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July 24, 2007
What the Supremes mean for public ed policyIn case you missed it, Education Week ran this chat Thursday, July 19, featuring NSBA's own Deputy General Counsel, Naomi Gittins, on the subject of the Supreme Court's impact on school policies. Gittins was joined by Mark Walsh of Education Week, and Paul Beard, a senior staff attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation.
Questions focused heavily on the recent race-based cases decided by the court, as well as Bong Hits 4 Jesus case.
Here's a good question from Kirstin McCarthy, a program associate with the Business Higher Education Forum:I'm interested to know if panelists could identify one or a few school district(s) that have successfully "limited their use of racial classifications when making school assignments"? I'm interested to understand what classifications, or combinations of classifications, have lead most successfully to diverse classrooms, and what benefits these school districts have gained from such school assignment classification systems.
Gittins replied: "Several districts that have received media attention in the wake of the decision are San Francisco, Wake County, N.C., Cambridge, Mass., La Crosse, Wis., and Brandywine, Del., as school districts that have moved away from assignment plans that take race into account to ones that are based on one or more factors including socioeconomic status, poverty, home language, educational attainment of parents, student test scores, etc. The jury is still out as to whether these plans successfully promote diverse classrooms. The U.S. Department of Education touts them as successes, and Richard Kahlenberg, a proponent of SES as a means of achieving diversity, asserts that such plans do work.
"Others are less optimistic in their assessment about whether these plans do result in racially diverse schools that help close the achievement gap between whites and some minority groups (see NAACP LDF website). What is important to remember is that these districts as well as many others are committed to bringing the benefits of diverse classrooms to all their students and avoiding the harms of racial isolation, both of which are well documented and they will continue to struggle to accomplish these goals within the parameters of the law."
Want more? Check out the complete transcript from this expert panel.
Postscript: Louisville's school board (Jefferson County) has ratified a plan for how the district will deal with the Supreme Court's ruling in the upcoming school year. The plan will be submitted to a federal judge. The district previously had announced that the decision would not change everything in the district overnight, leading the plaintiffs in the case to threaten more litigation. Stay tuned.
Posted July 24, 2007 4:06 PM | School Law
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