The Supreme Court ruled today that race cannot be used to decide where students go to school except in limited circumstances, a decision that advocates fear could jeopardize roughly 20 voluntary desegregation plans in Massachusetts.
By a 5-4 vote, the court struck down voluntary programs adopted in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., to attain racial diversity in public school classrooms.
Chief Justice Roberts said, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Wasn't that refreshing?
Clarence Thomas added, "What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today... The plans before us base school assignment decisions on students' race. Because 'our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,' such race-based decisionmaking is unconstitutional."
WASHINGTON -- Manufacturers may set a fixed price for their products and forbid retailers from offering discounts, the Supreme Court said today, overturning a nearly century-old rule of antitrust law that prohibited retail price fixing.
The 5-4 ruling may be felt by shoppers, including those who buy on the Internet. It permits manufacturers to adopt and enforce what lawyers called "resale price maintenance agreements" that forbid discounting.
Until today, the nation has had an unusually competitive retail market, in part because antitrust laws made it illegal for sellers or manufacturers to agree on fixed prices. The Supreme Court, in a 1911 case involving Dr. Miles and his patented medicines, had said that price-fixing agreements between manufacturers and retail sellers were flatly illegal.
It looks like the consumer got screwed on this one...
Inequities in the quality of education has to be addressed in means beyond forced integration ;a policy that people have demonstrated they reject.
I can only tel you the very sad story of then Govenor Bush yammering on about no child left behind and then point to the 50% dropout rate that Texas enjoys. Put that and the 2 billion dollar surplus the state has, and something smells to me. There is a lot we don't know.
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Now that may indeed be an indictment of human nature ,but it does represent an legitimate choice. Forced integration has been a failed policy.
The legitamate choice is for those that can afford it, the rest get kicked to the curb. Not just kids get left behind it seems. As far as forced integration, no such thing, as no one gets on the bus with a gun to their heads. They go to get better, just like immigrants. Does the problem start when they get off the bus???
It has been brought to my attention that perhaps I am looking at this with a Canadian perspective and not with an American one.
We appreciate all perspectives
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Furthermore it has been brought to my attention that it is a huge issue in terms of the quality of schools that black’s go to versus that of whites.
Well that's the excuse anyway. The responsibility for the quality of public schools lies with the administration ... and the parents and students. What I'm about to say is not very politically correct, but then no one can accuse me of ever being very PC because I don't mind saying the things that need to be said. Too many blacks (and others) in this country are trapped in a culture of victimhood instead of taking responsibility for themselves - it's all the white man's fault. Bill Cosby took a lot of heat for going around the country with this message that people didn't want, but needed to hear. I have as much sympathy as the next guy for those in need, but I have no sympathy for people that won't do what it takes, what's within their power to change, and take responsibility for bettering their lives and the lives of their children. If kids don't learn respect, integrity and hard work at home it's difficult to succeed at school and it makes it that much more difficult for those who are there to learn.
Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hypersegregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation.
And that's the fact that drives them crazy, and the one they seem to want to refuse to deal with because of the racial aspects of it. You can't say black schools are failing - even if they are - because it's racial profiling. That highlights the folly of this anti-profiling nonsense the left demands, just like extra screening for young Arab males in airports. My position is who cares as long as it achieves the desired, beneficial result? If people in those groups don't want to be proifiled then maybe it's time they do something to erase the perception.
I thought this was very revealing:
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His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers.
Ok, so wouldn't it have been more prudent to attack the problem? If the problem was school districts discriminatory funding practices then address that directly and emphatically while also correctly ruling a student couldn't be excluded because of race. Integration in the hope of equalizing funding was a specious way to achieve the desired result.
On the second, I hope Elliot weighs in. I can see the pros and cons. For instance, we are the exclusive distributor for a particular fire alarm and extinguisher manufacturer. If they set a reasonable retail price we had to follow it would simplfiy things and we wouldn't have to discount so much. On the other hand it would hamper our bidding on projects that allow an "or equal" in lieu of what's specified. We may have the best extinguishers and state of the art fire alarms, but they're certainly not the most economical. Say you wanted that new Toyota FJ Cruiser, there would be no more shopping for the best deal, but then again it would also prevent a dealer from sticking it to an unwitting buyer. I disagree with the decision but I have doubts it will affect most of us too much. I have no plans on buying my wife a Leegin handbag or shopping for a Louis Vuitton man bag any time soon so they can sell them for whatever they like.
I can only tel you the very sad story of then Govenor Bush yammering on about no child left behind and then point to the 50% dropout rate that Texas enjoys. Put that and the 2 billion dollar surplus the state has, and something smells to me. There is a lot we don't know.
