Reply to Dumb WaPoo Article on Public Schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You can always re-litigate an issue. Lawrence v Texas legalized sodomy about 20 years after a decision that did the opposite. You can always try to bring a case again to SCOTUS. But the current state of the law appears to be that if black people live in neighborhood X because it's what they can afford, and the schools in neighborhood X are poor performing, then the only constitutional requirement is that the govt not intentionally reduce the quality of schools in X. For example, the govt cannot underfund those schools. But in DC, schools in black neighborhoods are overfunded relative to schools in white neighborhoods. This satisfies the requirement of equal inputs. Sadly, and I am genuine when I say sadly, there doesn't appear to be a constitutional requirement of equal outcomes. [/quote]

That is the constitutional law. There are federal and state statutes that would be the basis for a disparate impact claim.

Sometimes I wonder if you dcum lawyers actually went to law school??[/quote]

Thanks for the ad hominem.

I am aware of no federal or "state" statute that would give rise to a successful outcome against DC, or that would even create a cause of action. Look at the way Catania's at-risk funding magnifies Title I. In DC, the government already allocates disproportionate resources to majority-minority schools in an attempt to close the achievement gap. Despite this, poor black kids do worse on standardized tests and drop out in higher numbers. (Similar thing happens with impoverished whites in states that have impoverished whites, by the way; DC has too few to be statistically meaningful). There is no law at any level of government that I am aware of that gives rise to a cause of action against a DC government that is already providing all of this extra money, renovations, special ed support, not to mention chartering many charter schools in an effort to address this.

This notwithstanding the aspirational arguments in the article that are based not on federal or state statutes per se but rather on a novel application of international human rights law, most of it unratified and weak in this country, to interpret those statutes. That kind of legal reasoning does feature in the courts of other countries. Good luck with it here.

This is completely different from the situation in other states, like the one in Ferguson MO that was featured on NPr a while back.  In those situations the schools in black neighborhoods are under-resourced *relative to majority white schools*, partly because of racist neglect and partly because of how local (real estate) taxes are used to fund education. None of that applies in DC.

The federal statute that best addresses the achievement gap is actually NCLB, in my opinion, and that's damning with faint praise. It's the only federal statute that creates real consequences for unequal outcomes (as opposed to inputs), but as we all know it is achieving some closed schools and not much else.

[/quote]

again, did you go to law school? the article discusses how the feds could enforce federal civil rights laws, as well as successful state law/state constitutional suit in colorado. as for your assertions of fact - well, we'll see. [/quote]

A friend of mine once said "I went to law school, because it was the highest degree I could obtain without being good at math."[/quote]

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