Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice sued to have the state submit for
review consequences of the program’s operation to federal courts in schools
districts under desegregation orders to obtain clearance before implementation
of these outcomes in them. The voucher program, which allows students in
poor-to-failing schools the ability to have the state pay for their attendance
at another qualifying public or private school, can have the effect of
marginally increasing majority-race proportions at schools under orders to reduce
the incidence of school populations that had heavy compositions of students of
one race. As long as this segregation is not solely created by voluntary living
patterns, in these districts with a history of intentional segregation under
court orders would have to have court review of any outcomes of voluntary,
individual decisions made where students desire to leave a public school
courtesy of the program.
While procedurally this seems neutral, in reality it invites judicial
mischief. Based upon criteria spelled out in the suit, DOJ argues even the most
minute adjustments can be interpreted as retrogression in affirmative district
action to bring as much racial diversity to schools as possible. There’s no
reason a federal judge can’t declare such minutiae as critical and violating
orders even as, Jindal and others have pointed out, the impact would be likely
to improve educational delivery to minority race children.
He and others express amazement that those who say they are acting on
behalf of an unjustly- discriminated minority in this policy area would accept
by vetting outcomes of the policy results that very likely would leave those
very members worse off. But to understand Pres. Barack Obama’s
DOJ and its ilk, it’s necessary to understand the judicial history behind how
courts came to run school systems and its place in their ideological worldview.
When Brown
v. Board of Education became rendered and obliterated the “separate but
equal” doctrine, the fact was that doctrine as a guiding strategy to
educational provision in many areas of the country was a fiction. Few (heavily)
majority-minority public schools were equal in resources to their counterparts.
But, importantly, that was not the basis
on which Brown was decided. Instead, separate but equal was swept aside
because the Supreme Court, unanimously, argued that the very concept of
mono-racial schools, for the minority race, “has a detrimental effect upon the
colored children” by generating “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in
the community.” Almost six decades later, that basic reasoning has remained
unchallenged: as long as non-natural forces, even if they were halted long ago,
were determined (by a court) to have some sort of atavism in impact that would
produce highly mono-racial schools, that alone justified continuing court
supervision because the system remained in an unconstitutional state based on
this reasoning.
So it’s not that the leftist Democrat-run DOJ argues that children
wouldn’t get a better education under the program, it’s that this is irrelevant
to the larger issue that, in its view, even the slightest retrogression, regardless
of cause from or intention of, in preventing formation of greater mono-racial
minority schools threatens to strengthen the inherent badness by thrusting more
decisively a badge of inferiority onto blacks. And if, as Jindal articulates,
DOJ follows this course in order to assist ideological allies like teacher
unions, that’s only tangential in that its real goal is to assist all
ideological fellow-travelers that are threatened by a program that promises to
reduce federal government power to control education, local districts, and
resources by its transfer to local electorates and nongovernment entities.
However, the only possible argument to justify that is to say that to
remove oversight at such an intense level
as a judge deciding whether a handful of students opting out of the public
school system aided by the state thereby threatens to reignite feelings of inferiority.
And that’s an argument Jindal and opponents of this federal overreach ought to
relish having. Because there’s no seriousness to the scenario that a majority
of the Supreme Court, given the cultural, societal, political, and economic
integration and advancement that all non-whites have experienced in America over
the past 60 years, would say the presence of a nearly all-black school merely because
of this racial composition today makes its enrollees feel “inferior” and brings
about psychological harm to them – especially when any such schools have come
about through race neutral policies or, as in the voucher case, even policies
that have the intent if not effect of helping discrete individuals of the
minority group.
In other words, fighting this in the courts threatens to overturn the
entire Brown justification, setting
the stage for a different interpretation to authorize federal intervention on
the far narrower basis of violation of race neutral policy, not on the basis of
results. For then you can’t argue that results, even if unintentional, bring
about a correctable harm, because the harm no longer exists. From then on, a
new judicial standard would have to evolve, perhaps based upon the
contemporaneous Boling
v. Sharpe that says government cannot segregate schools on the basis of
race because there is no legitimate government purpose to do so. But that would
weaken substantially federal government power in this area.
1 comment:
Ah, Professor, Professor, there you go again!
If you would like to get past this blather and see other sides of this that are much more revealing, accurate and enlightening, go to:
WWW.CENLAMAR.COM and read the post "Commission of Error: Jindal's Cynical, Immoral, and Hypocritical Campaign Against the Department of Justice ..."
and
Robert Mann's blog, SOMETHING LIKE THE TRUTH, and see the Thursday, September 19 entry entitled: "Jindal's voucher program: a vote-buying scam for the Christen right"
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