    
A_womon
Veteran Poster
Username: A_womon
Post Number: 1665
Registered: 05-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, July 05, 2007 - 04:53 am: | 
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Thursday, June 28, 2007
Supreme Court Greenlights School Resegregation
Bush's Supreme Court has done its duty to its conservative backers and taken a huge step in resegregating the public schools system.
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected school diversity plans that take account of students' race in two major public school districts but left the door open for using race in limited circumstances.
The decision in cases affecting schools in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle could imperil similar plans in hundreds of districts nationwide, and it further restricts how public school systems may attain racial diversity.
The court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court's judgment. The court's four liberal justices dissented.
The districts "failed to show that they considered methods other than explicit racial classifications to achieve their stated goals," Roberts said.
Yet Justice Anthony Kennedy would not go as far as the other four conservative justices, saying in a concurring opinion that race may be a component of school plans designed to achieve diversity.
The Supreme Court decision ushers along the already rapid resegregation of the public school system, and is sure to exacerbate growing inequality in education based on race and class.
The achievement gap between black and white children, which narrowed for three decades up until the late years of the 1980s—the period in which school segregation steadily decreased—started to widen once more in the early 1990s when the federal courts began the process of resegregation by dismantling the mandates of the Brown decision. From that point on, the gap continued to widen or remained essentially unchanged; and while recently there has been a modest narrowing of the gap in reading scores for fourth-grade children, the gap in secondary school remains as wide as ever.
Such issues are of little concern to the conservative Supreme Court, whose political allies are strengthed by gaps in education and income among minorities.
Though we usually think of segregation in racial and ethnic terms, it's important to also realize that the spreading segregation has a strong class component. When African-American and Latino students are segregated into schools where the majority of students are non-white, they are very likely to find themselves in schools where poverty is concentrated. This is of course not the case with segregated white students, whose majority-white schools almost always enroll high proportions of students from the middle class. This is a crucial difference, because concentrated poverty is linked to lower educational achievement. School level poverty is related to many variables that effect a school's overall chance at successfully educating students, including parent education levels, availability of advanced courses, teachers with credentials in the subject they are teaching, instability of enrollment, dropouts, untreated health problems, lower college-going rates and many other important factors. The nation's large program of compensatory education, Title I, has had great difficulty achieving gains in schools where poverty is highly concentrated. When school districts return to neighborhood schools, white students tend to sit next to middle class students but black and Latino students are likely to be next to impoverished students.
The above paragraph should illustrate how school resegregation, and the forthcoming consequences of this legal decision, will be catastrophic for white children from poorer families as well as the children of black and Latino families.
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