The race-based school assignment cases — the irony

Justice Breyer and his fans in the MSM whine that last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down two race-based school assignment schemes undercuts Brown v. Board of Education and will lead to the “re-segregration” of public schools. As I’ve tried to show in my series of posts on the decision, this alarmism rests on a misunderstanding of both the Brown decision and the Court’s decision of last week.
Moreover, as Ed Whelan notes, the alarmism fails to account for the potential of “school choice” programs including charter schools and the use of vouchers to provide educational opportunities for economically disadvantaged students, including minority group members. Ironically, it was Justice Breyer and his fellow dissenters in last week’s case (Stevens, Ginsburg, and Souter) who, though posing as champions of equal educational opportunity, voted to strike down school choice programs as a violation of the Establishment Clause.

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