Comments
by Scoper...
The Real Power of the Robe
(Part II)
(For a recap, see Part
I )
After most of 30 years trying
to comply with Swann vs. Board of Education, Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools
tried an experiment that - it was thought - would not only heed the commandments
of the ruling, but also give some parents some measure of choice in the
education of their children. As mentioned earlier, "magnet schools" quickly
acquired a waiting list, and the school district adopted a race-conscious
system of assigning those premium seats. This lit the fuse on a brand new
set of fireworks.
In 1997, parent Bill Capacchione
sued the school system after his daughter was denied magnet admission.
Turns out she was the wrong color. She was white, and the only remaining
seats had been "set-asides" for minorities.
Unlike earlier challenges,
this one took root. Last year, federal Judge Robert Potter ruled that the
schools were "unitary" (sufficiently desegregated) and ordered CMS to end
it's race-based policies.
If you ever aspire to run
for political office, this should be enough to strike "school board" from
your list of considerations. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg board now had to
reconcile the following (keep in mind that all three of these are the law
of the land!)
1954: You cannot assign students
on the basis of race.
1969: You must consider race
when assigning students.
1999: You are no longer allowed
to consider race when making school assignments.
So how do you get three federal
court rulings, each contradicting the previous one, but all three standing
as enforceable law? I'll have to get back to that, because this gets crazier
still.
Did I say three conflicting
rulings? How about four?
Following the Potter ruling
of 1999, the school board began crafting a "school choice" plan, setting
up a system of "zones" within which parents could select schools for their
children within a reasonable distance of their homes. It did not recognize
racial heritage, and did away with quotas and set-asides. This took almost
2 years, 4 point 5 million taxpayer dollars, and numerous public hearings
to design something everyone could tolerate. This year, during the last
week of November, 101 thousand applications were mailed out to students
and their parents, to allow the school selection process to begin.
Exactly one week after Thanksgiving
Day, a three-judge federal Appeals Court added to the indigestion by summarily
overturning the Potter ruling, stating YET AGAIN that race-based assignment
is the way to go. The following morning, the school board (meeting in emergency
session,) scrapped the school choice plan, rendering all those applications
(and brochures) so much landfill fodder.
Given no choice, the board
has decided to keep its earlier (race-based) assignment plan in place for
the time being. Some parents have vowed to appeal this latest ruling, which
could send it back to federal District Court. But it probably won't go
back to Judge Potter; he's 77 and plans to retire at the end of the year.
It's possible that the lower court could re-re-reverse the situation, but
to what end? There's another faction willing to go back to court to re-re-re-reverse.
Imaging getting slapped by
your father for obeying your mother, who has a different set of rules.
Then mom steps back in to punish you for disobeying her. It's not the kid's
fault; it's the parents' for not being able to get together on the simplest
concept of what's right and wrong. The child is smacked around like a ping-pong
ball (a scene many would consider criminally abusive) while the parents
both claim their actions are purely for the good of the child.
This whole desegregation
teeter-totter: it IS all for the children, isn't it?
You know and I know that
it isn't. It's to feed the egos of "judicial activists" who, having little
or no accountability for their actions, can play with people's lives as
easily as we move pawns on a chessboard. Maybe they believe that, in a
way, they are acting as our parents, but if so, they're spectacularly BAD
parents.
How can something as noble
as the Brown decision (instrumental in ending the institutionalized racism
sometimes called the "Jim Crow") have gone so totally insane? Some rather
politically-incorrect thoughts on this in the final installment.
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