Posted on 12/04/2006 4:22:03 AM PST by theothercheek
The Supreme Court is considering oral arguments in two cases that pit school choice against school desegregation. The high court’s ruling, expected in Spring 2007, will determine whether a public school system can use a race-based formula to promote diversity at individual schools at the expense of individual students.
Or to put the issue in stark, black-and-white terms: Is the state’s interest in improving the quality of the education minority kids receive compelling enough to justify destroying the quality of life of white kids – and the quality of the education they receive?
On one side, are white parents in Louisville, KY, and Seattle, WA, who wanted their children to go to neighborhood schools, or to schools with academic or extra-curricular activities in which their children were interested.
On the other side, are school officials who think nothing of putting a child as young as five years old in a school so far from his home that his round-trip commute is three hours, and he has to be on the school bus at 5:35 am to get to school on time.
The Washington Post reports that in its brief, the Louisville school system argued that "the small harm done to a few students … is outweighed by the value of an integrated school system that ‘significantly advances the goal of teaching students how to participate in a democracy that has formed a single society out of many diverse people.’"
According to The Seattle Times, the Seattle school system used a similar argument to justify it’s "tie-breaker policy" which used race as a determining factor in school assignments: the practice enhanced their education by "introducing them to people with multiple backgrounds and points of view."
This is "the small harm" that was done to the children at the center of these cases:
† Being assigned to schools they did not want to attend because they are white is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
† Louisville’s desegregation policies were devised to ensure that the percentage of black students at most schools fell between 15 and 50 percent. Instead of attending kindergarten at a local school, Crystal Meredith’s son Joshua – then just 5-years old - was bused 90 minutes away.
† Jill Kurfirst’s son and Winnie Bachwitz’s daughter wanted to attend Seattle’s Ballard High School because of its Biotech Academy. They were instead assigned to an academically inferior school. The round-trip commute, which involved taking three city buses, would have meant being away from home from 5:30 am until at least 8 pm – and they would have had to be out on the streets in the dark twice a day waiting for those buses. Their parents chose to leave the Seattle school system rather than subject their children to this grueling – and potentially dangerous – commute.
Most adults would balk at a three-hour commute between work and home – particularly if they were forced to use mass transit. Yet many school systems require young children to navigate the complexities of city bus systems alone, and to travel to parts of town where nothing and no one is familiar.
In addition, commutes of two to three hours destroy both a child’s and family’s quality of life in several ways, and can adversely effect academic performance:
† Sitting down to dinner together as a family is out of the question – younger siblings cannot be expected to wait until 8 pm to eat.
† There’s little time left for homework - and no time for such after-school interests as private music lessons, which entail hours of practice to make progress.
† Forget a part-time job after school.
† Getting the 8 or 9 hours of sleep a night that experts say adolescents and teens need is impossible - lack of sleep has been linked to irritability, hyperactivity and poor scholastic performance.
The putative benefits these children receive in return for these considerable harms rest on several dubious pedagogic and social engineering assumptions:
† A school is the only place children interact with people of other races.
† White parents are incapable of teaching their children to "play well with others" when those others are nonwhite.
† Simply sharing a classroom with students of diverse backgrounds provides white students with a more valuable education than attending a school with an outstanding science or music program.
At present, roughly 400 of the 15,000 school districts nationwide are under court orders to desegregate. There are no statistics on how many school systems voluntarily use racial criteria to integrate schools by spreading white students evenly around.
NOTE: The original source includes links to relevant articles and Web sites.
I have always thought that, like so much of liberal social philosophy, there was something inherently racist about this proceeding. Is there some magical attribute in white skin that makes other, darker students improve by the mere proximity to it? Why is there a presupposition that black children will do better just because they are sitting next to white children in school?
I believe the courts will have to answer, "Well, actually, yes."
"No Child Left Behind" demands that black and white performance be equal. Clearly, no amount of further training is going to improve the one group much above its current level. So the only way to meet the Harrison Bergeron requirements is to try to lower the scores of the other with three hour commutes, increased stress, and disruption of their lives.
That arguement itself should get them laughed out of the courtroom. It is the public school that CAUSES people NOT to integrate into a single society. They are the ones who separate non-English speaking students into SEPARATE classes. They tell all non-white students to retain their culture, while all white students are taught their culture is the reason for all the problems, deaths, illnesses, greed and starvation throughout the world.
Regardless of wrong-headed teaching methods and test score results, public schools promote hatred and saparatism. This arguement by school boards is merely an effort to derail 'school choice'. take the monoply away from them, and RETAINING THE MONEY!
All the parents at the heart of these cases moved to other school districts. No court or governmental authority can prevent parents from voting with their feet - or home schooling their kids. As you know, home school kids outperform public school kids by leaps and bounds.
EXACTLY! Get your children out of the government schools!
Border's on child abuse.
*** Is the state’s interest in improving the quality of the education minority kids receive compelling enough to justify destroying the quality of life of white kids – and the quality of the education they receive?***
The question has already been answered and its been done for the last 25 years or so. Like you say ,the only way to make scores equal is to lower white scores. The Schools have been doing it for the last 25 years. Nothing to see here , lets move on.
You are right that this is about nothing but mixing the races. If it were about inferior inner city schools, then more spending or bonuses for good teachers to teach there would be proposed. This forced busing solution is saying that the black kids also need to sit next to white kids to get a good education. It is racist. What I really suspect however, is this is dreamed up as a way to punish whites.
This is the same forced busing that was slammed down our throat in the 70s and 80s, so call it what it is: Forced Busing. I suspected it was meant as a punitative measure then by the many black 'leaders' and Jesse Jackson types who couldn't resist using the phrase, "dragged them kicking and screaming" to describe forcing busing on a white community.
Doesn't that qualify as cruel and unusual punishment? geesh
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.