CNSNews.com staff writer Monisha Bansal has done something I've seen very little, if any of, in mainstream media coverage. Reporting on yesterday's Supreme Court ruling striking down two race-based preference structures that governed public school districts in Louisville, Ky. and Seattle, Ms. Bansal documented the reaction of the lawyers who won the lawsuits in question.
As NewsBusters has repeatedly noted, most of the media focus has been on the political dimensions of a "rightward" shift in the Court, in Kennedy as the new swing justice, etc.
Below is an excerpt of Bansal's June 29 article, portions in bold are my emphasis:
(CNSNews.com) - Parents hailed as "an important victory" a Supreme Court decision on school racial quotas, saying it was time students were considered as individuals, not "components of a racial class."
The court ruled in a 5-4 decision Thursday that school districts cannot use race as a factor in determining where students will attend school.
It decided two cases -- Parents in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County [Kentucky] Public Schools -- in which white families sued school districts because diversity programs kept their children out of schools in their neighborhood.
As Cybercast News Service previously reported the schools used race as a determining factor when approving school choice requests, favoring racial diversity in the schools over other factors, including proximity.
The policy in place in Seattle allowed officials to give preference to minority students in an effort to create racial diversity in the classroom. The Kentucky school district had a quota system requiring student bodies to be no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent African-American.
"In our view, they should have long ago stopped using race to decide what schools the Seattle schoolchildren get to attend," Harry Korrell, attorney for the Parents Involved in Community Schools, said during a conference call Thursday.
"The court ruled this morning that absent the need to remedy past discrimination, the government cannot make student admission assignments ... based on a student's skin color," he said.
"If you don't have the lingering effects of past discrimination, you need to stop looking at students as components of a racial class and start looking at them as individuals," Korrell added.
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