School desegregation: Trump officials vow to end Civil Rights-era orders

Six decades after the federal government ordered Concordia Parish to desegregate its schools, the district remains racially divided. Black students make up more than 92% of Ferriday High School, while 15 minutes away, Vidalia High is 62% white. Yet state and local officials say it’s time to free Concordia Parish and other districts from court-ordered desegregation orders dating back decades. In a stunning shift that reverses decades of policy, they have allies in the federal government. The Trump administration has vowed to lift more desegregation plans from the 1960s. Civil rights activists say it would leave families with little recourse when they face discrimination.

Parental Rights, Parental Choice, and State Public Education Mandates

Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Meyer v. Nebraska were cases about parental rights in general, and parental choice in particular. Both centered on a challenge to a state’s legal effort to reduce or eliminate the educational choices available to parents—in the former, by requiring students to attend public schools, in the latter, by requiring instruction in all schools, public and private, be conducted in English. Pierce and Meyer also were about state efforts to forge a homogeneous American citizenry by limiting the educational choices available to parents. As Justice McReynolds observed in Meyer, “The desire of the Legislature to foster a homogeneous people with American ideals . . . is easy to appreciate,” but, as he observed a year later in Pierce, “the fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”

Book Review: My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult – If You Could Only Save One Child…