Desegregation is Alive in Louisville

Last June, when the Supreme Court decided that the desegregation plans of Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington, violated the Constitution, many people said desegregation was, for all intents and purposes, dead. But Louisville may have found a way to revive it.

The court ruling was a five-to-four decision, and the fifth vote came from Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote his own opinion. He said "race conscious measures" could pass muster if they didn't involve the race of the individual student.

How can you desegregate without taking into account the race of the student? It's not as impossible as it sounds. And ironically, it works because so many neighborhoods in America are extremely segregated.

Louisville's new plan assigns students based on the neighborhood they live in, not the race of the student. But that's almost the same thing because the neighborhoods are mostly segregated.

The plan also takes into account the neighborhood's family income and education level, not just race. But that's not why Louisville lawyers think it will satisfy Justice Kennedy. They think he will approve because the new plan doesn't assign a child on the basis of that child's race.

The plan is to have every school enroll between 15 and 50 percent students from neighborhoods that are low in education and income, and high in the percentage of minority residents. Everyone in a neighborhood, regardless of race, will be treated alike.

The Jefferson County Teachers Association, which represents the Louisville teachers, supports this new approach, and believes it can serve as a national model, says JCTA President Brent McKim.

But Louisville has a big advantage over many other urban areas: The center city and the suburbs are in the same district: Jefferson County. If the suburbs were in a separate district, there wouldn't be enough white kids in the city to integrate the schools. That's the situation in many big cities, and it's one of the main reasons America's schools were resegregating even before the last Supreme Court decision.

--Alain Jehlen