Does this SCOTUS article seem a little biased to you?

The BBQ Pit
1

So the way I read this article, it sounds like the SCOTUS has struck down programs that move kids becuase of race to schools they shouldn’t be in. That sounds like a great thing. I can’t understand for the life of me why liberals would be against such a thing, and what’s more, claim that it’s AGAINST Brown v Board.

The really disturbing thing is that the writer of the article fails to give an impartial view of the decision. The whole article is about the “evil Bush-SCOTUS link” instead of this monumental leap forward in common sense and justice.

2

It didn’t read as being particularly biased to me. Of course, I don’t have a strong opinion on the decision, so every sentence that failed to describe it as a “monumental leap forward” didn’t pierce me like a dagger.

3

You might be a tad sensitive, almost everything in the article was a direct quote from the opinion.

4

Looks reasonably balanced to me. One might wonder why they only quoted Democratic presidential candidates (the 3 top contenders), but maybe none of the Republicans said anything. I don’t think news articles should make this a conservative/liberal thing because it’s really a question of what judicial philosophy a particular justice uses. But everyone does it, so nothing unique to this article.

5

Because Brown was the final case in a long line of cases brought by the NAACP proving that segregated schools had inadequate funding and resources. The point of Brown was to equalize resources and funding for all children, and the most convenient way of doing so was integrating schools. (Some of the court cases before Brown sought funding remedies rather than integrated schools.)

The scenarios in Seattle and Lexington are quite different. For all of the rhetoric of having a colorblind society, residential segregation is an enduring issue. White flight is real - the New Orleans public schools went from being virtually all White in the late 1960s to having virtually no White students by the 1980s. So neighborhood schools are not going to create school populations where White students and students of color will be represented in sizable numbers (the “critical mass” argument, where a sizable minority is preferable to token representation). Some of the most successful educational experiments have occurred in magnet schools, which specifically seek to bring diverse student populations together. Magnet schools are among some of the most effective schools in the nation, and they strive for as great a racial balance as possible.

Deseg plans such as Seattle’s and Louisville’s attempts to bring the magnet philosophy to a broader scope of schools. The reality is that schools are becoming resegregated, essentially reversing the gains of the 1960s and 1970s (Cite.) Another reality that we’ve probably all observed is that when choice plans are available, the parents with the greatest amount of social capital (typically reflected in education, income, and profession) get their kids into the best schools. Those with the least amount of social capital - their kids often end up at the least desirable schools.

This ruling essentially says that if a school ends up majority minority, or all White, there’s nothing a school district can do to increase racial diversity. All the research pointing to the benefits of schooling in diverse environments was basically ignored. Very disappointing.

If the ultimate goal is a colorblind society, we’re going to have be color-conscious for some time to make that a reality. I fear that schools where kids aren’t compelled to play, work, argue, and basically figure out how to get along with sizable populations of kids of different races, those kids are going to harbor stereotypical and inaccurate perceptions of different races.

My high school is a good example of this. The school was in the barrio of the city, but had a population of about 20% White, 20% Black, and 10% Asian. The other 50% were Latino. So while you did see a concentration of kids of color in the low tracked classes, you also had a number of kids of color in the AP and advanced classes. There were multiple Black kids, and Black males in particular in my honors classes, along with Latino and Asian kids. When I went to college in my honors program, I was usually the only Black person, period in my classes.

Today, that same school is a complete neighborhood school, which makes it about 75% Latino, 20% Black, and about 5% White and Asian. Most parents don’t bring great reserves of social capital, so there’s no-one who can help make things happen at the school beyond the obvious (and often ineffectual) efforts of going to the school board to complain. The school will probably be closed because of several years of declining test scores. Meanwhile the schools in more affluent neighborhoods are performing better than ever.

I’ll say this. Had I not had friends who were college track, and had parents who were pushing them in that direction, I doubt I would have ended up at a four-year, selective college in an honors program. I, and my parents, literally did not know the first thing about college besides “take the SAT.” I learned about the PSATs, prep courses, and scholarship applications from my peers and their parents. At my old high school, I was happy to see the board of kids going to college - but I noticed it was smaller than the board was when I was in school. And all of the kids were going to the big state schools, which is fine, but we always had some kids going to small liberal arts schools, simply because we were exposed to a lot of different types of schools.

