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Author Topic: Supreme Court school desegregation decision: Bye-bye Brown?
Obi-Ewan 
Registered: Jan '00
6609_Anakin Skywalker
Date Posted: 7/2/07 4:29pm Subject: RE: Supreme Court school desegregation decision: Bye-bye Brown?
One of the positive aspects of integration in the wake of Brown was that it forced school districts to fund all the schools in their district equally. No longer could they sink their money into the white schools while ignoring the black ones. Robin Hood laws, now declared unconstitutional, prohibited taking money from one district and giving it to another. However, to my knowledge, moving money around within the district is acceptable. (KK, tell me if I'm wrong on this.) For example, my school district has for High Schools: Klein, Klein Forest, Klein Oak, and Klein Collins. I know of no law requiring that, say, taxes collected from Klein Oak's attendance zone can only be spent on Klein Oak. They're not funding individual schools so much as the whole school district. The point being, unless such a law exists, there's no legal barrier to all schools in the district being equitably funded. That was the real problem that made separate, by definition, unequal. If I hear of a school district deliberatly suffling all their minorities to one school, and screwing that school over by lack of funding, I'll be in line to attack them for it. But if all they're doing is simply allowing the attendance zones to reflect, rather than reverse, the demographics surrounding each school, I see no problem.

 

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Kimball_Kinnison 
Registered: Oct '01
6249_Veers
Date Posted: 7/3/07 7:07pm Subject: RE: Supreme Court school desegregation decision: Bye-bye Brown? - Date Edited: 7/3/07 7:13pm (2 edits total) Edited By: Kimball_Kinnison
For those of you who claim that this ruling undermines desegregation efforts, how many of you have actually looked at what the law actually says about desegregation and what it is?

42 USC 2000c (b) defines desegregation (in the context of public education) as:
"Desegregation" means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin, but "desegregation" shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.
Notice two important phrases in there:
without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin
and
“desegregation” shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.
At least the way that I read that, it says rather clearly in plain English that what those school systems were doing was not desegregation.

Of course, English becomes far from plain once you get lawyers involved.

Kimball Kinnison

EDIT: And just to make sure than no one thinks that this is a new definition, it was originally inserted with these exact words in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

 

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Lane_Winree 
Registered: Mar '06
16508_Wedge Antilles
Date Posted: 7/5/07 12:27am Subject: RE: Supreme Court school desegregation decision: Bye-bye Brown?
I just want to throw this out there as fodder since I'm from the greater Seattle area and have recently graduated Washington's extraordinarily inept education system, where this ruling has a tremendous impact.

Let's get a few things out of the way first. I'm Asian-American, not white. I spent my K-12 years in this system.

That said, I'm glad this ruling was handed down by the Supreme Court. These practices were (and excuse me for being brutally honest) simply to please the PC nation. From 6-8th grade, I was sent to a middle school fifteen miles from my house, despite the fact that five blocks north was another middle school that I could have walked to in less time than it took for me to drive there. In High School I was sent clear across the city on a twenty minute drive as opposed to another high school that I could have, again, walked to in less time. All of this was a part of my district's highly touted "racial diversification" programs. That was a personal headache for me, but these racial zoning issues have other consequences.

Thanks to these plans and other ill-advised practices, the Seattle School District (as well as many others in Washington) are in financial ruins. Seattle isn't looking to get out of the red for years, and part of the problem is racial zoning. Instead of geographic zoning relative to the schools, the district is footing the bill for longer transportation routes and more drivers. I view this as being incredibly irresponsible on a fiscal level. In a time where public education has a hard enough time getting funds, it seems almost moronic to be dumping excessive amounts of money into needless transportation. Doing away with racial zoning and basing enrollment strictly on a geographic basis is a huge step in solving the Seattle district's problem with hemorrhaging money.

Is racial diversity a good thing? Absolutely. Do our school districts have to funnel funds via racial zoning? Absolutely not.

 

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Master_SweetPea 
Registered: Nov '02
6289_A-Wing
Date Posted: 7/8/07 12:45pm Subject: RE: Supreme Court school desegregation decision: Bye-bye Brown?
so then stopping this will help reduce our use of fossil fuels and thus help reduce pollution?

 

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Lane_Winree 
Registered: Mar '06
16508_Wedge Antilles
Date Posted: 7/9/07 4:34pm Subject: RE: Supreme Court school desegregation decision: Bye-bye Brown?
Master_SweetPea posted:
so then stopping this will help reduce our use of fossil fuels and thus help reduce pollution?


Cute. All I'm saying is that our schools have serious financial problems. I'd rather see money being funneled into the classrooms themselves, rather than being placed into needless transportation.

 

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Master_SweetPea 
Registered: Nov '02
6289_A-Wing
Date Posted: 7/9/07 8:30pm Subject: RE: Supreme Court school desegregation decision: Bye-bye Brown?
ditto.

 

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I don't like the donkeys and I don't like the Elephants
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