"If only [racial] change were as swift and simple as a child’s dance recital."

Here's a second article about race giving central, front-page attention on the NYT website this morning. (The previous post discusses the first.)

Reaching out longingly to female readers, this article features a picture of adorable kindergarten girls in pink tutus and white tutus... and — mostly — nonwhite skin. It's a performing arts magnet school, and the serious topic of the article is the federal grant program, dating back to the 1980s, that supposedly helps with racial integration.

The idea was to create a themed curriculum that attracted children from outside a school’s immediate neighborhood to reduce the isolation of one minority group....

About 58 percent of the students in District 14 public schools are Hispanic, 26 percent are black, 12 percent are white and 3 percent are Asian, according to the Education Department. At each of these four elementary magnet schools, Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of the population.

These are the wrong percentages, for some reason that is supposed to be obvious to you, and the promise of putting their little girls in tutus is intended to lure white parents into doing what the government deems valuable, diluting the minority population. We are assured that "decades of research studies show that children perform better in integrated schools," and then there's much talk about the magnet schools hitting academic targets. But the tutu school in the photo is under investigation for cheating
(because kids did so well on the tests at the school, but badly when they moved on to middle school).

Complicating desegregation even further: a 2007 United States Supreme Court ruling that restricted schools in selecting students. The court, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, ruled 5 to 4 that schools could not explicitly take race into account when selecting students.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who voted with the majority, nevertheless kept alive the importance of school integration: in a separate opinion, he wrote that school districts could be creative, perhaps reconfiguring attendance zones to spur socioeconomic diversity....

Historically for magnet schools, white middle-class students have been the prize. Despite the odds, one of the Williamsburg schools has been able to attract them in droves.....

Education officials placed Brooklyn Arbor [Public School 414] in a prime location to draw families from the Northside neighborhood: just south of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, near the trendier parts of Williamsburg. The new principal, Eva Irizarry, did the rest. Her aggressive recruiting and her commitment to progressive, hands-on learning helped persuade white middle-class families to try the new school.... [The school's theme is] global and ethical studies. Ms. Irizarry plans to build eco-friendly classrooms and a greenhouse on the roof...

When it came to recruiting, Ms. Irizarry said, she got no response when she went to Head Start nursery schools in the surrounding Dominican neighborhoods.

She had more success pitching a new concept to Northside parents. At Mommy and Me yoga classes, she left brochures that featured the school’s carefully designed green tree logo and 13 children of all ethnicities photographed in green T-shirts....

Ms. Irizarry... was concerned that Hispanic parents might feel they were being pushed out of the school.

White middle-class students have been the prize.... the trendier parts of Williamsburg... commitment to progressive... learning.... So the success of the project is measured in terms of how many white kids enroll, and the theme is designed to appeal to white people... But it's the presence of white people that "decades of research studies show" is what's really best for the nonwhite kids.

Here's the Parents Involved case, in the event that you'd like to brush up on the constitutional law. The Supreme Court has been clear that racial balancing is not an acceptable basis for classifying individuals by race. Diversity — which is — has a different meaning, and, to keep this post from getting much longer, I'll just say the Court has struggled to define diversity and what may be done to achieve it.

Whatever the law says, there are still policy decisions to be made, and here, I'm puzzling over the paradoxical high valuation of white children and their use for dilution purposes.