“Are you suggesting that nonwhite children are likelier to be inferior students than white children? Isn’t that exactly the sentiment Brown sought to counter?”

Inferior and superior students (as i’ve defined them on the dimensions of intellectual level, behavior, and motivation) both come in all shades of color.

It’s hazardous to speculate about an empirical issue, but i’d guess that student-quality is a function of the following factors, in no particular order:

1) genetics: Intelligence is at least partially genetic, as are some personality characteristics that influence how emotionally stable we are, how prone we are to behavioral problems, mental health problems, etc. all of which can influence a student’s motivation and behavior in class.

2) home environment: Students who come from “broken homes”, where they are subject to physical abuse, or where the parents are divorced (single parent household), or constantly fighting, or where financial problems mean that the kids go cold or hungry or lack learning materials, or where parents abuse drugs or don’t provide proper medical care, or set an example that denigrates the importance of learning, etc. … All of these surely influence a child’s intellectual and emotional development, and their motivation.

Personally, i don’t believe there is any credible evidence that at the group (race) level, white, red, yellow, black, or brown people differ significantly from each other on any of these genetic factors, such as IQ or personality.

Concerning home environment, in some social settings (e.g., in a particular city) it might be the case that “broken homes” are more common among one race (say whites) than another race Y (say yellows). In which case, yes, in that particular city, there will be proportionately more white inferior students than yellow inferior students. And in which case, it would be rational for parents of yellow kids to not want a “critical mass” of white kids attending their kid’s schools, because that would likely result in a downward effect on the learning environment.

But, that seemingly racial difference in student quality would NOT be because whites are inherently, genetically more prone to use drugs or abuse their kids, etc. It would be a product of broader social/cultural forces that put whites in tougher overall circumstances in that particular city, circumstances that tend to lead to those negative home outcomes.

Are you suggesting that nonwhite children are likelier to be inferior students than white children? Isn’t that exactly the sentiment Brown sought to counter?

“Skipping to the end by integrating the schools via quotas and declaring victory is pointless. Does it improve the socio-economic status of a single person? I’d say it might, if there was some large material difference in basic educational opportunity between the schools. Here, the schools only seem to differ in the advance placement and magnet programs they offer.”

I think that “educational opportunity” isn’t just a function of what programs are being offered. Other factors matter, and one big one is the quality of the students who attend a school. E.g., a university like MIT isn’t great just because it has world-class faculty and facilities, part of its greatness comes from having really bright students who are highly motivated to achieve- all those 1550 SAT scores in classes. Intelligent, well-behaved, motivated students make for a great learning environment.

This is also true in K-12 education. Bright, motivated, disciplined kids make for a much better learning environment than intellectually stunted, unmotivated, and behaviorally disruptive kids.

Parents know this. If you have an intelligent, focused-on-learning child, you know his/her educational opportunities will be disrupted if put in a classroom full of unruly, emotionally and intellectually stunted students, regardless of how much “money per student” is being spent, how qualified the teachers are, etc. So they seek to avoid this.

Likewise, parents of unruly, intellectually/emotionally stunted students know their child’s chances of learning will be improved if put in a class with lots of smart, well-behaved students. That environment might “rub off” on their kid and eventually improve his/her performance.

But of course the parents of the smart/well-behaved students don’t want inferior students coming in, because at least initially they *lower* the overall learning climate, and if a “critical mass” of them come, then the overall climate might go from positive to negative.

Student-quality is a big reason why, in a given city or neighborhood, schools that are on paper “equal” in funding or programming (like in seattle) nevertheless gain reputations among all parents as “desirable” or “less desirable”.

Sadly, politicians don’t usually discuss “student quality” because to do so is to criticize the parents who are responsible for creating those low-quality students, and who are voters.

Student quality is, IMO, one of the “real problems” that has to be addressed …

The ‘integrative effect’ they are trying to achieve is attempting to skip straight to the solution. Non-integrated schools used to be a symptom of de jure and subtle de facto segregation. Nowadays, non-integration is symptomatic of conditions where individual people have not obtained economic equality. I grew up in a high school that had a history of de facto racial segregation dating back to the 70s – the rumor is that the local real estate agents purposefully denied housing to minority families. 25 years later, after those unofficial policies stopped, some minority families have moved in (mostly Asian). Why? Because they had achieved socio-economic equality. Or more specifically, some families had obtained an income high enough to live in the area. Thus, the schools slowly become integrated.

