We'll see.
Joanna
andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>Very depressing. In the flurry of litigation that will
>ensue (as Justice Breyer predicts) as schools attempt
>to align their pupil assignment plans with the new
>requirements, the Court will move even closer to
>abolishing consideration of race for remedial purposes
>altogether, cementing residential segregation in
>place, and involving bad implications for affirmative
>action in other contexts.
>
>http://www.nytimes. com/2007/ 06/28/us/ 28cnd-scotus.
>html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
>
>
>Use of Race in School Placement Curbed
>By DAVID STOUT
>Published: June 28, 2007
>WASHINGTON, June 28 — In a decision of sweeping
>importance to educators, parents and schoolchildren
>across the country, the Supreme Court today sharply
>limited the ability of school districts to manage the
>racial makeup of the student bodies in their schools.
>
>Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote the majority's
>decision. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the dissent.
>
>The court voted, 5 to 4, to reject diversity plans
>from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., declaring that the
>districts had failed to meet "their heavy burden" of
>justifying "the extreme means they have chosen —
>discriminating among individual students based on race
>by relying upon racial classifications in making
>school assignments. "
>
>Today's decision, one of the most important in years
>on the issue of race and education, may not entirely
>eliminate race as a factor in assigning students to
>different schools. But it will surely prompt many
>districts to revise programs they already have in
>place, or go back to the drawing boards in designing
>plans.
>
>The majority's rationale relied in part on the
>historic 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education
>that outlawed segregation in public schools — a factor
>that the dissenters on the court found to be a cruel
>irony, and which they objected to in emotional terms.
>
>Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G.
>Roberts Jr. said the officials in Seattle and
>Louisville had failed to show that their plans
>considered race in the context of a larger educational
>concept, and therefore did not pass muster.
>
>"Classifying and assigning schoolchildren according to
>a binary conception of race is an extreme approach in
>light of this court's precedents and the nation's
>history of using race in public schools, and requires
>more than such an amorphous end to justify it," the
>chief justice wrote.
>
>In the now familiar lineup, Justices Antonin Scalia ,
>Anthony M. Kennedy , Clarence Thomas and Samuel A.
>Alito Jr. sided with the chief justice on most points.
>
>"When it comes to using race to assign children to
>schools, history will be heard," the majority said.
>
>The four dissenters wrote, in effect, that the
>majority was standing history on its head. Justice
>Stephen G. Breyer said that today's result "threatens
>to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of
>race-related litigation, and it undermines Brown's
>promise of integrated primary and secondary education
>that local communities have sought to make a reality."
>
>
>"This cannot be justified in the name of the Equal
>Protection Clause," Justice Breyer went on, alluding
>to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which
>bars states from denying people "the equal protection
>of the laws."
>
>Justice Breyer's dissent was joined by Justices David
>H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens ,
>the tribunal's longest-serving member, who wrote a
>separate dissent that was remarkable for its feeling.
>
>"While I join Justice Breyer's eloquent and
>unanswerable dissent in its entirety, it is
>appropriate to add these words," Justice Stevens
>wrote. "There is a cruel irony in the chief justice's
>reliance on our decision in Brown vs. Board of
>Education."
>
>Today's ruling breaks faith with the 1954 ruling,
>Justice Stevens asserted. "It is my firm conviction
>that no member of the court that I joined in 1975
>would have agreed with today's decision," he wrote.
>
>The decision today runs to 185 pages, including the
>dissents. It was eagerly awaited by the National
>School Boards Association and by the Council of the
>Great City Schools, representing 66 urban districts,
>which had filed briefs on behalf of Seattle and
>Louisville and had warned of disruption if the
>justices overturned lower court rulings upholding the
>diversity plans.
>
>The Bush administration participated as a "friend of
>the court" on behalf of the plaintiffs who challenged
>the diversity plans.
>
>__._,_.___
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