    
Just The Aunt
Supporter
Username: Auntof13
Post Number: 5299
Registered: 1-2004
| | Posted on Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - 6:48 am: | 
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How will this effect our schools?
Justices to ponder race in public schools
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
BY GINA HOLLAND
Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to decide whether public school districts can consider skin color in assigning students to schools, reopening the contentious issue of af firmative action in a major case that will turn on the votes of President Bush's new justices.
The announcement puts a contentious social issue on the national landscape in an election year, and could mark a new chapter for a court that famously banned racial segregation in public schools in Brown vs. Board of Education.
Since then, race questions have been hugely divisive, both for the court and the public.
Three years ago, more than 5,000 people demonstrated outside as the justices considered whether public universities could select stu dents based at least in part on race. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor broke a tie to allow it in a limited way.
The court's new interest is in public schools, far more sweeping than universities. And O'Connor is gone, replaced by conservative Jus tice Samuel Alito.
The justices will hear appeals from a Seattle parents group and a Kentucky mom, who argue that race restrictions improperly penalize white students.
"This is going to reach into the homes and thinking of 100 percent of students," said Doug Kmiec, a Pepperdine University law profes sor and former Reagan administration lawyer. "This is not quite at the level of Brown vs. Board, but it will be argued in the style of that case."
Justices will look at the modern-era classroom, no longer under court desegregation orders but in some places still using remnants of those policies.
At its heart, the court will consider whether school leaders can promote racial diversity without violating the Constitution's guarantee against discrimination.
The court's announcement that it will take up the cases this fall provides the first sign of an aggressiveness by the court under new Chief Justice John Roberts. The court rejected a similar case in December when moderate O'Connor was still on the bench. The outcome most likely will turn on her successor, Alito.
As Justice Department lawyers during the Reagan administration, both Roberts, 51, and Alito, 56, worked to limit affirmative action.
The court's announcement followed six weeks of internal deliberations over whether to hear the appeals, an unusually long time.
"This is a very dramatic move. I expect it will create a big national discussion," said Gary Orfield, who heads the Harvard University Civil Rights Project and supports affir mative action.
A ruling against the schools "would be pretty devastating to suburban communities, small towns that have successfully maintained desegregation for a couple of generations," he said. "The same communities that were forced to desegregate would be forced to re segregate."
In one of the cases, an appeals court had upheld Seattle's system, which lets students pick among high schools and then relies on tie breakers, including race, to decide who gets into schools that have more applicants than openings. Seattle put the system on hold during the legal fight.
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1149569363109730.xml&coll=1
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