July 7, 2007
The June 28 Supreme Court decision sharply curbing the ability of school districts to pursue racial integration illustrates the pitfalls of both the conservative and the liberal blocs' approaches to the problem of race. But finding a principled middle ground is not easy.
The conservatives. Chief Justice John Roberts's plurality opinion for the four-man conservative bloc oversimplified the Court's...
November 15, 2003
Outside Anacostia Senior High School, three miles southeast of the Capitol, a football player was killed on October 30 by a stray bullet meant for someone else. Not far away, at Ballou Senior High, a gang fight involving 15 or 20 students broke out in the cafeteria on November 10. School officials "have no control," one Ballou mother complained to The Washington Post.
February 23, 2002
Eulanda Johnson sees her daughter's move from Cleveland's dismal public school system to St. Mary's Elementary as a kind of deliverance. At public school, she says, 9-year-old Ebony learned little amid the disruptive kids, and administrators "only want your kid in that seat to get the money" from the state. At St. Mary's, "I felt welcome when I walked in the door, and when I walk...
January 19, 2002
It made news when hecklers booed Sacramento Bee publisher Janis Besler Heaphy so loudly and long-for suggesting that the government had gone too far in curbing civil liberties since September 11-that she could not finish her December 15 commencement speech at California State University (Sacramento). "Many interpret it as a troubling example of rising intolerance for public discourse that...
March 3, 2001
In his much publicized Feb. 18 speech attacking the SAT, University of California President Richard C. Atkinson proposed that his university's eight campuses stop using the test as an admissions requirement. The result, he said, would be to "help all students, especially low-income and minority students, determine their own educational destinies."
July 10, 2000
Al Gore saw his opening, and he took it. Campaigning last Wednesday in Backlick, Ohio, the vice president unexpectedly tossed aside the top of a scheduled speech about energy and the environment and instead launched into a passionate lecture about the importance of the Supreme Court. All morning, Gore had been asking aides to inform him as soon as the court handed down its expected final...
July 1, 1996
The Supreme Court probably reached the right result in its 7-1 decision striking down all-male education at the Virginia Military Institute, given the state's failure to offer any genuinely equal opportunity to women.
But even so, the broad sweep of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's June 26 majority opinion in United States v. Virginia could end up doing more harm than good. The Ginsburg opinion...
October 17, 1994
Racial preferences, or affirmative action, or quotas, or call-them-what-you-will, are back in the news:
• The Supreme Court-which has picked up four new justices in four years while losing its three strongest proponents of affirmative action-has agreed to decide a racial-preference case for the first time since it struck down a state program in 1989 and upheld a federal one in 1990, leaving...
October 3, 1994
I have two daughters, 7 and 10 years old. I want them to have every opportunity to develop their educational potential to the fullest, so that they will be able to (among other things) compete against men for good jobs. And I am concerned that their opportunities will be diminished-not enlarged-by one of the feminist movement's current crusades.
Feminist groups and their allies in the Justice...
June 1, 1992
The whiff of censorship is in the air at the Harvard Law School. Look for a push by the faculty's left wing this fall to adopt a campus speech/"harassment" code-one of those affirmative-action models aimed at punishing insensitivity toward women and minorities while smiling on the stigmatization of white males.
And look for more demands for appointment of a faculty-student committee-...
February 18, 1991
Harvard, like most universities, gives alumni children a break in admissions. Some Asian-Americans see this as illegal discrimination, because mostly white "alum-kids" bump Asian-Americans who would otherwise get in.
The Education Department recently ended a probe into this particular thumb on Harvard's scales, finding it justified by the need to sustain the flow of alumni dollars and...
October 8, 1990
Hearing its most important school-desegregation case in more than a decade, the Supreme Court was presented last week with two unappealing prospects: court-ordered busing in perpetuity or (de facto) resegregation.
The Court can and should avoid both alternatives.
The immediate issue in Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell is whether the school board acted lawfully in 1985 when it ended,...
