Is the Supreme Court about to kill all hope of racially integrating public schools? You might think so, based on the reactions of civil-rights groups, editorial writers, and others to two cases argued before the justices on Monday. They involve programs adopted by school boards in the Louisville, Ky., area and Seattle to promote racial balance in their schools despite segregated housing patterns.

The five more-conservative justices seem poised to strike down both of these plans and to ban — or severely restrict — consideration of any student’s race in deciding what school he or she may attend. But the news is not all bad for those of us who share the four liberal justices’ sense that more racial integration would give many students better educations and foster interracial understanding and social cohesion.

There is another — perhaps better — way to pursue these goals, one that also happens to be legally unassailable. This is to take account of students’ socioeconomic status in making school assignments and to give underprivileged students — who are disproportionately black or Hispanic — the opportunity to attend middle-class schools.

Some 40 school districts with about 2.5 million students, including Wake County, N.C. (Raleigh and suburbs), and San Francisco, already have such class-based programs. In Wake County, the school board replaced a long-established racial desegregation program in 2000 with one designed to keep the number of students eligible for subsidized lunches below 40 percent and the number who are not performing at grade level below 25 percent at every school.

Such socioeconomic integration is actually more effective than pure racial balancing at improving the academic performance of poor children of all races, studies show. "Educational research suggests that the basic damage inflicted by segregated education comes not from racial concentration but the concentration of children from poor families," Harvard professor Gary Orfield, a leading advocate of racial integration, wrote.

And in many areas, "socioeconomic integration also will produce a sizable amount of racial integration," according to "A New Way on School Integration," a recent paper by Richard D. Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation. He has long been a leading advocate of considering economic status in school assignments and college admissions alike.

To be sure, in some places socioeconomic integration and magnet schools will achieve less racial integration than overtly race-based student assignments, which Kahlenberg would keep as a last-resort option.

But even race-based assignments can produce only so much integration, given political and geographical realities. The Seattle program, for example, has done almost nothing to relieve minority isolation at the city’s two least integrated high schools, which were and are 90 percent nonwhite.

More to the point, a decision ruling out race-based student assignments would in no way restrict class-based assignments, even when the main motive is to use class as a rough proxy for race.