Reverse…

 

Greenhouse in the NYT

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — By the time the Supreme Court finished hearing arguments on Monday on the student-assignment plans that two urban school systems use to maintain racial integration, the only question was how far the court would go in ruling such plans unconstitutional.

There seemed little prospect that either the Louisville, Ky., or Seattle plans would survive the hostile scrutiny of the court’s new majority. In each system, students are offered a choice of schools but can be denied admission based on their race if enrolling at a particular school would upset the racial balance.

Joan Biskupic in USA Today:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court appeared ready Monday to strike down public school diversity programs that use race as a factor in deciding where students go to school.

In the first test of school integration efforts to come before the court since Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Samuel Alito joined the bench last term, the justices heard two cases — one from Seattle, the other from Louisville — that examine whether using race in school assignments violates the Constitution’s equality guarantee.  […]

The significance of the cases — and of their potential impact on the 1954 landmark — was apparent in the courtroom. Among the spectators was Cecilia “Cissy” Marshall, the widow of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first black justice and a legal architect of desegregation. Also in the court was William Coleman, who was part of Marshall’s legal team in 1954, went on to become secretary of Transportation in the Ford administration and is now a lawyer in Washington.

Outside the marble-columned building, supporters of the integration programs vastly outnumbered challengers. They chanted, “Equal education, not segregation.”

However, it is the challengers — mostly white parents whose children were not assigned to their schools of choice — who seemed more likely to prevail.

I caught the oral argument yesterday in two cases before the SC on school desegration, one in Seattle and one in Jefferson Co (Louisville) KY.

The Reuters and NYT links point up the emergence of Kennedy as swinging to the conservatives on this issue…

But none points to a fateful and ugly train of questions begun by Scalia in the KY case (the oral argument in the KY seemed more contentious to me, hotter) and quickly picked up by Kennedy… Scalia introduced as a query, do we know the school board is benign?  This despite the fact that I heard the KY atty for the school board state that surveys (plural) are included to show that the plan enjoys wide support, up to 80% of the community… Scalia elaborated that perhaps schools are equal but at one school performance is higher and thus a racial group on the board wishes to benefit their race by inserting children from their racial group into that school, perhaps to 80%. 

You get the drift…

Well… Kennedy ran with it.  Honestly, he appeared agitated in a way that seemed revealing.  But it was Breyer who broke thru in dismay with this:

“Think, go back to Cooper v. Aaron,” Justice Breyer told the solicitor general, referring during the argument in the Louisville case to the court’s 1958 decision enforcing a desegregation order in Little Rock, Ark. “Go back to the case where this court with paratroopers had to use tremendous means to get those children into the school. That’s because the society was divided.”

He continued: “Here we have a society, black and white, who elect school board members who together have voted to have this form of integration. Why, given that change in society, which is a good one, how can the Constitution be interpreted in a way that would require us, the judges, to go in and make them take the black children out of the school?” 

Afterwards, out front of the court in questions with reporters, the atty for the Seattle plan said if this is struck down, if the court finds for the parents, that little will be left of Brown v BoE.

A case in which the the court was so careful to achieve a unanimous decision that they worked two years to deliver their ruling.  Further, Jonathan Kozol has said that while KY delayed integration, when they got to work, they did just about the best job in the nation and thus are more integrated than many large northern states, CA, NY, IL, MI and MA are the states he names…

From a December 2005 Kozol article in The Nation, entitled Overcoming Apartheid:

In the Louisville area as well, school integration, initially carried out under court order, has now been in place without court order for a quarter-century. The sweep of the program, under which the city schools and county schools have been combined into a single system in which more than 90,000 black, Hispanic, white and Asian children are enrolled, has had the effect of rendering Kentucky’s public schools the most desegregated in the nation. The typical black student in Kentucky now attends a school in which two-thirds of the enrollment is Caucasian.

When a proposal was made in 1991 to terminate or cut back on Kentucky’s integration program, protests were voiced by community groups, the teachers union, the local press, the Jefferson County Human Relations Commission and the regional branch of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. A survey revealed that the number of black parents who believed their children’s education had improved under the busing plan exceeded those who took the opposite position by a ratio of six to one. Less than 2 percent believed that education for their children would be better in resegregated schools. Despite occasional recurrences of opposition from groups or individuals who represent small pockets of resistance, support for school desegregation in the Louisville community continues strong and unabated to the present day.

It was unbearably sad…  I see no good spin on this one.  None.

“Even many black leaders,” notes education analyst Richard Rothstein, are weary of the struggle over mandatory busing programs to achieve desegregation and “have given up on integration,” arguing, in his words, that “a black child does not need white classmates in order to learn.” So education policies, he says, “now aim to raise scores in [the] schools that black children attend.” “That effort,” he writes, “will be flawed even if it succeeds.” The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision, he reminds us, “was not about raising scores” for children of minorities “but about giving black children access to majority culture, so they could negotiate it more confidently…. For African-Americans to have equal opportunity, higher test scores will not suffice. It is foolhardy to think black children can be taught, no matter how well, in isolation and then have the skills and confidence as adults to succeed in a white world where they have no experience.”

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UPDATE: 2:25 pm in San Francisco…

I think this can safely be called MIssing the Point… from Roll Call (behind subscription wall) today, via The Note:

In her “Heard on the Hill” column, Roll Call’s Mary Ann Akers has a “well-placed GOP source” saying that Nancy Pelosi, “in a random act of bipartisan kindness that will surely irk Members on both sides of the aisle, has decided to reward Hastert with the plush and coveted Capitol office suite now held by retiring Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.).” 

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UPDATE… 4:40 pm

The Armed Services committee voted unanimously (21-0) today to approve Gates, so he proceeds for a vote from the full senate.  I am sure voice vote will be fine.  Perhaps they can phone it in from their perch on some gold leafed commode somewhere.  And not that I expected much different… certainly they are still the handmaiden party.

You have to laugh.  We are just downstream… and the pollution is heavy. 

Madman has a post up…

[T]here is ample evidence that this bagman for imperialist warmongers and enablers of death squads shouldn’t be given this very important post. None of that matters, though, because the fix is in. BOTH parties support and foster our warlike ways, our bullying and unconstrained extraction of the world’s resources.  [snip] 

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