Word: factoring
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...what? Race could be out as a factor in assigning students to public schools, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday, leaving educators to ponder less reliable alternatives for creating racially diverse classrooms. School districts can still place students according to family income, academic achievement or even neighborhood poverty rates-all assumed to bear at least some correlation with race. But where that's been tried, it has rarely resulted in integrated schools. And to the extent these alternatives are meant as proxies for race, they could still be vulnerable to constitutional attack...
...Today's decision was remarkably close. It came in the cases of two public school districts - one in Seattle and the other in a region of Kentucky including Louisville - that considered students' race as just one factor in deciding where they should go to school. Both districts wanted to maintain integrated classrooms, and like hundreds of districts across the nation, they used race to periodically tweak the makeup of schools that were oversubscribed or racially out of whack in systems that otherwise let parents choose where their children attended class...
...intentionally segregated, the desire for racial balance isn't enough to trump the Constitution's general ban on treating people differently because of their race. Justice Anthony "Swing Vote" Kennedy agreed with the striking-down bit, but he wrote a separate opinion saying schools could consider race as a factor if they did so in ways precisely gauged to achieve diversity. The districts' plans were too crude - Seattle had only two categories: white and non-white - and too ambiguous to pass that test, Kennedy wrote. And because he supplied the fifth vote, he speaks for the court on the narrow...
...Breyer seems way too pessimistic. Kennedy's concurrence suggests that schools might figure out an acceptable way to use race in assigning students, and there are apparently five firm votes on this court for allowing race as a factor in creating good public schools. What's more, the decision did not overrule Grutter v. Bollinger, the court's 2003 decision upholding the University of Michigan law school's admissions policy of considering race because students learn better in diverse classrooms...
...five schools," says the parents' lawyer, Harry Korrell. "So you're going to get a heavy minority representation no matter what." The district, though, argues that segregation in the city's neighborhoods will soon be reflected in the high schools now that race isn't a factor in assigning students. Whether or not the district's right, that's what happened in many other cities, leaving schools to find alternatives for maintaining diversity...