Scalia and I agree (WTF?)

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today against programs in two school systems, one in Seattle and one in the Louisville, KY area, created to place students in schools according to the "racial balance."

I don't think I'm breaking any new ground here when I say that race-based classifications for school demographics are overly simplistic, reductionist, and may not fully address all the factors that prevent minority students from succeeding in education. In Justice Robert's opinion, he writes “Classifying and assigning schoolchildren according to a binary conception of race is an extreme approach in light of this court’s precedents and the nation’s history of using race in public schools, and requires more than such an amorphous end to justify it.”

Isn't it rather insulting, as well as the EXACT QUOTA SYSTEM WE SHOULD TRY TO AVOID, to say "oh, you need to go to this school, where they need more kids with your skin tone?"

As a graduate of a landmark school system in racial integration, I can say a few things from lived experience: One, being in a school with kids of different races only impacts students inasmuch as they do not resegregate into tracked classes or different social circles. Two, race is only a superficial indicator of potential influences with regard to the education level of the family, motivation and encouragement to succeed, even a family's ability to choose whether to hold a kid back from kindergarten for a year (thus giving them a greater chance of starting their school career successfully, and continuing that success for life).

As Richard Kahlenberg and many other scholars have said- it's about class, stupid. There are case studies out there, from Wisconsin to Oakland, that demonstrate how balancing schools based on socioeconomic class gives poorer kids the chance to benefit from middle-class values and resources, while allowing higher-income students to learn from and encounter people different from themselves. So, thanks, conservative judges, for demanding that we judge children and strategize for the education success based on multiple complex factors, instead of bigoted shorthand.