Reply to Residents appeal MCPS boundary changes, challenge legality of diversity focus

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[quote=Anonymous]While this is an appeal not a lawsuit, it does raise an interesting legal question. The Supreme Court ruled years ago that schools could not use race to determine school assignments. Racial quotas are now unconstitutional. However, those same decision also clearly stated that schools could strive to achieve racial diversity. This basically allowed placing test-in magnets that the school could predict would attract whites in high minority schools. A federal court in Florida has found that schools can give disadvantaged groups such as low income minorities additional points toward admissions in test in programs.

Where the Clarksburg neighborhood and the Asian Americans who filed multiple complaints of discrimination to the OCR have an argument, is whether MCPS has crossed that line from legal ways to promote diversity into illegal ways that equate to racial balancing or racial quotas. The politics behind both are very different.

The Asian Americans have a stronger case but they are generally the weakest political group and are not supported by liberal whites, conservative whites, AA or hispanics. We'll see what happens there.

On the boundary changes, this will end up in the Supreme Court either coming from MD or NY or somewhere else in the NE/Mid Atlantic. The legal question will be clarification on where the line between racial balancing/racial quota and seeking diversity exists. Depending on the case, the line could get pushed back much farther away from diversity efforts, especially if MCPS ends up being the defendant in that case. MCPS hyper focuses on race, spends a huge amount of time and resources tracking kids by race, has plenty of public statements about prioritizing some racial groups over others, and generally has a huge paper trail that would be far more likely to hurt the case than help it. At this level, MCPS can't claim that it was trying to racial balance schools through school assignment out of one side its mouth and then turn around with all the statements to the contrary. The Supreme Court being conservative now does not help either. [/quote]

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