Rambling a bit, but I hope this explains why this liberal is saddened by the SCOTUS’ decision, and I join Justice Stevens in mourning this setback to the spirit of Brown.

6

Did the commonly-accepted truism that “separate is inherently unequal” get repudiated as a result of the ruling? Or as a part of it?

7

no the article doesn’t seem biased to me but i did not count the interviews with majority and those with the minority. in any case it seemed fair.

as to “separate but equal” and inherent inequality i only read the synopsis but the issue does not seem to have been in play and brown is explicitly approved. the problem seems to be that both districts are using racial qualifications to place students where (1) in seattle there has never been any instance of segregated schools and (2) in Louisvile - Jefferson county the court order to desegregate is no longer in force. in louisville they used race as a tiebreaker and i cannot remember about seattle. the court basically seemed to be saying that if you want to achieve a balance in enrollment you can do it without resorting to race itself. it does not seem to me to be the end of the world, but the decision and disssents are 185 pages long and i am going to wait for the movie.

8

The article does not seem biased to me. Your OP seems biased when it says:

Where did the article or the Supreme Court ruling say that students have been placed in schools they shouldn’t be in? Certainly no one wants that at all. Many liberals believe as I do – that racial, ethnic and cultural diversity within our schools has enriched the lives of all.

Are you old enough to remember what race relations were like before the mid-1950s? Are you aware of how underfunded Black school were? I just can’t imagine going back to the way it was. How dull!

It’s not just liberals who are saying this; it’s the Justices themselves.

Would you quote a single word that the writer of the article says that is critical of President Bush? You say the whole article is. Most of the article is quoting the Justices. I just don’t see the bias you are claiming.

9

This is an excellent decision. These policies were going against the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, the Civil Rights movement was about equal treatment, not special treatment, and not impersonal treatment in a ludicrous effort to group people together in an “ideal” racial mixing.

The SCOTUS should be concerned with the law, not how much diversity “enriches” the lives of students. Issues like that should not be on the plate for a Supreme Court justice, a SCOTUS member should be concerned with what is constitutional, and precedent has been pretty clear recently that you can’t make decisions about people based solely on their race. The Seattle system was not even strictly racially based, but it too was struck down. When a school was explicitly barring blacks who would otherwise be in that school’s area, you had a problem. Where things got out of whack is when judges started believing they were social engineers, the program in Louisville was the remnant of a judicially mandated program.

Programs like the one you have in Seattle are probably the worst, though. It’s my understanding that Seattle allowed its students to attend any school in the district that they chose, and schools that were more popular than others, the applicants would be awarded positions at the school based on several criteria (with race being one of them.) The problem is what this does to our societies and our school systems as a whole. Government needs to be more concerned with the average and the below average students than the exceptional ones. And a system which just guarantees all the smart kids fight for positions at the “smart” school and all the average kids get left in the average school is just compounding the problem. People don’t want to go to a particular school because it is bad, so what do genius school boards do? They let the cream of the crop get out of the crappy school, thus making it even worse.

The focus really does need to be on making all American High Schools more or less standardized in educational quality. The rest of the stuff really doesn’t matter, it’s not and should not be the purpose of the educational system to engage in racial engineering. Funding for schools needs to become more centralized, because as it stands now areas that collect higher property taxes have more money to spend on local schools; and the areas that collect higher property taxes are of course, the areas where rich people live. Funding needs to be centralized and test scores should not penalize a school. It makes no sense at all that a school with falling test scores loses money, those are the schools that should be getting more money.

Until we achieve a standard-level of education at all of America’s schools we’re basically always going to be dealing with this fundamental problem: there’s only so many good High Schools and way more students than there are spaces in them. You can talk about racial diversity and et cetera but all of this stuff is mostly about quality, parents want their kids going to quality schools. Magnet schools in my opinion are not successful because of their racial diversity, they are successfully because they are centrally managed and they get to pick from the cream of the crop of applicants because they were set up specifically to funnel the best students to that school, usually with some intent to make it a racially diverse school. By and large magnet schools have been successful at promoting racial diversity within magnet schools but the school districts where their students come from and those student’s “local schools” continue to lack diversity, and much more importantly, continue to be of sub-par quality.

