Supreme Court's majority failed to understand Louisville's situation

After long deliberation and deep division, the Supreme Court has issued a muddled and polarized set of decisions in which the majority recognizes that school districts and the nation have a compelling interest in integrated schools, but rejects some of the most important tools school districts have used to achieve them.

It could be worse. Many feared that the increasingly conservative Court would simply strike down any race-conscious tools for desegregation and even undermine the goal. That has not happened, but the Court has created new hurdles for Jefferson County and many other school districts whose existing plans must be altered to meet the new standard or the plan will be lost and massive resegregation accepted...

...The majority of the Supreme Court simply does not understand the specifics of the Louisville situation in particular or the challenges of urban desegregation in general.

The desegregation tools that are specifically authorized in Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion are not adequate for a big city and can even be counterproductive in areas of expanding minority residence, where they could speed an unstable racial transition. These tools support the end but reject the means -- tools such as selecting sites for new schools in interracial areas and adjusting boundaries of neighborhood.

In a choice-based plan such as Jefferson County's, the Court majority holds that the practice of making decisions about who gets what choice on the basis of race alone is unconstitutional, even though this policy was part of court-ordered and voluntary plans in thousands of school districts for many years following clear evidence in the early l960s that unrestricted choice plans often intensified segregation. The federal magnet school program for many years required that those receiving federal funds to set up magnets had desegregation policies...

[School systems]... must examine other possible ways of creating diversity -- what would be the impact of using poverty, geographic diversity within the district, test scores, subsized housing status, NCLB or state accountability status of the school or other dimensions to produce diversity.

This from the Courier-Journal.