Unbalanced

In Busing Without (For Now?) The Buses, I discussed the Supremes’ decision to review racial school assignment cases from Louisville and Seattle, even though it had recently (with O’Connor, without Roberts or Alito) refused to hear a similar appeal from Lynn, Mass. (discussed here).

Now comes the New York Times, with a long article yesterday, “Schools’ Efforts on Race Await Justices’ Ruling.” Those “efforts,” the article reports in raptuous detail, “take race into account” or “use race as a factor” in noble “efforts” to promote “racial balance.” And many of these “efforts” actually do involve buses.

The Jefferson County district in Louisville is one of the most thoroughly integrated urban school systems in the nation. That is partly because its boundaries include suburbs as well as Louisville’s urban core. Sixty percent of students are white, and 35 percent are black.

Its student assignment plan, which evolved from a court-ordered desegregation effort, keeps black enrollment in most schools in the range of 15 percent to 50 percent by encouraging, and in some cases obliging, white students to attend schools in black neighborhoods, and vice versa.

The Louisville lawsuit was brought by a white parent, Crystal Meredity.

She sued after the district denied her request to transfer her son Joshua from Young Elementary, in the West End, to Bloom Elementary, nearer her home. The district said the transfer would disrupt Young’s racial balance.

Judge John G. Heyburn II of Federal District Court ruled against Ms. Meredith in 2004, saying that the district had shown a “compelling interest” in maintaining integrated schools. A federal appeals court upheld that ruling, but the Supreme Court has now agreed to review the case.

Joshua, in short, was held hostage to the belief that his being allowed to transfer to the school of his (or his parents’) choice would deprive his current classmates of the benefit of being exposed to him.

Until recently it has been clear that the right to be free from discrimination based on race was a core constitutional value of the highest order. Now, however, that right is often subordinated to the amorphous desire for “diversity” or “racial balance.”

But exactly what are the boundaries of that “balance” that allegedly justified discrimination? In Louisville it is apparently a range of black students in all public schools of anywhere between 15% and 50%. That apparently means a school district could discriminate by race legitimately to achieve those numbers, but it could not if the discrimination resulted in a black presence of 14% or 51%. This makes no sense.

And what is the principle, what is the standard, that sets these statistical boundaries? This question, I think, is not theoretical or abstract. Consider:

In a survey carried out in 2000 by the University of Kentucky, 67 percent of parents said they believed that a school’s enrollment should reflect the overall racial diversity of the school district.

Does this mean, then, that a suburban district that is 94% white, 4% black, and 2% Hispanic would be justified in blocking any transfers in or out that would upset that balance? If Joshua’s hostage situation in Louisville is upheld, then it would be similarly legitimate to prevent a black kid in that white suburban district from transferring to a school with a “critical mass” of blacks because doing so would deprive the white (and the few Hispanic) students of their right to be exposed to him.

Do we really want to continue marching down this racial road? I hope not.

UPDATE

I somehow neglected to cite this excellent article on the racial assignment cases by Roger Clegg a couple of weeks ago. My mistake. If you missed it, too, go read it now.

Roger discusses a number of areas where “diversity” in K–12 education is even more problematical than in higher education, and notes that the use of race to accomplish it is even more blatant (and less “holistic”) than college admissions offices claim to use.

My own sense is that real diversity is nice but that the evidence of its educational value is thin, especially when skin color is the sole determinant of what is “diverse,” an offensive notion that never should have been given constitutional support.

UPDATE II [26 June]

For a conventional liberal spin on racial school assignment, see this article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution by Emory law professor Robert Schapiro.

Schapiro obviously believes, as do most liberals, that the “promise of Brown” is to require integration, not to eliminate segregation. Since racial integration, also known now as “diversity,” is the supreme value, it is legitimate to use racial discrimination to achieve it.

Thus Schapiro argues that the Court barring racial discrimination in the assignment of students would amount to

its abandonment of the Supreme Court’s historic commitment to racial equality. For federal courts now to interfere with local school boards’ efforts to promote racial integration would be to stand the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution on its head.

It would make a mockery of Grutter to say that the lessons of diversity apply only in college or graduate school. The value of diversity is too important not to be taught in childhood.

On the contrary, what stands the principle embodied in the Equal Protection Clause on its head is the argument that racial discrimination is a legitimate means to anything.

Assigning students to schools based on their race requires, as we have seen, holding some students hostage to their race in schools they would like to leave so that others can be exposed to them. The lesson this teaches is not “diversity” but that state-sponsored racial discrimination is legitimate.