10

Yeah right Marty, cause we all know you’re all about civil rights. :rolleyes:

11

Gosh, I thought that Brown II, which put schools under race-based desegregation orders, was something the civil rights movement pushed for.

And for some reason, I coulda sworn that Martin Luther King, Jr. was at least tolerated by the civil rights movement:

I certainly appreciate the historical revisionism!

Daniel

12

I personally struggle with this. Ultimately, I’d love to see a society in which all races had equal opportunities, and no one was labeled or given special treatment because of their race.

Unfortunately, experience has shown that de facto forces routinely undermine that first goal. It’s great that we’ve made de jure forces that do such illegal, but there is a reasonable argument that current de facto forces are remnants of past de jure forces. And that allowing those de facto forces to undermine equality is worse than temporarily giving people a leg up on the base of their (historically oppressed) race.

Treating everyone equally is the best. But what do you do when treating everyone equally creates unfair consequences, due to prior unfair practices?

13

A rather shallow appeal to authority. Just because Dr. King said something doesn’t make it morally correct or even desirable.

I find any institutionalized special treatment that is forced upon people, regardless of their color, to be a gross offense to the principal of equality that should guide lawmaking in this country.

14

Well, I sure as hell am, and I have considerable trouble justifying race-based solutions to racial problems. I can accept the notion that temporary programs similar to affirmative action might well be needful and useful, but sooner or later, if they are successful, they must be suspended. And what metric do we apply to determine that? How do we decide when enough is enough? When would Al Sharpton say “Hold! Enough!”, as he feeds on racial crisis like a leech feeds on blood.

I agree that diversity is a good thing in an educational environment, especially if it reflects the diversity of the community itself. I certainly wouldn’t agree to importing Amish children to Berkely simply to supply some diversity, to grab a silly exemplar.

I will be the first to admit that this problem is, as it has always been, difficult and prickly, and persons of good will find themselves in rancorous disagreement. And I think this decision displays an unfortunate attitude. But it is a setback, not a disaster, we can find other ways to our goal, especially as the great bulk of America is in alignment with our goals. We can be obstructed, but we cannot be stopped.

15

Didja read what I was responding to, friedo? When the discussion is about the spirit of the civil rights movement, an appeal to MLK is not exactly a logical fallacy.

I didn’t say King was right. I’m just correcting some blatant historical revisionism about the movement itself.

Daniel

16

No its not. Martin H claimed that the civil rights movement did not fight for special treatment, and this is just an example that refutes that claim.

17

:dubious: It does, however, reflect on what the civil rights movement was or was not about, which is the purpose for which Left Hand used that quotation, as you know.

18

I don’t see that *Brown *was about diversity, so I don’t see how this opinion can be said to be out of step with Brown. That case was about denying access to certain schools based on race. Sound familiar? That’s exactly what this case was about.

This is also consistent with prior court opinions, particularly the recent one involving the University of Michigan. Numerical racial quotas have been rejected by the courts going back to Bakke in the 70s, and have only supported forced integration plans where it was proven that previous discriminatory practices needed to be remedied. Although Louisville had been under such a desegregation plan in the past, that judgment had been lifted a few years ago.

I won’t deny that racism is a continuing problem in this country, but we need to find ways to address that without institutionalizing the very practice, racial discrimination, that we are trying to cure.

19

Well, we can proceed one of two ways: you can propose your brilliant solution, and I can applaud, or vice versa. Well, age before beauty…

20

We also need to acknowledge that class divisions are now more important than racial divisions. Consider: If racism in America vanished tomorrow – how much would really change? Blacks would no longer have to worry about getting pulled over for no reason . . . hate groups would disband for lack of interest . . . and that’s about all. But class problems would remain. The semiliterate black kid from the projects who goes in to interview for a good job would now have the same chance as the semiliterate white kid from the trailer park – but how much of a chance is that?