Last June, 53 years after Brown v. the Board of Education, the Supreme Court declared that the modest voluntary racial integration strategies practiced by two school districts—one in Seattle, WA, the other in Louisville, KY—-were unconstitutional. “This is a decision, ” wrote dissenting Justice Stephen Breyer, “that the Court and the nation will come to regret.”
Yet there was a very large and interesting loophole in the decision that Slate legal writer Emily Bazelon explores in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.
The decision was 5-4, making justice Kennedy the swing vote. However when Kennedy wrote his opinion, he agreed with Roberts that public school districts should not make school assignments based on the race of individual students. Then he added that the court’s ruling “should not prevent school districts from continuing the important work of bringing together students of different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds.”
Education lawyers took notice of this crack in the decision’s metaphorical door and, after pawing repeatedly through Kennedy’s words, they concluded that districts could assign a child to a school based on any kind of socioeconomic measure they chose—including income, assets, parental education attainment.
The importance of class in a school population’s educational performance, was first measured in 1966, when Congress asked a Johns Hopkins sociologist named James S. Coleman to examine why the educational achievement of black students lagged so far behind that of white kids:
The expected answer was that more than a decade after Brown, black kids were still often going to inferior schools with small budgets. But Coleman found that the varying amount of money spent on schools didn’t account for the achievement gap. Instead, the greater poverty of black families did. When high concentrations of poor kids went to school together, Coleman reported, all the students at the school tended to learn less.
How much less was later quantified. The Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks reanalyzed Coleman’s data in the 1970s and concluded that poor black sixth-graders in majority middle-class schools were 20 months ahead of poor black sixth-graders in majority low-income schools. The statistics for poor white students were similar. In the last 40 years, Coleman’s findings, known informally as the Coleman Report, have been confirmed again and again. Most recently, in a 2006 study, Douglas Harris, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, found that when more than half the students were low-income, only 1.1 percent of schools consistently performed at a “high” level (defined as two years of scores in the top third of the U.S. Department of Education’s national achievement database in two grades and in two subjects: English and math). By contrast, 24.2 percent of schools that are majority middle-class met Harris’s standard.
School districts in areas from Jefferson County, Kentucky, to San Francisco, CA to Wake County, North Carolina are experimenting with socioeconomic-based integration but, although there are some very encouraging results, education experts point out that strategies that work for one district and/or city may not apply to another region at all. And for cities with huge urban populations like Los Angeles, Detroit, New York and Chicago, the problems are far more complex.
In our own hometown of LA, for example, where huge swaths of parents who can afford to do so have yanked their kids out of public schools in favor of private campuses, 77 perecent of the city’s public school students are lower income.
Yet, even in the big cities, the issue is not entirely cut-and-dried, says Baselon in her smart and nuanced article —that is worth reading in total.
(It’s exactly the kind of in-depth exploration of a single angle on an important issue that it would be great to see in the LA Times magazine—if we had an LA Times Magazine.)
You can’t lump LA in with Wake Cty, NC, DC, Philly, Boston or any other big city. Even all of NY State has an est. 1 million Hispanics, whereas our county alone has 3 times that; our LAUSD is the same percentage of Latinos as the figure you give are on poverty assistance (77%), while blacks, which make up the majority of inner city schools in other cities, are only 12% here. Typically, Latino immigrants elsewhere are at most 10%. So in LA, race IS largely class, and is in a class of its own. Almost all immigrants haven’t finished h.s. in their home countries, most not even 8th grade. (I don’t know what the percentage breakdowns are by race in S.F., or if there are any other Cal cities which are close to LA. Are there any in AZ that are close? You’d have to correlate by race AND class to get any valid data that applies to LA.)
If you look at different races by class, you see huge differences in all of them — from the wealthy Mexicans settling in gated enclaves outside San Diego to escape crime and threats of kidnapping, vs. the Laitno population of LAUSD; the black middle class of Baldwin Hills which shuns the local public schools, and Shaq and other wealthy blacks in Manhattan Beach; and whites who come from families where no one has graduated college or made it a priority vs. the kids of educated middle to wealthy whites. The educated parents of all races have more in common with each other than with the “underclass” of their own race — but since in LA one race with one socio-economic level is so predominant, you can’t extrapolate statistics to other cities with the more historical black-white dichotomies.
(If I’ve left some of this unrefined, sorry, thoughts jotted down late at night while they’re fresh on my mind…)
Holy cow. WBC sure stays up late.
