School segregation a black-and-white issue

In 2000, Seattle public school officials told nearly 100 minority students in the eighth grade they couldn’t attend the high school of their choice. There was only one reason for the decision: the students’ skin color. They weren’t white.

For 200 white students, the news was the same: they couldn’t go to the high school of their choice because of their skin color.

Despite decades of advancement in our country on civil rights, some government officials wrongly insist that people should be judged on the color of their skin. In Seattle, despite racially diverse neighborhoods and schools, officials took it upon themselves to decide that certain schools weren’t “white” enough or “minority” enough.

The school district and hundreds of other school districts around the country do so in the name of “diversity,” a nice word that attempts to gloss over the wrong lesson for our children. If we don’t want our children to judge people based on the color of their skin, why are educators doing just that?

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court was given a chance to tell school officials around the country that it is morally wrong – and unconstitutional – for them to discriminate against students based on their race.

The court heard two cases brought by concerned parents from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., who objected to their children being turned away at schoolhouse doors simply because their skin was the wrong color.

In Seattle, a school district policy used the color of a student’s skin to determine whether children would get a spot at a high school. In Kentucky, Jefferson County Public Schools refused to transfer a 5-year-old boy from one kindergarten to another kindergarten that was closer to his home for only one reason: he was white.

In both instances, the children were assigned to schools to achieve a specific racial mix of students. This is nothing less than a quota. In Seattle, school officials wanted high schools to be about 40 percent white and 60 percent minority. If the schools deviated too much from that, school officials color-coded their admissions.

In Kentucky, the school district divides students into two racial categories – black or white. It lumps all Hispanics, Asian-Americans, American Indians and all other non-black students into the white racial group. It then uses race to assign children to elementary and secondary schools to ensure a specific racial mix of kids. The racial balancing plan ensures that no school has a black student population of less than 15 percent or greater than 50 percent. Such a practice makes no sense.

Not only are these policies unconstitutional, Americans are rejecting them at the voting booth.

In the year 2006, we should be teaching young people that ours is a country where they won’t be judged by the color of their skin.

Now, more than 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, our nation’s justices can put an end to these government-ordered discrimination policies. That’s a message everyone needs to hear.