The time for forced integration has passed
By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
Published October 15, 2006
Race is back at center stage at the U.S. Supreme Court this term. The court has another opportunity to put the government out of the business of social engineering by race. I hope the new conservative majority on the court takes it.
The Constitution's equal protection guarantees clearly demand that government act without regard to race, but for some reason my fellow liberals don't want to see it.
Two cases will be argued in early December in which large public school systems are asking the court to uphold racially conscious student assignment measures that help keep their schools integrated.
In Louisville, Ky., the school district was under a court-ordered desegregation plan until 2000. Thereafter, its elementary school populations were assigned to be no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent African-American. Crystal Meredith, a white parent, sued when her son Joshua was denied access to his neighborhood elementary school on racial grounds.
In Seattle, the school district did not have a history of segregation but still used race to award coveted spots under a school choice plan. A group of parents sued when their children were denied their first choice of high school due to race or ethnicity.
The rulings in these cases could affect as many as 1,000 U.S. school districts that use race in varying degrees in student assignments.
I realize this could mean a great deal of disruption and likely the resegregation of some schools, but I believe it is time to end racially conscious school assignments for good. As Chief Justice John Roberts said last term in a voting rights case, "It's a sordid business, this divvying us up by race."
I've changed. I once thought school integration was a national obligation. There were two primary reasons for this: First, I thought we had a duty to redress the wrongs of the past, when blacks were barred from predominantly white schools due to Jim Crow in the South and barriers to integrated neighborhoods in the North.
Second, I thought that the reason African-American students were struggling academically was because they had been consigned to second-rate schools. I thought when they got the opportunity to attend better, predominantly white schools, they would soon raise their achievement levels.
Neither reason holds any longer.
The legal regime of segregation has been extinguished for more than two generations, and while blacks and whites still tend to live in separate neighborhoods, it is more a matter of economics and personal preference than any legal apartheid. Over the last 50 years, sufficient redress has occurred.
And on the question of whether African-American students benefit academically by being in integrated schools, there is little evidence of it. The persistent achievement gap between black and white students exists even in school systems that have been well integrated for decades. The experiences of the Pinellas and Hillsborough school districts are primary examples.
Both systems spent 30 years under court-ordered desegregation, with black and white children attending the same schools. Yet the most recent statistics say that only about a third of black students can read at grade level compared with about two-thirds of white students - a gap that hasn't budged much despite concerted efforts. Nationally, the statistics are similarly bleak. Much to my surprise and disappointment, the answer to raising the academic achievement of black students is not to be found in integrating the schools.
So, with my two primary rationales no longer valid, the only remaining reason for moving beyond organic integration to forced integration is to introduce students to the diversity of America. And while I agree this is a laudable goal, it cannot in my view overcome the strong constitutional dictate (and societal good) that government should be colorblind.
When the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 1954 that school segregation had to go, it said that the Constitution required "a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis." Race-based measures were supposed to be only a temporary remediation.
In the coming cases, the school districts hope the court will rely on its 2003 ruling in Grutter vs. Bollinger, in which race was approved as a factor in law school admissions to further student diversity. But the law school practice of holistically evaluating each applicant is a far cry from the racial balancing of the sort practiced by public schools, where a student's race alone determines his or her assignment.
I think the court will not go along. And it will probably be one of the few rulings I agree with all term. I wish my fellow liberals would see that the time of forced integration is over. We should stop fighting about it, and get down to the business of helping all students to learn.