July 20, 2008 By EMILY BAZELON The New York Times In June of last year, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, declared the racial-integration efforts of two school districts unconstitutional. Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could no longer assign students to schools based on their race, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote [...]
BY ELIZABETH BIRGE The Star-Ledger Staff Sixty years ago, black and white students headed off to school under a new state Constitution that assured they would attend class side by side. The same could not be said for their teachers.
By SUZANNE C. RUSSELL STAFF WRITER The Home News Tribune PERTH AMBOY — In Daniel Rodriguez’s ninth-grade English as a Second Language class, students sit with headphones covering their ears listening to iPods playing the Alicia Keys song “No One.” One student starts to dance in his seat to the song, while another is tapping [...]
Friday, February 01, 2008 BY KATHLEEN O’BRIEN Star-Ledger Staff The school’s two wings were mirror images: the north wing for white children, the south for blacks. The playground was divided by a fence, and students alternated use of the auditorium so their paths never crossed. In a small town, race trumped logic in drawing district [...]
January 13, 2008 By GEORGIA KRAL The New York Times GREENWICH ALL 213 students at New Lebanon Elementary, a small neighborhood school in the Byram section of Greenwich, walk or are driven to school. But soon, children from other parts of town will take buses to join them. To adhere to a state statute that [...]
September 17, 2007 by Shavar D. Jeffries NJ Voices The United States Supreme Court held in June that school districts were prohibited from voluntarily pursuing racially integrated schools except in the most cramped of circumstances. Many civil-rights leaders loudly criticized the decision as a wholesale denial of the educational needs of black children. The reaction [...]
By JOSEPH BERGER The New York Times WHITE PLAINS For 18 years, this city of 55,000 has maintained racially balanced schools without the white flight that has followed integration plans in places like Boston and Canarsie, Brooklyn. But in June, the Supreme Court rejected school assignment plans in Louisville and Seattle that, like the one [...]
June 30, 2007 By TAMAR LEWIN and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN The New York Times For several years, two lawyers intent on helping black children do as well in school as white children had a kind of roadshow: Michael A. Rebell would describe the recent successes of state-court litigation, forcing more financing for poor children’s schools, [...]