Of all things to worry about in the twenty-first century:  schools are segregated again.

On August 29, 2007, a Washington Post story [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/29/AR2007082902111.html] proclaims that schools are becoming more segregated because of the June 2007 ruling of the Supreme Court regarding using race as a factor in assigning children to public schools.  How could that be, if the Supreme Court ruled that school districts must be color-blind?

The Post story cites a report from the Civil Rights Project of UCLA.  Matthew Biggs, author of the Post story, clams that: “Many segregated schools struggle to attract highly qualified teachers and administrators, do not prepare students well for college and fail to graduate more than half their students.” 

Are the Washington Post and University of California funded research report saying that schools in predominantly non-white areas, with predominantly non-white students are of worse quality than schools in areas with more white students? 

They don't mention why this is.  Are they saying that minority students constantly underacheive and it only shows when they have schools to themselves?  Are they saying that black and Latino students do worse in school without more white students around, to give the school an air of seriousness and focus?

When I went to high school in a largely white neighborhood in Long Beach, CA; there was about a 25-25-15-35 mix of Latinos, blacks, Asians, and whites.  In the honors classes I took, there were more white students (not by that much, however) and the minority students (there were plenty) were focused and determine to study and achieve.  In the non-honors classes I took, the students (far less white students, more Latinos and blacks) the students were loud, often vulgar, talked throughout class and never contributed anything to a discussion.  I learned less in those non-honors classes with disruptive, mostly minority students.   (However, I didn't learn all that much in the honors classes where teachers' main focus was how creative we could be,  but at least everyone in the class did their homework and could keep quiet for 55 minutes while the teachers tried to do their jobs.)  

Thanks to this new study, I can conclude that minority students, left to their own devices will disrupt class and not take their educations seriously.  Schools need leaders--students to act and acknowledge that it’s an institute of learning and that it’s a privilege to be educated.   Why else would all-minority schools do so poorly?

At any rate, that was not my point.  My point is that while the media outlets constantly scream that they have “No Political Agenda,” they publish stories about institutes and reports and studies that do have political biases and agendas.  The UCLA professor they interviewed (Gary Orfield) says, “The federal courts are clearly pushing us backward segregation with the encouragement of the Justice Department of President George W. Bush.”  Nevermind the unclear syntax, his point is what hippies have been claiming for decades:  The Man exists.   

There you have it: The US government (or, “The System,” if you prefer broad, scary-sounding terms) is going out of the way to destroy the educations and opportunities of minority students.  There’s something wrong with The System.  Not the attitudes many minority students take towards their public educations.   (And nevermind that Asian students are consistently enrolled in universities in numbers disproportionate to their population.)

The court case that the study cites as destroying the hopes and dreams of minority students is Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al [and is graciously archived by Cornell University at http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-908.ZO.html]. This case was ruled by the Supreme Court on June 28, 2007 and reversed the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that school districts in Washington State could use race as a “tiebreaker” when assigning children to schools.  After some children were denied admission to their high schools of choice solely because of race, the parents--understandably so--filed suit based on an a violation of their constitutionally guaranteed right to equal protection.  District and Ninth Circuit Courts upheld the school’s decision, saying it had reason based on its interest in creating diverse schools.

The school district allowed students to choose which high school they attended; if one school became overbooked, then race was considered.  The districts distributed students to high schools to meet pre-set, mandated racial mixture ratios.  The schools had never had legal segregation or had ever been ordered by the court to desegregate, but voluntarily used quotas to overcome certain racial patterns that made certain schools more ethnically homogenous.  The high schools wouldn’t let more than a certain percentage of white students in, and if there were too many, then nonwhite students would be selected to attend that school--even if they would not have otherwise been selected if race had not been a factor. 

The Supreme Court deciding that it is wrong to assign students to certain schools based solely on race--you know, based on the great Civil Rights amendment, the Fourteenth one--is merely part of a concerted federal effort to give minorities poorer educations than white children get.

And there’s no liberal media?  Sure, the papers don’t write scathing polemics.  They just write “objective pieces” on thinly-veiled scathing polemics masquerading as “reports.”