There is a lot we don't know, but we do know the dropout rate in Texas is NOT 50% or even close. It was about 50% in Brownsville, a border city, but not statewide:
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For 2005, the most recent figures available from the TEA, 84 percent of Texas students graduated with a full diploma in 2005 while 3.8 percent earned their GED, 7.9 percent continued high after four years and 4.3 percent dropped out.
But on the face of it, based on the article posted by Steve, I find myself in opposition with the conservative members of the court on this price-fixing issue.
Kudos to the court on the affimative action ruling, though.
Steve ; when you have the time read Justice Thomas' concurring opinion starting on page 49 of the opinion .
In case someone might like to read a few exceprts from Thomas' opinion...
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Disfavoring a color-blind interpretation of the Constitution, the dissent would give school boards a free hand to make decisions on the basis of race—an approach reminiscent of that advocated by the segregationists in Brown v. Board of Educa-tion, 347 U. S 483 (1954). This approach is just as wrong today as it was a half-century ago. The Constitution and our cases require us to be much more demanding before permitting local school boards to make decisions based on race...
Racial imbalance is not segregation. Although presently observed racial imbalance might resultfrom past de jure segregation, racial imbalance can alsoresult from any number of innocent private decisions, including voluntary housing choices...
Unlike de jure segregation, there is no ultimate remedy for racial imbalance. Individual schools will fall in and out of balance in the natural course, and the appropriate balance itself will shift with a school district’s changing demographics. Thus, racial balancing will have to take place on an indefinite basis—a continuous process with no identifiable culpable party and no discernable end point...
As these programs demonstrate, government uses racial criteria to “bring theraces together,” post, at 29, someone gets excluded, and the person excluded suffers an injury solely because of his or her race. The petitioner in the Louisville case received a letter from the school board informing her that her kindergartener would not be allowed to attend the school of petitioner’s choosing because of the child’s race. App. inNo. 05–915, p. 97. Doubtless, hundreds of letters like this went out from both school boards every year these race-based assignment plans were in operation. This type ofexclusion, solely on the basis of race, is precisely the sort of government action that pits the races against one an-other, exacerbates racial tension, and “provoke[s] resent-ment among those who believe that they have beenwronged by the government’s use of race...”
Finally, the dissent asserts a “democratic element” to the integration interest. It defines the “democratic element” as “an interest in producing an educational environment that reflects the ‘pluralistic society’ in which ourchildren will live.” Post, at 39.15 Environmental reflection, though, is just another way to say racial balancing. And “[p]referring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for itsown sake.” Bakke, 438 U. S., at 307 (opinion of Powell, J.). “This the Constitution forbids.” Ibid.; Grutter, supra, at 329–330; Freeman, 503 U. S., at 494...Simply putting students together underthe same roof does not necessarily mean that the studentswill learn together or even interact..."
Most of the dissent’s criticisms of today’s result can betraced to its rejection of the color-blind Constitution. See post, at 29. The dissent attempts to marginalize the no-tion of a color-blind Constitution by consigning it to meand Members of today’s plurality.19 See ibid.; see also post, at 61. But I am quite comfortable in the company I keep.
rock on !! indeed, it's refreshing to see so much common sense.
al-AP's view today in our paper has (naturally) been to highlight the court's right turn and the left's pain. They went so far as to publish a graph of which justices agree with each other and how often.
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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer shook his head. He rolled his eyes. He even grimaced once or twice as he listened to Chief Justice John Roberts read the majority opinion in the school diversity case on Thursday...He punctuated his words by jabbing his right hand into the air. He told the hushed courtroom three times that the majority was wrong.
I think it's all bunk. I don't know how you can cure segregation without mentioning race. And, I don't see you can avoid the mention of race if you're going to cure segregation.
I dunno. I have the answers to all the world’s problems, except this one.
If you had dug deeper, you would know that the TEA statistics are under fire for the way they have skewed the numbers to hide the problem of drop out rates, so let me catch you up a bit, MySA.com: State Government
and let me add this to clarify your perception. Education Working Paper 3 | Public High School Graduation and College Readiness Rates in the United States
So the the education system is broke, and no amount of busing will fix that, as a lot more must be done to make all schools give students a credible education, and let me clarify another point as the turnover rate for teachers is 50% as of 2006, in Texas, and the ISD's here depends on their funding from the state, and local schools can only administer what the state gives them, and that could use some oversight as well.
As to the Supreme courts new ruling, for now it only applies to the Seattle and Louisiana school systems specifically, and other districts are already on notice to modify ther integration policy, as they must use other factors besides race, to determine the make up of schools in their jursdiction. The ruling fixes nothing, and until they get to the root of he problem, which is economics, not race, the problem will grow, as it has in the past.
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