Race balancing

Louisville/Jefferson County public schools devised a race-balancing formula to try to keep its schools from becoming re-segregated, and for its efforts, it ended up this week knee-deep in arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on charges of reverse discrimination against white students.

An Enquirer study two years ago found Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky students attend overwhelmingly segregated schools -- either mostly white or mostly black -- and the latest United Way assessment of this region still listed residential segregation as one of our top negatives.

Plenty of studies claim minorities especially benefit from racially "balanced" schools, but lawyers for the Louisville parents challenging that school district's "diversity" plan insist it has not raised student achievement. They argue school districts ought to be focused on upgrading the quality of all their schools instead of chasing this social engineering goal of racially balanced enrollment. Even defenders of the Louisville plan say it can be grossly misleading because even in supposedly race-balanced schools, some students can still end up in mostly black or mostly white classes.

A few questions: Does the goal of racial balance justify the means of denying kids their first choice of school solely because of skin color? Who said it's the schools' job to achieve racial balance? And if the day is fast approaching when we're all going to be "minorities," what does racial balance mean?