kitty inhalers

[thestickywicket]

"This decision to commute the sentence of a man who compromised our national security cements the legacy of an Administration characterized by a politics of cynicism and division, one that has consistently placed itself and its ideology above the law. This is exactly the kind of politics we must change so we can begin restoring the American people’

Comments

[thestickywicket]

So, to my view, this was less about race as it was the ultimate level of 20 years of a district not listening to it's parents, poor management and a parent who finally had had enough and the race gave them a way to make the district pay attention.

Not going to respond at length because I haven't had time to read the decision yet (yay, weekend reading!), but none of this has anything to do with the fact that the Supreme Court just said that race can no longer be a factor in determining which students go to what schools. It sounds like Seattle had an especially stupid program in place, and if these particular parents had merely used the racial angle as a lever to get the district to listen, that would be one thing, but because this (and at least one other/similar case) went all the way to Bush's New Asstastic Supreme Court of Entrenched Conservativism, we now have no judicial tools with which to enforce Brown v. Board of Education. And that is awful.

Grutter and Gratz were problematic in that they accepted nebulous 'meaningful number of various racial groups' as an acceptable goal for diversity, but rejected anything granting "extra" points for race (don't kids get extra points for having an alumni parent?). And if you look at these three cases together, we're going backwards:

*Graduate school: can use vague notions of meaningful number as a proxy for considering race;
*College: cannot use points-based system, but can probably consider race in some other nebulous, non-numberical way;
*Elementary school: cannot use race as a factor.

[zandras_court]

we now have no judicial tools with which to enforce Brown v. Board of Education.

I've heard this and I am confused. Because wasn't the issue of B v. BoE that a district couldn't say, we have seperate schools for races, but they are equal, so that's ok. Doesn't this say, "you can't consider race at all"? Meaning that it's still illegal for a school to say "whites go here and the rest go somewhere else?" Instead, the underlying message becomes, whites and non-whites will never live near each other for neighborhoods to be naturally integrated, so we have to make sure we bus kids into different neighborhoods. I don't know if this was how it was done in the other cities, but it was certainly the message given here.

Wouldn't economic considerations be a better way to do this? There are poor children of every race and just because some one is black, doesn't mean they come from a poor home. I'd rather the district look at the econmic resources available related to a student's economic home life (like how many have computers and internet at home, single income or double income, numbers of years in preschool) and then direct programs and money to the schools that need it that way.

Now, all of these cases are coming from bigger city school districts and that poses another issue that is harder to deal with. Oprah did a show about the conditions at a in-city Chicago high school compared to one in a suburb, but they were in different districts. A district cannot control what another district does or who lives there. So how do you integrate geography? The reality is, you can't. It is just something that will have to happen over generations.

[thestickywicket]

Quickly because I'm on my way out -- Brown said you can't segregate schools based on race, so asshat school districts could still draw the lines around schools without explicitly saying they were trying to segregate. Then came various judicial decrees and state law initiatives to desegregate schools, many of which involved bussing kids all the hell over to achieve some sort of desegregation.

The courts look at any use of race by the state with struct scrutiny, which means the state must have a compelling interest (in desegregation) and must have used means narrowly tailored to the end. The court here said Seattle's plan wasn't narrowly tailored because race was a "tiebreaker" instead of (like the Grutter/Gratz school of thought) a nebulous, non-numerical factor...

... seriously, I can't do this without reading the opinion, but, yes, you can try to use socioeconomic factors as a proxy for race/desegregation, but the court has already said that while education is a right, so long as there's a school with walls and desks and books and teachers, there's nothing more required. Consequently, poor school districts can't legally 'steal' from rich school districts, so our school system will continue to be fucked up.