“…the important work of bringing together students of different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds.â€Â
And, why is this important? It seems that has caused more problems than any good that might have resulted. Also, don’t give me this “diversity” nonsense, which has become nothing but favoring people for their races rather than their accomplishments. Next, explain to me why black kids can’t learn unless they are sitting next to white kids. I guess the next move is to crank up mandatory cross-town bussing–another great liberal idea.
Oh, let’s look at the “scientific” study that helped push through the Brown decision.
Give me a break! Liberal studies are jokes. They know the results that they want and go for that. However, let a study go the other way and they’ll kill the messenger, like William Shockley. When impartial results don’t fit their agendas, they’ll deny the “fairness” of it–like SAT scores.
Education lawyers took notice of this crack in the decision’s metaphorical door….
I love the ways that liberals look at laws, which is that laws mean only what they choose them to mean. Here you have a Supreme Court ruling, and the losers instantly dismiss it and say that the ruling doesn’t change anything. This is the same with the Washington, D.C. handgun ruling. Didn’t liberals learn as kids that no means no?
Maybe poor kids do poorly in school because they inherited the genes and get guidance from parents who are poor, and poor people stay there if they aren’t smart enough to break out of poverty.
You don’t need the L.A. Times Magazine to read the studies that you want. Just do like most liberals–make up your own!
Why do Asian students generally get higher marks than Latinos?
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lincoln16-2008jul16,0,3712530.story?
Those who lament the Supreme Court decision regarding modest voluntary racial integration strategies (Voluntary – Means the local government FORCED children to be bused 10 miles away from their neighborhoods), should VOLUNTER their children for busing to inner city schools.
The same 4 liberal Supreme Court Justices who voted to bus children are the same FOOLS who believe that the second amendment, A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed., is only to protect the rights of individual states.
The 2007 June decision was based on our Constitution and protection or rights, not on laws that liberal judges make up to move forward their agenda.
(read the Asian students link posted by Lost Expectations)
WBC, all quite right about LA. This whole concept only tangentially relates to big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit et al—each of which are different from one another, too. (As the article says as well.) Here in LA we have a whole different kettle of fish, and yet the class issue certainly enters in, as you alluded to on the other thread,
The Catholic schools are more diverse than LAUSD. Loyola’s got Jews, Buddhists, Russian Orthodox, kids of the wealthy and kids of garment workers and gardeners.
I think the problem with bussing that happened in LA is that the white children never got bussed to the inner city, they just left the public schools all together.
I never went to public school. I went to parochial school, but I heard these various stories. In LA all of the kids who were bussed were in one class and all of the kids who were not were in another class.
Seems to completely defeat the purpose of bussing. You can just stay in your own school and do that.
Also from friends of mine who have children now, I used to live in Los Feliz and at the school all of the children from the area went to the magnet version of the school (even if they weren’t exactly in the district they just needed to have a one million dollar house and talk to so-so and more than often these people were white) while everyone else from somewhere else seemed to go to the regular school.
Now these obviously are just little personal anecdotes, but I think bussing could have worked if it had been done the way it was supposed to be done.
It seemed to be (and still seems to be) all of these little tricks in LA to get out of doing what was supposed to be done.
Now my fiance who is white grew up in Montgomery, Alambama and for some odd reason they actually did bus the white kids out to the black schools and he went to an integrated high school in a black neighborhood. Now maybe that was just one little blip in time. He was going to high school in the 80s, but it seems like to me even though he’s from the “south” he has way more tolerance for a wider variety of people than people who look like him, but are from the more so-called progressive areas.
I think the problem with LA is that there is way too much of a separation between classes. In most cities (before this economic downtown turn) it seemed like most people were around middle class or working class. The only thing people bussed to schools had to overcome was stereotypes about race, but in LA you have people who are literally from a different world living in the same city.
Much more to overcome in regards to diversity.
browne: I think bussing could have worked if it had been done the way it was supposed to be done….
This is a problem with liberals. They just can’t believe that some great social engineering scheme didn’t work. Bussing did work exactly as it could in response to human nature. And, in the process, it helped to kill off central cities, which made problems worse. Way to go, liberal judges.
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browne: Much more to overcome in regards to diversity.
We’ve had enough of diversity. It’s a code word for racial preferences. Plus, I don’t like being forced into associations with people of low values and bad ideas, just because they are different. Western civilization progressed because it took the best ideas from different groups and discarded those that were less successful.