It's discrimination. It's wrong.
School policies that judge students by skin color are illegal.

By Sharon L. Browne

When Crystal Meredith of Louisville tried to enroll her young son in Bloom Elementary School, she was told he couldn't transfer out of Young Elementary, the school where he was already assigned.

Why? Not because of his grades or interests. It was because he is white. As a federal district court later recounted the facts, he “was denied admittance because his transfer to Bloom would have had an adverse effect on Young's racial composition.”

Did this happen in 1950, when students were routinely barred from certain schools on grounds of skin color? No, it was 2002. Called “managed choice,” the race-based policy is the district's attempt to achieve the so-called “right” racial balance of students, ensuring that schools have at least 15% African-American students and no more than 50% African-American students.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Meredith objected to her son being turned away from a public school because of his skin color. She filed suit, arguing that he had been denied his equal protection rights under the U.S. Constitution.

This month, the U.S. Supreme Court sent a hopeful message when it agreed to hear this case and a similar one brought by Seattle parents, setting the stage for a decision on the constitutionality of these practices.

Some say these race-based policies are about diversity. They're not. They amount to blatant and illegal racial discrimination.

Sadly, Louisville and Seattle school administrators aren't alone. Nearly 1,000 school districts today are using race-based policies to assign students.

Supporters of these policies say that getting a balance of different races in each school can help the academic performance of minority kids. That claim is questionable.

Judges opposing Seattle's race-based assignments cited this passage from a report co-authored by George Mason University social scientist David Armor: “… racial composition by itself has little effect on raising the achievement of minority students or on reducing the minority-white achievement gap. Some studies show that there is no relationship at all between black achievement and racial composition … and other studies show that there is no relationship between the black-white achievement gap and racial composition.”

The high court's decision to take these cases is particularly important since lower courts have misapplied prior decisions involving higher education institutions, using those rulings to wrongly justify discriminatory practices in K-12 public schools.

The court has repeatedly made a clear distinction between universities and their academic freedom to exchange ideas and K-12 public schools where students are required to attend. Further, the court has said that race cannot be the sole factor in categorizing students, yet the Louisville and Seattle K-12 schools have used race mechanically.

In 2003, the Supreme Court rejected the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions point formula that was even less racially focused than the systems in Louisville and Seattle, where students have been assigned to schools solely based on their color.

More than 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, our nation's justices can put an end to government-ordered discrimination policies.

In 2006, decades after the civil rights movement, no one in America should be judged by skin color. That's a message that everyone, from school administrators to children, needs to hear.

Sharon L. Browne is a principal attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a non-profit, public-interest organization based in Sacramento that filed briefs in both cases before the Supreme Court.

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