increasingly ruled against the use of race in school assignments.
Ann Walsh, director of Boston's Children First, a nonprofit group that filed the suit on behalf of the parents, said the parents would appeal the ruling.
"We feel as if an opportunity has been lost here," Ms. Walsh said.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, an educational researcher at the Century Foundation, a public policy research organization, said the judge's ruling in Boston was not surprising.
"We're still waiting for the Supreme Court to decide the larger issue, which is whether the explicit use of race in education is constitutional," Mr. Kahlenberg said.
In the case involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court is expected to rule by the summer on the issue of using race in university admissions. The Michigan case, although it involves higher education, is expected to have ramifications in elementary, middle and high schools.
In his ruling, Judge Stearns noted that the white parents had won a victory when, in response to their lawsuit, Boston school officials voted to eliminate the use of race in school admissions for the 2000-2001 school year. Despite that vote, the parents claimed that parts of the old policy persisted in the new admissions plan.
Thirty years ago, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of Federal District Court found that Boston school officials had deliberately created a dual public school system, one that discriminated against black students. He ordered forced busing to desegregate. Violence erupted as white parents threw rocks at buses carrying black children to their neighborhood schools. Thousands of white students left the system and enrolled in parochial schools.
With bitterness still lingering over the forced busing, the white parents who filed the lawsuit before Judge Stearns were seeking a return to neighborhood schools. Judge Stearns noted in his ruling that one of the legacies of the old segregated system is that historically white neighborhoods still have a relatively high number of schools. Predominantly minority neighborhoods, like Roxbury and Mattapan, have the fewest schools. The lack of schools left minority students with few and sometimes no schools in their neighborhoods, while white students in some neighborhoods had as many as 10 schools from which to choose, Judge Stearns wrote in his ruling.
Boston is in many ways a very different city than it was 30 years ago. Back then, the public school students were 61 percent white, 32 percent black and 7 percent other. Today the students are 14 percent white, 29 percent Hispanic, 47 percent black and 9 percent Asian.
And school officials today emphasize their commitment to diversity and equal education. Testifying in the case before Judge Stearns, the Boston school superintendent, Thomas W. Payzant, said he was concerned that if the district returned to the old neighborhood school plan "we could backslide with respect to racial isolation and racial imbalance."
