I have written several times about the racial school assignment case the Supremes refused to review, the one from Lynn, Mass. (See here and here.) In fact, it surprised many observers (and pleased others, like me) when the Supremes decided to review this term the cases from Seattle and Louisville since the issues are almost identical and the Courts of Appeals in those two cases agreed with the Court of Appeals in the Lynn case, and all three supported the districts’ assignment policies. (Typically the Court takes cases where the Circuits disagree.)
Today the Boston Globe has an interesting, long article about the Lynn case. It begins as follows:
IN MARCH 1999, Samantha Comfort tried to enroll her daughter in kindergarten at Shoemaker Elementary, a school in a suburban neighborhood of Lynn, but was told there was no room for her child because she was white. Instead, Comfort was told to send her daughter to Sewell-Anderson, the school located in her own, more urban, neighborhood. Comfort herself had attended Sewell-Anderson, and had loved it. But the issue for this single, working mother of two was not simply a matter of school quality. Sewell-Anderson was closer to home, but farther from work, and Comfort could not make the school’s closing bell. Shoemaker, on the other hand, was around the corner from her day-care provider.
“What I was told, basically, was that my daughter couldn’t go to Shoemaker because she wasn’t the right color,” Comfort explained recently in a telephone interview from North Carolina, where she and her two children now live. Seven years later, she still bristles with anger when she talks about the incident.
Read the whole article, since I’m going to concentrate on something in it that wasn’t discussed.
Note well the following comments (emphasis added):
What Comfort learned was that Lynn was one of 22 districts in Massachusetts and hundreds across the country that had voluntarily adopted a student-assignment plan designed to promote racial diversity. For decades, Lynn children had been required to attend their neighborhood schools, but by the early 1980s, 13 of Lynn’s 17 elementary schools were predominantly white, while four inner-city schools remained 35 to 50 percent minority. In 1977, the Massachusetts Board of Education confronted Lynn about its racial imbalance, and the city began to take measures to address its problems….
….
When the Massachusetts attorney general’s office agreed to defend Lynn, the first thing its lawyers set out to do was paint a picture of the North Shore city’s schools before and after the adoption of its racial balance program.
The defendant school districts in the upcoming Seattle and Louisville cases will, citing Grutter, stress the importance of “diversity.” But those cases, like Lynn before them, have precious little to do with “diversity” and everything to do with simple racial balance, as I discussed here. As Charles Lane, in a moment of candor, wrote in the Washington Post:
At issue are programs in Louisville and Seattle, which seek to ensure that the student bodies of public schools reflect the cities’ ethnic composition.
And as I wrote in the post cited above:
If the Supreme Court agrees that these policies implement nothing more than naked racial balancing, the plaintiffs will almost surely win, for, at least in the past, the Court has emphasized time and again, as the U.S. Solicitor General’s brief makes abundantly clear, that “outright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.”
Re-read the rest of that post for more evidence that racial balancing is per se unconstitutional.
