Back to the basics

Can anyone explain, really, how putting kids on school buses for an hour or more instead of letting them attend their neighborhood schools has been good for education? The irony is that this has been done in the name of "diversity," when the actual goal has been to make each school mirror, as much as possible, the makeup of the larger community. What's diverse about schools all being the same? Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a couple of school diversity cases, and it has the education establishment in a panic:

The new cases "put on the table, in a very clear way, the question of how far society, how far government, should go in terms of trying to promote diversity in education in America," said Ellis Cose, the author of a study on affirmative action.

"The core issue of whether the government should be in the business of helping to promote diversity in some way in education is at the heart of all these cases," he said.

The Bush administration is siding with parents against the school districts, arguing the policies are an unconstitutional, albeit well-meaning, "racial balancing" without a compelling justification. "A well-intentioned quota is still a quota," the administration said in a brief submitted on the Kentucky case.

Civil rights advocates say a ruling that bars schools from taking race into account would deal a devastating blow to the promotion of diverse schools.

If the court issues a sweeping ruling against using race, "we will be witnessing a reversal of historic proportions," said Ted Shaw, president of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Foundation.

I don't know if we should expect a "reversal of historic proportions," but maybe we'll at least engage over a long-overdue debate on the dubious notion that diversity is a valuable component of education and the therefore bogus claim that government and society should move heaven and earth to achieve it. There are plenty of valuable experiments going on out there -- same-sex classes, same-race academies, online instruction, charters -- which should be judged solely on whether they get the job done. Can't we say by now that the diversity experiment has been a failure? Shouldn't it have been been demonstrating dramatic improvements in academics as well as an increase in people desegregating themselves in neighborhoods?

The diversity movement is a case study in good intentions and wishful thinking triumphing over common sense and a focus on primary goals. We get what we work at. We wanted diversity -- we got it. How about getting back to education? A side benefit might be the return of some neighborhoods, which were pushed into even further decline when the neighborhood school stopped being the glue that held them together.