If you haven't already, I hope you'll read Richard Kahlenberg's analysis of Louisville, Kentucky's new race and class-based desegregation program. After the Supreme Court last year declared, 5-4, that Louisville and Seattle's race-only integration plans were unconstitutional, Louisville didn't sit on its hands. The district heeded persuasive research showing that socioeconomic integration is the biggest factor in the academic achievement of poor children. Seattle, on the other hand, has thrown up its hands in frustration. The Seattle Times reports:
School Board Chairwoman Cheryl Chow puts it more bluntly: "It's not my job to desegregate the city," she said. "We serve the kids that come to our doors." ...
Seattle stopped busing, designed to achieve integration, more than 10 years ago. Its latest effort at orchestrating school diversity -- in which it based some school assignments on a student's race -- affected only a few hundred students each year. That was the so-called "racial tiebreaker" that the high court declared unconstitutional.
Over the past three decades, Seattle schools have steadily resegregated. Thirty schools -- close to 30 percent of the district's buildings -- have nonwhite populations that far exceed the district's average of 58 percent. In 20 of those schools, nonwhite enrollment is 90 percent or more.
To be fair, more than a will for change separates Louisville and Seattle. The Kentucky district contains suburbs as well as city, so affluent and white parents can't flee integration by making a relatively nearby move. That's why bigger, regional districts are a good idea. But even within the confines of a traditional urban district, Seattle could be applying Lousiville's approach of economic integration. The fact that they aren't shows the pervasive effects of last year's Court ruling, which essentially scared districts from trying integration.
--Dana Goldstein
