Saturday, July 07, 2007

EDUCATIONAL RACISTS STILL WRIGGLING

A Leftist critique of the recent SCOTUS decision below. They may well be right in saying that the decision leaves it open for education authorities to use proxies for race rather than race itself in manipulating the composition of their student bodies but they fail to acknowledge that many of the possible proxies would not only fall foul of the 14th Amendment too but also have hilarious results. The best proxies for negritude are income and IQ and a school that kept out most students from high income and high IQ families would be shooting itself in the foot anyway. They might be thanked by the families concerned, though! And making a good school take in a quota of students from poor backgrounds would be more likely to draw in grateful poor whites than blacks. Far-Left school administrations will probably just lie about what they are doing but the threat of exposure should keep most administrations pretty close to the strait and narrow

But despite appearances, the school integration decisions represent something of an exception to that trend. In those cases, the Court invalidated the Seattle and Louisville plans, which used race as one factor in promoting inclusive and diverse schools. The outcome of these cases was disappointing, to be sure. But much of the news reporting on the cases has gotten it wrong, describing the outcome as a 5-to-4 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts against voluntary school integration. In fact, the outcome of these cases was a 4-to-1-to-4 decision in which Justice Anthony Kennedy (the "1") controlled the outcome and wrote a careful opinion with both positive and negative implications for the future of educational opportunity and our Constitution.

Justice Kennedy voted with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas to strike down the specific policies used by the Louisville and Seattle school districts. But he agreed with Justices Souter, Stevens, Ginsburg and Breyer that educational diversity and combating segregation are compelling governmental interests that governments may pursue through careful efforts that consider race. Unlike the Roberts group, Justice Kennedy made clear that his disagreement was with the specifics of the plans at issue, and not with their motives or the limited consideration of race to accomplish them. Kennedy concluded, for example, that

[i]f school authorities are concerned that the student-body compositions of certain schools interfere with the objective of offering an equal educational opportunity to all of their students, they are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a general way and without treating each student in different fashion solely on the basis of a systematic, individual typing by race.

More clearly than in any of his past decisions, Justice Kennedy (and therefore a majority of the Court) firmly rejected Chief Justice Roberts' position (typically articulated in past cases by Justices Scalia and Thomas) that considering race in a careful way to promote inclusion inflicts the same constitutional harm as the hateful segregation laws that Brown v. Board of Education legally overturned. While Chief Justice Roberts' opinion quips that "the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Justice Kennedy's careful opinion explains that

[t]he enduring hope is that race should not matter; the reality is that it too often does," and notes that "as an aspiration, Justice Harlan's axiom [that our Constitution is "colorblind"] must command our assent. In the real world, it is regrettable to say, it cannot be a universal constitutional principle.

What Justice Kennedy says is unconstitutional is considering the race of individual students in determining their school assignment. That element, and the ambiguous nature of the Seattle and Louisville plans, Kennedy said, made those programs insufficiently narrow in their tailoring to meet constitutional muster.

Justice Kennedy's ruling misapprehends how difficult it is to overcome residential segregation, disparate school resources, and other barriers to inclusion without modest mechanisms like the "tie breakers" used in these cases. In other words, he is wrong to conclude that the Louisville and Seattle plans were not "narrowly tailored" to achieve the compelling goal of a diverse and equal education. But while the Court's ruling will make it harder to bring our kids together across lines of difference, it's important to acknowledge the victory for the principles of integration, inclusion and diversity that Justice Kennedy's opinion represents. Justice Kennedy's opinion also makes clear that numerous options for promoting inclusion remain, many of which include explicit consideration of race. His opinion says:

School boards may pursue the goal of bringing together students of diverse backgrounds and races through other means, including strategic site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones with general recognition of the demographics of neighborhoods; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race.

School districts and their allies are already hard at work crafting innovative approaches within the Court's parameters that work on the ground. Congress, too, has an important role to play in promoting inclusion and combating segregation in the wake of last week's decision. For example, Congress should allocate significant resources for communities that want to pursue diversity efforts in line with the Court's ruling. Federal support for school construction and expansion should be allocated, in part, based on whether school locations and attendance zones will foster or stymie integration.

And the U.S. Senate must give far greater scrutiny of judicial nominees than it has done to date. It's deeply disturbing that four members of the Court would have outlawed almost all effective efforts to promote inclusion in our nation's schools. And their view that the modest voluntary integration efforts at issue in these cases are constitutionally tantamount to Jim Crow-era segregation is nothing short of outrageous.

While a majority of the Court correctly rejected that extreme position, the Chief Justice's opinion-joined by Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas-fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of our Constitution and highlights the importance of exacting questioning of the President's judicial nominations by the U.S. Senate.

Source





Official graduation rate to get a bit more honest

The official 2006 graduation rate for Montgomery County public schools is 92 percent. But that number and the formula by which it was calculated are falling out of use in public education. For years, public educators in Maryland, Virginia and the District have measured graduation rates based on the number of students known to have dropped out, and many dropouts are never counted. Education leaders long defended the method, but increasingly they are agreeing with researchers that it yields inflated graduation rates. Now, educators are taking a closer look at attrition, the winnowing-down of a high school population over time, as the basis for a new and more accurate -- and less flattering -- way of calculating the graduation rate.

All 50 governors have agreed to a new method for calculating the graduation rate. Their proposal, which will be adopted in Virginia by 2008, in the District by 2010 and in Maryland by 2011, is fairly simple: Divide the number of freshman in one year by the number of graduates four years later, adjusting for students who transfer in or out or repeat grades. Applying the new math depends on an accurate count of transfers and students who repeat grades. State education officials say they are working on that and intend to go even further by applying a unique identifier to each student.

To illustrate the extent of student attrition at different county high schools, The Washington Post analyzed attrition data for the class of 2006 using a method similar to the formula embraced by the governors. The analysis of head counts from 23 schools, provided by the state education department, found that the class shrank from 11,589 students to 9,743 between freshman year and graduation day. That suggests a graduation rate of about 84 percent, eight points lower than the 92 percent reported by the Maryland State Department of Education.

The Post estimated graduation rates by comparing the number of freshmen enrolled in fall 2002 with the number of diplomas awarded in spring 2006, the latest count available. The result is only an estimate -- it doesn't account for the comings and goings of students, those who repeat grades or the growth and decline in school populations over time. But it may give a more accurate picture of student attrition than the state can provide at present. Parents seeking out such data from the state education department at http://www.mdreportcard.org will find the old rates, based on dropouts.

In contrast, the graduation formula adopted by the National Governors Association should yield a more accurate count. The Post's findings are similar to those of a report released last month by Editorial Projects in Education, publisher of Education Week. That study, embraced by the Bush administration, estimated attrition rates for school districts nationwide and painted a bleak picture: Just over two-thirds of students graduate.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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