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Dec. 4th, 2006 11:53 pmI've been listening to NPR and various other news organizations talking about the Supreme Court reviewing cases in Seattle and Louisville, KY where the school boards have been using profiling to make sure that schools have a representation of minority students roughly comparable to the numbers of minorities in the communities which they serve, and it got me thinking about the concept of affirmative action and the law.
Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, KS was a landmark decision which said that schools had to be desegrated, that 'separate but equal' wasn't legal under the law. So- the precedent set in Brown is that segregation must be ended. But how far does the law reach in the other direction- is is proper for the law to dictate a level of desegregation which muct be enforced, or is this over-reaching?
I'd postulate the latter. A community may not be ethnically homogeneous, and this would seem to be the key factor.- how granular the sample is, and what levels of variance are acceptable. Within Seattle and King County, the Ballard and Magnolia neighbourhoods have very low minority presence; where as areas like White Center have significantly higher concentrations. So- is it proper to bus students from White Center to Ballard because the latter has fewer minorities than the average? This seems patently ridiculous.
As long as there isn't evidence of deliberately exclusionary practice, shouldn't the courts stay out of it, and let neighbourhood schools vary as they may? Is there something simple I'm missing here?
Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, KS was a landmark decision which said that schools had to be desegrated, that 'separate but equal' wasn't legal under the law. So- the precedent set in Brown is that segregation must be ended. But how far does the law reach in the other direction- is is proper for the law to dictate a level of desegregation which muct be enforced, or is this over-reaching?
I'd postulate the latter. A community may not be ethnically homogeneous, and this would seem to be the key factor.- how granular the sample is, and what levels of variance are acceptable. Within Seattle and King County, the Ballard and Magnolia neighbourhoods have very low minority presence; where as areas like White Center have significantly higher concentrations. So- is it proper to bus students from White Center to Ballard because the latter has fewer minorities than the average? This seems patently ridiculous.
As long as there isn't evidence of deliberately exclusionary practice, shouldn't the courts stay out of it, and let neighbourhood schools vary as they may? Is there something simple I'm missing here?
