links for 2007-09-17

• Greenspan alert on US house prices - FT.com
• Q&A: Greenspan on Bubbles, Saddam, Cheney and Bernanke - WSJ Economics Blog
• Checking Greenspan's Book Against Historical Record - WSJ Economics Blog
• Gene determines whether male body odor smells pleasant - EurekAlert
• Greenspan on 60 Minutes and on the Bush deficit - Justin Fox
• The Piracy Paradox - James Surowiecki - The New Yorker
• Will Iraq sink the GOP? - Los Angeles Times
• Greenspan's Memoir Shows Dangers of Irrational Book Advances - Caroline Baum
• Compromise on Health Care Bill Sets Stage for Veto - New York Times

Comments

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/education/17schools.html

September 17, 2007

Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry of Resegregation
By SAM DILLON

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.

Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones.

"We're talking about moving children from good schools into low-performing ones, and that's illegal," said Kendra Williams, a hospital receptionist, whose two children were rezoned. "And it's all about race. It's as clear as daylight."

Tuscaloosa, where George Wallace once stood defiantly in the schoolhouse door to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama, also has had a volatile history in its public schools. Three decades of federal desegregation marked by busing and white flight ended in 2000. Though the city is 54 percent white, its school system is 75 percent black.

The schools superintendent and board president, both white, said in an interview that the rezoning, which redrew boundaries of school attendance zones, was a color-blind effort to reorganize the 10,000-student district around community schools and relieve overcrowding. By optimizing use of the city's 19 school buildings, the district saved taxpayers millions, officials said. They also acknowledged another goal: to draw more whites back into Tuscaloosa's schools by making them attractive to parents of 1,500 children attending private academies founded after court-ordered desegregation began.

"I'm sorry not everybody is on board with this," said Joyce Levey, the superintendent. "But the issue in drawing up our plan was not race. It was how to use our buildings in the best possible way." Dr. Levey said that all students forced by the rezoning to move from a high- to a lower-performing school were told of their right under the No Child law to request a transfer.

When the racially polarized, eight-member Board of Education approved the rezoning plan in May, however, its two black members voted against it. "All the issues we dealt with in the '60s, we're having to deal with again in 2007," said Earnestine Tucker, one of the black members. "We're back to separate but equal — but separate isn't equal."

For decades school districts across the nation used rezoning to restrict black students to some schools while channeling white students to others. Such plans became rare after civil rights lawsuits in the 1960s and '70s successfully challenged their constitutionality, said William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights.

Tuscaloosa's rezoning dispute, civil rights lawyers say, is one of the first in which the No Child Left Behind law has become central, sending the district into uncharted territory over whether a reassignment plan can trump the law's prohibition on moving students into low-performing schools....

[anne]

We are moving to a resegregation of America's public schools, both intellectually and in fact. Intellectually, a narrow conservative Supreme Court majority moved us from Brown v Board of education to Plessy v Ferguson, from separation is inherently unequal to the mask of separate and equal with barely a nod or whimper. Actually, public schools K through 12 are being segregated anew.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/opinion/29fri1.html?ex=1340769600&en=86f06a756d90d397&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

June 29, 2007

Resegregation Now

The Supreme Court ruled 53 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education is inherently unequal, and it ordered the nation's schools to integrate. Today, the court switched sides and told two cities that they cannot take modest steps to bring public school students of different races together. It was a sad day for the court and for the ideal of racial equality.

Since 1954, the Supreme Court has been the nation's driving force for integration. Its orders required segregated buses and public buildings, parks and playgrounds to open up to all Americans. It wasn't always easy: governors, senators and angry mobs talked of massive resistance. But the court never wavered, and in many of the most important cases it spoke unanimously.

Today, the court's radical new majority turned its back on that proud tradition in a 5-4 ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts. It has been some time since the court, which has grown more conservative by the year, did much to compel local governments to promote racial integration. But now it is moving in reverse, broadly ordering the public schools to become more segregated....

