Friday, June 29, 2007

Resegregation Now

I was fortunate enough to have attended a fully integrated high school and to have had the opportunity to help create it. It is lamentable that future generations will perhaps no longer have the experience of learning and living with those OTHER from themselves. Education should not resign itself to being a mirror of the self, but always and only a window onto what the student himself is not.

Resegregation Now - New York Times

The Supreme Court ruled 53 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education is inherently unequal, and it ordered the nation’s schools to integrate. Yesterday, the court switched sides and told two cities that they cannot take modest steps to bring public school students of different races together. It was a sad day for the court and for the ideal of racial equality.
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There should be no mistaking just how radical this decision is. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said it was his “firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.” He also noted the “cruel irony” of the court relying on Brown v. Board of Education while robbing that landmark ruling of much of its force and spirit. The citizens of Louisville and Seattle, and the rest of the nation, can ponder the majority’s kind words about Brown as they get to work today making their schools, and their cities, more segregated.

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