Racists & Robber Barons

Justice Stephen Breyer is the very model of a decorous Supreme Court Justice. That's why his impassioned soliloquy condemning the majority's decision in the school desegregation cases, delivered on the last day of the Court's term, drew so much attention. Those opinions "threaten the promise" of Brown v. Board of Education, he said. "This is a decision that the Court and the nation will come to regret."

These cases represent the last chapter in the half-century effort to end racial isolation in the public schools. The Seattle and Louisville integration plans that the five-member majority struck down are remarkable in their modesty. These communities weren't sending kids across town on long bus rides in the name of racial balance, and neither of them was using a strict racial quota to assign students. "I am not aware of any district that is actively seeing the broad-based use of a race-based mechanism to dictate large portions of the districts' student assignments," says Joseph Olchefske, former superintendent of schools in Seattle. In both cities, race was simply a tiebreaker in determining which students could attend a popular school. There has to be some rule for making decisions in these cases--race was selected, says Olchefske, because it's "a way of promoting a better environment for learning." What's wrong with that?

These two cities came to adopt race-sensitive choice plans in ways that reflect their local political values. In the 1970s, confronted by threats of a desegregation lawsuit, Seattle began to bus students; when that arrangement generated widespread hostility, the district settled for a more modest, and more educationally defensible, process that allowed more than 90 percent of the students to attend their first- or second-choice school.

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