• Logging In
• Password Recovery

School districts around the country including the Chicago Public Schools are closely following two courts cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, which could ban public schools from using students’ race to promote diversity. “The purpose of the Equal Protection clause is to ensure that people are treated as individuals rather than based on the color of their skin,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. said.

Cases from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., brought the issue before the court for the first time since 2003, when a 5-4 ruling upheld considering race in college admissions to attain a diverse student body. A ruling is expected by June. The two cases are Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith vs. Jefferson County Board of Education. Lawyers for the parents and the Bush administration said the plans violate the 14th Amendment. At issue are the racial-integration guidelines adopted by school boards in Seattle and Louisville.

Seattle allows its students to choose which high school they want to attend but tries to maintain a racial balance within 10 percentage points of its overall enrollment. In 2001, before the program was suspended, 210 white students and 90 minorities were denied their first choice of a high school. The Louisville schools seek to keep black enrollment between 15 percent and 50 percent.

Mike Vaughn, communications director for the Chicago Public Schools, said the challenges could prove among the most significant K-12 desegregation cases since the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that banned racial segregation in public schools. He adds that CPS is monitoring these two cases case and predict its outcome could play a crucial role in determining how race-based admission policies are handled in the future for the nation’s third-largest school system with 435,000 students.

The district uses a racially weighted lottery system to ensure diversity at some 60 selective and magnet schools citywide. About 400 of the nation’s 15,000 school districts are under court orders to desegregate. In August, a federal judge dumped many Chicago Public Schools desegregation rules, but the system remains under a 26-year-old desegregation plan. Diversity problems go beyond high school Education advocates like Walter Michaels, best-selling author of the book “The Trouble with Diversity,” said by focusing on race and promoting diversity programs at universities, rich people can maintain their class status. That’s because many selective universities enroll so few minority students. For example, this year blacks made up 2 percent of the student population at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and 6 percent at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, school records show.

And Michaels adds that the majority of students at selective colleges come from families of extreme wealth. At Harvard, for example, 75 percent of students come from families with incomes over $100,000, according to a recent report by the National Board of Higher Education, a New York-based non-profit organization.

If Harvard’s affirmative action program became class-based, designed to reflect the class distribution of the United States, half of the current student body would be eliminated. Most of those removed would be rich and white, the report said. “It’s no wonder that rich white kids and their parents aren’t complaining about diversity. Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality,” adds Michaels.

Closer to home, he points out that 40 percent of the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign students come from families making over $100,000, although only a little over 20 percent of American families have incomes that high. Recently, Michigan voters approved a proposition to amend the state constitution, banning public institutions from considering race or sex in public education, employment or contracting.

The whole basis of university racial preference programs is that they serve “the interest of diversity,” said Patrick Deval, an attorney and former director of the Civil Rights division for the U.S. Justice Department. He cites the 1978 Supreme Court case Bakke v. Board of Regents. That of course begs the question: How “diverse” is a student body when the overwhelming majority comes from well-to-do, white families? He calls universities “rich people’s malls.”

It’s not that poor people are being kept out of elite schools because they can’t pay, Deval said. “It’s because they generally don’t qualify for admission in the first place. Competition for admittance at the high schools and colleges begins in kindergarten. Wealthy and upper-middle class parents groom their children for such acceptance by placing them in private schools — even exclusive preschools — or moving to expensive neighborhoods where higher taxes assure a better education,” adds Deval.

“So, a white kid born in a trailer park and a black kid raised in inner-city housing projects are at virtually the same disadvantage.” Micheals writes in his book that “the entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from the very start to enable the rich (who are usually white) to out compete the poor (who are usually minorities).” Wendell Hutson is a freelance writer for NLCN and various publications. To comment on this article visit our weblog at: www.nlcn.org.