In an eloquent dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer explained just how sharp a break the decision is with history. The Supreme Court has often ordered schools to use race-conscious remedies, and it has unanimously held that deciding to make assignments based on race "to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society" is "within the broad discretionary powers of school authorities." ...

[kthomas]

Schooling is the most important issue for serious parents. If race becomes too much to bear, I'd just leave an area, rather thn reseg the area. That's just stupid and probably unAmerican.

Overall, the schools are a mess. And in my opinion, this subject ends up being economic. If the parents are poor, the choice of schools stinks. If the parents are wealthy, they go wherver the hell they want. If the parents are middle-class, these days, we get reseg in some areas.

anne, we're graduating armies of idiots anyways.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/washington/29stext.html

June 28, 2007

From Justice Breyer

For much of this nation’s history, the races remained divided. It was not long ago that people of different races drank from separate fountains, rode on separate buses and studied in separate schools. In this court’s finest hour, Brown v. Board of Education challenged this history and helped to change it. For Brown held out a promise. It was a promise embodied in three amendments designed to make citizens of slaves. It was the promise of true racial equality — not as a matter of fine words on paper, but as a matter of everyday life in the nation’s cities and schools. It was about the nature of a democracy that must work for all Americans. It sought one law, one nation, one people, not simply as a matter of legal principle but in terms of how we actually live.

Not everyone welcomed this court’s decision in Brown. Three years after that decision was handed down, the governor of Arkansas ordered state militia to block the doors of a white schoolhouse so that black children could not enter. The president of the United States dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Ark., and federal troops were needed to enforce a desegregation decree.

Today, almost 50 years later, attitudes toward race in this nation have changed dramatically. Many parents, white and black alike, want their children to attend schools with children of different races. Indeed, the very school districts that once spurned integration now strive for it. The long history of their efforts reveals the complexities and difficulties they have faced. And in light of those challenges, they have asked us not to take from their hands the instruments they have used to rid their schools of racial segregation, instruments that they believe are needed to overcome the problems of cities divided by race and poverty. The plurality would decline their modest request.

The plurality is wrong to do so. The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality’s position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.

I must dissent.

[anne]

Notice carefully the wording:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/education/17schools.html

September 17, 2007

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools....

[We have turned intellectually and increasingly in practice from understanding that racial separation fosters inherent inequality. Where "No Child Left Behind" might be written anew to allow for student transfer out of district to limit the effects of neighborhood segregation on schooling, this will not be considered.]

[anne]

Segregated public schools and inherently unequal and will remain so, and even as we speak of education as critical to well-being, which of course has so long been the case, we are turning both from integrated public school education as a proper aim even as public colleges and universities become increasingly more expensive and questionable for students who may be disadvantaged in neighborhood and schooling from the beginning.

says...

Remember?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/opinion/17mon3.html?hp

September 17, 2007

The New Hampshire Phone Scam

On Election Day in 2002, when New Hampshire voters were going to the polls in a hotly contested Senate race, the phone lines in Democratic get-out-the-vote offices were jammed. The executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party pleaded guilty to phone harassment charges, but there has never been an adequate investigation of reports that the White House may have been involved.

Paul Hodes, a New Hampshire congressman, is asking the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to investigate. It should conduct the searching inquiry that the Justice Department has not.

The Bush administration has spent a lot of time talking about mythical cases of voter fraud and election improprieties, but the New Hampshire phone jamming case was the real thing. Republican operatives hired an Idaho telemarketing firm to jam the lines to prevent people who needed help in voting from getting through. The scheme was a direct attack on American democracy.

After the guilty plea from its executive director, the New Hampshire Republican Party paid to settle a civil lawsuit filed by the state's Democrats. There is reason to believe, however, that the phone jamming ploy may have been coordinated out of the White House. Democrats say there were 22 phone calls between New Hampshire Republican officials and the White House Office of Political Affairs on election night and early the next morning.

Mr. Hodes says that rather than trying to learn the truth, the Justice Department has engaged in unlawful interference to block the investigation....