Skipping to the end by integrating the schools via quotas and declaring victory is pointless. Does it improve the socio-economic status of a single person? I’d say it might, if there was some large material difference in basic educational opportunity between the schools. Here, the schools only seem to differ in the advance placement and magnet programs they offer. These decisions will force cities to confront the real problems of minority students, rather than offer skin-deep solutions.

Also, I don’t think any serious person claims that the Seattle and Louisville cases overruled Brown. The cases are not true to the meaning of Brown, however, because they endorse an abstract notion of racial equality under which intentional integration is treated as constitutionally indistinguishable from intentional segregation. Enacting a program to help disadvantaged people just isn’t the same as enacting a program to hurt disadvantaged people, and the two shouldn’t be treated the same way under the Equal Protection Clause.

I would also like to point out that the cases are stupid from a policy standpoint because the districts can most likely find a way to achieve roughly the same integrative effect using socio-economic criteria to sort kids into schools. These decisions just prevent districts from being honest about what they’re trying to do.

Joe Kosanda

Anyway, I agree that the court is not a policy making body. But I do think that there is a lot of wishful thinking about what the court should do. The heart of the American experiement is the congress, not the president or the SC. But in a country so divided as ours, people look fondly on one of the other branches to get what they want. It seems that expecting a result by judicial fiat is just so much easier and somehow more satisfying than getting out on the streets and organizing.

Hmmm, does this mean that judicial victories that are not supported with a political response have a weak foundation of democratic legitimacy?

also, is it not possible that the framers’ delegation to Congress rather than courts effects how those institutions go about their business?

the argument implicit in that quote seems weird. If i say X shall do something, and then X goes ahead and does it, does that prove “prescience”? That Congress and not the courts has taken the lead in civil rights just might have something to do with the obligations conferred on it. it’s hard to blame the courts for not taking the lead on civil rights when they were not asked to. i agree with the commentator above that “what I find disturbing about this article is the concept of the Supreme Court as a policy branch of government.”

i’m not defending the Court’s decisions by any means — there are plenty of stupid ones out there (e.g. Dred Scott) — but I don’t see how one makes the leap from “the Court has issued bad opinions” to “the Court is responsible for crafting civil rights legislation.”

what is so “ironic” about the political branches making most of the significant civil rights gains? as the author notes, the 14th amendment explicitly delegates to Congress the authority to ensure the equal protection of the laws. that amendment says “congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” what’s so “ironic” about congress, rather than the courts, exercising that power? seems like that result follows from a natural reading of the amendment.

if the 14th amendment said the “Courts shall have power to enforce, by judicial lawmaking, the provisions of this article,” then i’d agree that it’d be weird that the legislature was making the laws regarding the 14th amendment. But it doesn’t.

I’m not sure about the history part. As Cass Sunstein notes in his book “radicals in robes”, the same Radical Republican Congress that passed A14 ran a segregated public school system in Washington DC.

Thus, the “separate but equal” reasoning from Plessy is probably closer to what the enactors of A14 meant by “equal protection” than what was decided in Brown.

Beyond that, for the author to claim that the court came very close to eviscerating Brown is just absurdly apoplectic. Brown was about dismantling state-sponsored segregation, something that wasn’t even at issue in the Louisville/Seattle cases.

As I understand Goodwin’s terrific article, he’s arguing that the Constitution itself — through the 14th Amendment — makes a policy choice against racial separation. One may disagree with his argument — though I think he has text and history on his side — but I don’t think this can be challenged: it is entirely appropriate to criticize the Supreme Court for disregarding a policy choice made in by the drafters and ratifiers of the Constitution.

Criticizing the Supreme Court for not adopting a certain policy position, as this article does,
perpetuates this error. The suggestion, however, that it is the role of Congress to define civil rights policy, is sound.