Out of balance

This has huge implications for Fort Wayne, or at least it should:

In a decision of sweeping importance to educators, parents and schoolchildren across the country, the Supreme Court today sharply limited the ability of school districts to manage the racial makeup of the student bodies in their schools.

The court voted, 5 to 4, to reject diversity plans from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., declaring that the districts had failed to meet “their heavy burden” of justifying “the extreme means they have chosen — discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments,” as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court.

In response to a lawsuit, Fort Wayne more or less dismantled its school system and rebuilt it, with racial balance of each school the primary goal. FWCS entered its racial-balance agreement in 1989; the agreement expired in 1997, but the school system still goes by it. Now? We'll see. This is what I wrote last June when the Supreme Court agreed to take the two cases:

"Schools strengthened by their diversity" is what supporters of the FWCS program usually say. But you usually hit what you aim at. If diversity or "racial balance" is the goal, that is what you will achieve; if you get any educational advances as a side benefit, all well and good, but they're certainly not guaranteed. Diversity is a societal goal, not an educational one (yes, yes, I know, they can overlap). I'd still like to see public schools primarily concerned with producing students who can read, write, do arithmetic and think clearly. I notice that supporters of all the heroic efforts to achieve racial balance seldom point to clear educational advantages. How can they, since public schools have been disintegrating for decades? Even if gains could be documented, which is doubtful, how does that balance against the elimination of the neighborhood school, which was an institution that held some challenged neighborhoods together?

In Brown vs. Board of Education, a black parent sued because his child was bused all over creation, just because of race, instead of being able to go to the school in the neighborhood. That was wrong. It has taken us more than 50 years to get it right that it is just as wrong to subject a white parent in one of thse cases to the same thing: a child bused all over creation instead of being able to go to the school next door, because of race.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. Amen. For more than 50 years, we have been trying to make schools compensate for the way we have chosen to live, in our racial enclaves. It has been a social experiment, not an educational one. Let's get back to just teaching our kids.