Ruling: Little Rock School District Remains Under Desegregation Order

A ruling from a federal appeals panel upholds a lower court decision to keep the Little Rock School District under a federal desegregation order. However, the three appeals judge expressed concerns in their opinion that the school district may have been held to too strict a standard.

The panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at St. Louis agreed on Monday with a ruling in 2004 by U.S. District Judge William R. Wilson Junior in the long-running desegregation case.

Wilson ruled in 2004 that the Little Rock district did not successfully evaluate its' academic programs for how well they helped black students. Wilson was ruling on whether the district should be released from the desegregation monitoring it has faced since 1965.

The opinion questioned whether the district was being burdened with having to demonstrate its compliance to a point that goes beyond what should be required. But the three-judge panel upheld Wilson's ruling.

Wilson said the district must hire outside experts and design a program assessment process.

What a major power-grab the courts have undertaken. The LR School district has progressively grown worse over the decades the district has been under the court's supervision. Although the district has a few bright spots, the district as a whole is getting worse. instead of becoming more racially equal, the district is just growing more out of ballance - because of white flight. the schools have gotten so bad, that even minority families and students are moving out of the district.

What more does the court want? The schools in LR already draw the largest per-student revenue from the state by a huge margin- with the accompanying higest expendature per-student of any district in the state.

Magnet schools, incentive schools, special programs, and public invovlement have all let to the courts still not being satisfied.

The next-to-last paragraph says it all - the court could see that the burden of the courts is causing more problems than it is solving.... but they upheld the crazy ruling anyway.

So what's the solution???

I know first hand what it's like to be in a school district where kids are bused here and there and never get to go to their neighborhood school. If black parents really wanted their kids to go to a "better" school, then they have every right to move. Or better yet, make an effort to support their neighborhood school and bust butts if their kids are a disruption at school. This is just another big brother getting in the way and the whiners getting more handouts.

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