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Posted by Susan Hyde Jul 1, 2007 |
Last week’s Supreme Court 5-4 decision (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1) to disallow race as a factor in school integration has many pundits declaring that the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling has been reversed. Is this really so?
The 1954 ruling, which declared that schools could not use a “separate but equal“ philosophy to justify racial segregation in the schools, seems clear enough. However, the High Court’s recent decision, and,certainly, school board responses from across the nation reveal just how differently Brown v. Education has been interpreted by school boards across America during the past fifty-three years.
In question, it seems, is not whether races should be segregated – the court uniformly agrees that intentional segregation is unconstitutional. Instead, Supreme Court justices, and, indeed, the court of public opinion disagree on whether race should play any factor in public school enrollment.
In effect, the recent decision comes down on the side of color blind enrollment. That is, school districts may no longer use race to either integrate or segregate students. While proponents hail the decision as a move toward a truly racially neutral society, opponents worry that the ruling will create a kind of social segregation based on real estate values.The supporting Supreme Court opinion suggests that it is "illegitimate" to tailor "each district’s specific racial demographics, rather than to any pedagogic concept of the level of diversity needed to obtain the asserted educational benefits." On the dissenting side, Justice Breyer points out that "de facto segregation (caused, e.g. by housing patterns or generalized societal discrimination) is meaningless in the current context," and so, in effect, racial segregation will still occur.
All in all, Americans should be heartened that the decision has opened a dialogue about fairness and integrity in our public schools. School boards across the nation will have to re-evaluate enrollment practices, and perhaps a real exchange of ideas about how all schools, regardless of race and socio-economics, can work better for all students.