In my view, the dissenters were paying lip service to the notion of narrow tailoring and compelling state interest; they really were arguing for a change in the law to require such a strict standard of review only when the government uses race to segregate or to disadvantage a group. That would be a significant departure from the court’s rhetoric, so I wasn’t surprised at the outcome.
2. The practicalities. I am not a social scientist, and my only perspective on the issue of diversity in the schools is as the parent of children about to go to Kindergarten facing a choice between private school and BPS. I think the fundamental reason it has proved to be so hard to integrate the schools is that society is not willing to constrain the choices of parents to the extent that would be necessary. During the busing crisis, parents voted with their feet, either leaving the city or sending their kids to parochial or private school. Are we willing to force parents to send their kids to public school, or to force parents to send kids across town lines to achieve diversity? If not, then the Supreme Court’s decisions from Brown to Seattle can have only a mild effect at best, because the courts can’t wish away people’s prejudices about race and urban schools, whether or not those have any basis in fact.
This kind of reasoning suggests to me that the best thing we can do to ensure diversity in the schools is to visibly and loudly improve the quality of schools where the majority of students are from disadvantaged groups, so as to remove the incentives for parents of kids from advantaged groups to vote with their feet.
TedF
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Or we could try and combat economic segregation in housing. Instead of making schools in segregated neighborhoods look like how the “average” school should look if segregation didn’t exist, work on breaking down barriers put up to keep segregated cities and towns in place.
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The battle is the same today as it was 30+ years ago; while there were not necessarily any policies in place, especially in the Northeast, to segregate by race, because of years of housing and other discrimination non-whites tended to be poor living in poor neighborhoods. And those neighborhoods tended to have schools that were not as well maintained, or who had a greener teaching staff. Education was not equal.
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When busing came in, whites voted with their feet and set up camp outside the economic reach of non-whites, outside the city boundaries. The urban public schools went from mostly-middle-class to mostly-lower-class, and teaching methods just don’t translate well between the two groups. A class of 40 high-income students is not the same as a class of 40 low-income student. Education is the primary way to advance, but the education is still being doled out sparingly to the poorer people in this state.
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In essence, low-income segregated neighborhoods have been replaced by low-income segregated cities. Separate and unequal is now legal, because nothing requires equal resources across town boundaries since funding is locally controlled.
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I’m a parent who does not want to send my kids to an all-white school. But I live in Springfield, and there are no schools with reputations that even come close to most suburban schools. If I have to choose, I’ll sacrifice diversity for educational reputation, because the odds are too high that in a Springfield public school, that my children will be overwhelmed by the problems that occur more often with poor children, and that those problems will consume most of the resources of the education system.
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I’d also argue that Springfield schools are simply not diverse. Diversity, to me, means a school that resembles America, or resembles Massachusetts. When I trumpet diversity people ask me why I don’t send my child to one of the nearly all-Hispanic schools in the city. Those schools are not diverse. “Diversity” does not equate to “all brown skin”. It equates to “a mix of all kinds of people”, from rich to poor, from Black to white to Asian to Hispanic, from blue collar to white collar.