The primary racial debate of our era involves the public schools, and on that subject, the U.S. Supreme Court held tense arguments recently. The court, in the famous Brown vs. Board of Education ruling of 1954, barred segregation enforced as a legal mandate. The question now hinges on what legally can be done to limit voluntary segregation occurring because of racially distinct housing patterns.
Certainly communities have an interest in doing just that -- because of the risk that schools with high concentrations of minority students, who tend to be less affluent, will become academically inferior, and also because classrooms filled with children of different races are educationally valuable in and of themselves.
The justices had the wisdom last year to decline to hear a case that challenged a school district's efforts to ensure integrated classrooms. Now, though, the court has let the debate be reopened, putting to the legal test good-faith attempts by Seattle and Louisville, Ky., school boards to ensure racially balanced schools.
Racial quotas may be pernicious, and people who oppose them don't have to be flaming bigots. Indeed, the argument that school assignments ought to be colorblind has appeal, if the United States is ever to become a colorblind nation.
Yet declaring illegal any attempt at balancing the schools by race would open the door wide to resegregation, clearly the greater evil. Besides, the country simply has yet to become colorblind. Consider a North Carolina example -- the white flight that occurred in Durham following the merger of the predominantly white county schools and largely African-American city district in the early 1990s.
As the national debate has raged, meanwhile, the Wake County school system has struggled for and found a middle ground. The system makes attendance decisions that are based in part on the economic status of families. That helps ensure racial diversity because, unfortunately, minorities tend to fill the lower rungs of the economic ladder. It also promotes academic achievement by spreading the burden of teaching children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Wake's arrangement has the potential of being a model if the conservative-leaning high court rules against Seattle and Louisville.
In both school districts, students apply to several schools. The Louisville system makes the final assignment in part based on its goal of attaining racially balanced schools. In Seattle, administrators used race and other factors to allocate students among schools with too many applicants.
Lower courts threw out lawsuits contesting both approaches, and the Supreme Court also ought to turn back the plaintiffs. Both cities' approaches seem fair, denying no youngster an equal chance to get an education. Conversely, a second-rate education is the very practical risk when schools end up being mainly African-American.
While racial progress has been made over the decades since segregation was outlawed, the equality train hasn't reached the station yet. Assignments based solely on race may go too far, but schools should be able to use race as a factor toward providing equal education. If the court rules otherwise, it will endanger the very future of African-American and other minority youngsters, an unacceptable outcome for a nation that has as a bedrock principle equal protection under the law.
