“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
That was Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s words this past Thursday. The Supreme Court restricted the abilities of public schools to use race as a factor of determining who can attend, potentially causing a great deal of disruption to the integration programs across the nation.
This decision was notably split with heavy opposition on both sides. This is one decision that “the court and the nation will come to regret,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer said.
Though it might not seem so, this ruling actually came about not as a motion to keep certain kids out of schools, but to allow children to go to their neighborhood or choice schools and not be turned away because the school had too many of their race already attending.
The decision is an interesting one because it raises the idea of what qualifications we can and should look at in our students. Should we look at race as a defining feature? How about gender, sexual preference or socio-economic backgrounds?
I know people like me in all of those ways, but we are still different – we are still individuals.
Perhaps the trick is to look for patterns that are multifaceted. If a group of students who are of the same race, gender, and economic class, or another set of common, factors are all performing poorly, we can base decisions on that.
If one school has too great of a difference on students across multiple levels, perhaps the district lines for the school can be redrawn to include more of the community.
We are in an era of political correctness, but we cannot let that stand in the way of common sense. If there is a community of white, black, Hispanic, etc. that all tend to go to a community school, it might not be smart to bus them out to other parts of the city in the name of diversity.
I went to schools with temporary buildings, sometimes no air conditioning, cracked walls, and I know a fair amount of you did too. These problems existed regardless of the percentage of different races in the school.
We cannot let our public schools decay in front of us, we cannot praise some and refuse to fix others. We need to repair all of our schools, and not ever be shown a statistic on race when it comes to where we are putting our money.
—Contact Geoff Whiting at [email protected]