Yesterday’s bombshell

Is racial discrimination ever right?

ANOTHER racial barrier in the law fell yesterday when a federal district court in Arkansas ruled that a couple of this state’s school districts could no longer bar students from transferring into their schools solely on account of their race. A simple, understandable decision, you might think. But it has ramifications not just for the students and school districts directly involved, but for the whole state and maybe the whole country.

Why is that? Because these students had been turned away under a state law that allows such transfers only if they do not affect the racial balance in the school district they’re leaving. These white students sought to transfer to an almost allwhite district (Magnet Cove) from one that was only largely white (Malvern).

These kids were barred from switching school districts on those grounds, established by a 1989 state law seeking to preserve racial balance in the face of what has become known as White Flight. Let these students change school districts and any others in the state could.

The law discriminated against such students on its face—but in the name of fighting racial discrimination by preserving racial balance. This is the kind of conundrum that is invited when race becomes the principal and maybe only consideration in matters educational. So the whole law had to be thrown out, and the state’s educational and political establishment thrown into a kerfuffle.

Trying to figure out just what yesterday’s decision means for education in Arkansas (and beyond) is a bit like trying to sort out the significance of what all agree was a major battle before all the smoke and dust has cleared, or a new line of engagement formed between the contending forces. All is fluid, and what seemed the balance of forces only the day before has been turned upside down.

The district court’s decision could not have come wholly as a surprise. Yesterday’s ruling is in line with the landmark decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court in cases out of Louisiville and Seattle awhile back, which made it clear that race alone could not determine where a student was assigned. Yes, those decisions offered some wiggle room for school districts that could figure out some way other than outright racial discrimination to assure “racial balance,” which has become the golden calf of American education policy.

This decision, too, leaves the door open for other ways to achieve that elusive goal, but it becomes more and more apparent, more than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, that a different order of priorities is needed in American educaton: not race but education itself.

If this decision pushes the country in that healthy direction, it will heal rather than further divide. Let the lawyers argue these fine points, maybe on appeal. As for the rest of us, come, let us reason together.