The new view would read Brown not as mandating integration, or even as neutral on the point, but as affirmatively prohibiting voluntary measures to achieve integration if they involve race-conscious government action.
[F]or the court conservatives to draw on the incomparable power of Brown to legitimize this particular view of the Constitution would be to tear the Brown decision from its historical roots and context. The singular objective of Brown was to end a system of state-sponsored segregation 300 years in the making, fully recognizing how difficult it would be to create racially diversified public schools.
What did Brown mean?
The Supreme Court may reinterpret the landmark ruling, threatening racial diversity in schools.
By Edward Lazarus
EDWARD LAZARUS, a lawyer in private practice, is the author of "Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall and Future of the Modern Supreme Court."
June 24, 2007
BROWN vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's landmark declaration that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional, may be the court's only ruling in the last 200 years that virtually everyone today agrees was "rightly decided." It is simply unimaginable that a president would appoint, or that the Senate would confirm, a court nominee who failed to pay homage to the 1954 decision.
Indeed, embracing Brown has become a ritual among nominees, even among those — such as the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist — who had opposed the ruling when it was originally made.
But the chorus of approval for Brown has for many years masked a deep division over what the decision actually means. To liberals, it mandated racial integration. It established the ideal that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would evoke nine years later in his "I Have a Dream" speech — a nation in which children of all races played in the schoolyard, hand in hand, in a harmony born of diversity. To those who read the decision this way, Brown was the underpinning for a host of measures, voluntary as well as involuntary, designed to undo centuries of racial apartheid and create a genuinely integrated public education system.
Conservatives, however, have always harbored a narrower view. Even as they embraced Brown's rejection of government-sponsored segregation, they balked at reading the ruling as an affirmative demand for integration, except as strictly necessary to undo the direct effects of past discrimination. And they rejected aggressive remedies, such as busing, to ensure integrated classrooms.
Before its summer recess next week, the Supreme Court will probably unmask, by a 5-4 vote, this basic discord by announcing a fundamental reinterpretation of Brown. The new view would read Brown not as mandating integration, or even as neutral on the point, but as affirmatively prohibiting voluntary measures to achieve integration if they involve race-conscious government action.
Although predicting the outcome of Supreme Court cases is fraught with peril, the occasion for this anticipated revision is two cases, one out of Seattle and one from Louisville, Ky. In both communities (as is common across the country), local elected officials chose to promote racial diversity in their public schools by using a student's race as one factor in deciding which school the student attended.
The Seattle and Louisville approaches are different in some specifics, but both allow parents to make the first choice of where their kids should go to school. The school districts, however, may use race as a "tiebreaker" to even out enrollment between over- and under-subscribed schools so that, in the end, every school has a reasonable level of racial diversity.
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According to this, I'm a Conservative (small C)
In New York, the education establishment has worked its way around the logical implications of Brown by two primary mechanisms: 1) retaining discriminatory funding formulas tied to property values and 2) subsidizing the capacity of wealthy and middle-class white districts to retain experienced and high-quality teachers by allocating funds according to the "average teacher salary" at the school. In other words, when preliminary budgets are introduced, School A (located in a primarily white district - like Douglaston, Queens or downtown Manhattan) could have an ATS of $75000. These teachers may have 10-15 years in the system...they may be award winning, accomplished professionals who are in high demand in lower performing districts; they will likely hold master's degrees and have demonstrated leadership skills in professional development, etc. but...
School B, which will be located in East Harlem or Central Harlem or Bushwick or Bed-Stuy or East New York or the South Bronx will have an Average Teacher Salary of $48000. Those teachers, however, are new to the system. They have one or two years experience. They are cultural aliens and know nothing of classroom management. Their school of education has prepared them to teach white girls, almost exclusively. They arrive in classrooms with no white girls - except the one in the mirror. There are more high-poverty students, more limited English proficient students, more special needs students - and FEWER community-based/parent financial support networks to augment services which cannot be provided by the school.
The differential in Average Teacher Salary effectively provides more funding for schools with better teachers and SUBSIDIZES the capacity of these schools to add NEW TEACHERS without significantly undermining the averge teacher salary of the school. It also incentivizes school principals to pay new teachers in "better schools" higher salaries, while principals in schools with lower ATS' cannot encourage new teachers with higher salaries at the expense of the existing staff.
This fiscal end around the Brown decision effectively keeps schools segregated (a non-issue) while keeping the most experienced, best paid teachers in schools with the most experienced, best paid admininstrators; the wealthiest, most connected parents; the wealthiest most effective community networks and the least "needy students."
This particular item has generated a great deal of heat. There has been a ground swell of energy to change the funding formulas to focus on the needs of students. Consider one implication...if School A wants to keep a full compliment of teachers at $75k, the city doesn't subsidize that decision...the school and its parents/community pony up the dollars to pay those teacher salaries - and make tough cuts if they're unable to raise money on their own. School B, with its high-need students gets a significant infusion of cash which can be used to hire more experienced teachers or add external support servics to improve outcomes for those children.
The current system operates like WalMart...a poor majority contributes their nickels and dimes so that a few wealthy children or middle to upper middle class children can attend elite PUBLIC Schools in a few locations. If you EVER look at TEST SCORES in NYC, the top scores come from 2 districts (out of 32)...that's it - just 2. District 2 (a mega district that covers most of downtown Manhattan and serves a demographic that does not reflect this increasingly black and brown city); District 26 (Queens - Douglaston, a wealthy enclave in an outer borough that has retained its retinue of million dollar homes and water-front views). The other districts are scattered along an achievement curve that precisely follows the relative income of adults.
By the way, NYCDOE just hired your boy Roland Fryer!
I know about Fryer
I know; the NY Times mentioned that two Sundays back.
hm
It's been that way
for at least three decades...school reform and all that and all that...small schools, big schools, old schools new schools, young teachers, old teachers, new training, old training, new books, old books, new lectures, old lectures, new theories, old hypotheses...etcetera, etcetera...ahem!
Dr. King called it for what it is almost 40 years ago
"The current system operates like WalMart...a poor majority contributes their nickels and dimes so that a few wealthy children or middle to upper middle class children can attend elite PUBLIC Schools in a few locations. " -T3
"Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony." - Dr. King, Remaining Awake for A Great Revolution