District Administration - February 2007 - (Page 20)

Warning : session_start : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : session_start : Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 9 Warning : Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by output started at /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php:9 in /mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 InsidetheLaw • Zach Miners Supreme Court Reviews Race in Assigning Schools he group Parents Involved in Community Schools sued Seattle School District No. 1 in 2000 after the founder’s daughter was one of 300 students denied their top high school choice because of a racial “tiebrea ker.” A U.S. district judge in Seattle and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Seattle integration program and said that the district had a “compelling interest in securing the educational and social beneﬁts of racial diversity.” But now, predominantly Repor t Analyzes white parents in School Segregation Louisville, Ken. and Seattle are arguing A November 2006 Center for Ameritheir schools’ intecan Progress report, Lost Learning, g rat ion programs Forgotten Promises, considers the in front of the educational impact of racial segregaSupreme Court. tion in more than 22,000 schools The two cases across the country enrolling more leave concerned parthan 18 million students. Previous ents wrestling with studies on the subject have never voluntary integraincluded more than a few thousand tion programs that students, making this study arguably use race as a factor the largest ever conducted on the in assigning students consequences of segregation. to speciﬁc public elementary and Some of the report’s ﬁndings include: secondary schools. • Blacks and Hispanics learn more in The Supreme Court integrated schools; is asking whether the two programs, • Minorities in integrated schools which have been perform better in college attendance upheld by federal and employment; appeals courts until • Minority students have lower now, are “acceptachievement in segregated schools. able” moves toward Given the Bush administration’s student diversity or just a way for the commitment to raise achievement in schools to set illegal minority schools, these ﬁndings raise racial quotas. serious questions about the adminParents are istration’s opposition to the school arguing that the integration programs in Seattle programs are and Louisville. If the goal is to raise denying children achievement, then opposing desegreadmission to ﬁ rst gation is counterproductive. choice schools not w w w.americanprogres s.or g to remedy past discr i m i nat ion but to T achieve a racial balance, which violates equal treatment guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The two districts have responded by saying that school integration—along with its educational and social beneﬁts—justiﬁes a caref u l, limited use of race in deciding which school a student should attend. Attorney Michael Madden, who represent s the Seattle school district, says race is only one factor and is only used in some instances as a tiebreaker when too many students apply to one school. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation violated 14th Amendment rights. Legal experts are saying the ﬁve conservative just ices who comprise the majority of the current court will likely vote the same way. The court’s four liberal justices have indicated, however, that they see no constitutional problem with school districts considering race to have individual school populations approximate the entire system’s racial makeup. “It’s a fundamental disagreement about the meaning of the Brown case,” says Philip Tegeler, executive director of the Poverty Race Research Action Council. T he court’s ruling could not only affect a thousand public school systems with voluntary integration plans but also those that face demographic change, like Long Island’s 124 racially stratiﬁed districts. Striking down integration policies there would essentially end any efforts to desegregate the school system. The Bush administration has sided with the parents, stating that race-based student assignments can only be used to “eliminate the vestiges of past discrimination,” not to maintain integration. But Theodore Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund says that accepting the Bush argument would be a “repudiation of Brown.” T housa nds of schools throughout the country are still almost completely segregated and, according to the Sacramento-based Paciﬁc Legal Foundation, as many as 1,000 districts still voluntarily pursue integration using race in some form. The court has not yet issued an ofﬁcia l ruling. District Administration 20 February 2007 DA_207_insidethelaw.indd 20 1/17/07 10:15:27 AM Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0 http://www.americanprogress.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - February 2007

Contents
Editor's Letter
Update
Inside the Law
Curriculum Update
Tackling Health Care Together
Administrator Profile
District Profile
Curriculum Hotspots
New Information Systems Track Student Progress
Students Wanted!
Spread the Word
Mentors Boost Student Reading Levels
The Online Edge
Speaking Out
Research Corner
Problem/Solution
Leadership Books
New Products
Calendar of Events
Professional Opinion

District Administration - February 2007