With Alito and Roberts tipping the balance on the Supreme Court now, it’s likely that race will be formally thrown out as a legitimate factor in public school admissions policies.

As everybody knows, Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District made it all the way to the high court last week.

In summary: The Plaintiffs, shot down in by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in late 2005, contend that the Seattle School District’s admission policy, used between 1999 and 2001, violated the 14th Amendment by discriminating against white students. The District policy used race as a tiebraker when the number of students trying to get into a particular shcool was greater than the spots available. The school district policy was an attempt to make the popular schools reflect the 60/40 split of non-white to white students respectively in the district as a whole—an honorable attempt to maintain racial diversity in our schools. This honorable attempt, however, may gets its ass handed to it by the high court.

This may not be a bad thing, though. In fact, it may be a great opportunity. The jolt may finally breathe some life into an idea that former conservative Seattle School Board Member, Don Nielsen, used to hype: Class-based integration rather than race-based integration.

The New Republic makes the case this week that, thanks to the Seattle case, the end of mandated racial integration is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for liberals to tackle the broader social justice issue of class:

If the Court decides that schools can no longer take race into consideration, those who care about social justice will need to find another way to promote equal educational opportunity. Luckily, roughly 40 school districts have been trying a new approach—income-based school integration. Because of the overlap between race and economic status, this policy produces a healthy amount of racial diversity. At the same time, even opponents of using race in student assignment concede that using socioeconomic status is perfectly legal. Moreover, socioeconomic integration provides an even more powerful lever for raising achievement.

Under racial desegregation plans, for example, black student scores rose in Charlotte, North Carolina, but not in Boston, Massachusetts. But discrepancies like these reveal a clue as to what does work. The difference between Charlotte and Boston is that in Charlotte, poor blacks had a chance to go to school with middle-class whites; whereas in Boston, poor blacks were mixed with poor whites. The answer isn’t race—it’s class.

I’ve posted in more of the article below (in case the link above didn’t work.)

This week, the Court heard arguments in a pair of cases pitting white parents against school districts in Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky, which use race as a factor in determining which schools children attend. The parents claim that this violates the proposition in Brown v. Board of Education that students should not be treated differently because of skin color. Advocates of the school policies, including civil rights groups, say that, under Brown, schools have a right to consider race because integration improves academic achievement and fosters better relations between races. In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Court upheld the use of race to promote diversity in higher education; but conservatives believe that, with Alito as a potential fifth vote, it may reverse course. This would affect hundreds of school districts that currently have racial integration plans similar to those of Seattle and Louisville and may also have implications for affirmative action at selective colleges and universities.

If the Court decides that schools can no longer take race into consideration, those who care about social justice will need to find another way to promote equal educational opportunity. Luckily, roughly 40 school districts have been trying a new approach--income-based school integration. Because of the overlap between race and economic status, this policy produces a healthy amount of racial diversity. At the same time, even opponents of using race in student assignment concede that using socioeconomic status is perfectly legal. Moreover, socioeconomic integration provides an even more powerful lever for raising achievement.

Wake County, North Carolina, which encompasses Raleigh, is a large and growing district with a diverse population. In the early '80s, Wake County voluntarily integrated its schools by race, largely through a system of magnet schools. But, by the late '90s, with pressure to raise achievement and to avoid legal challenges to the use of race, Wake officials began talking about trying something different.

Even for liberals, the system of integrating students by race has had its drawbacks. For one thing, it can appear to insultingly imply that black students need to sit next to whites to learn or that "too many" black kids make for a bad learning environment. For another, it hasn't always improved black achievement. Under racial desegregation plans, for example, black student scores rose in Charlotte, North Carolina, but not in Boston, Massachusetts. But discrepancies like these reveal a clue as to what does work. The difference between Charlotte and Boston is that in Charlotte, poor blacks had a chance to go to school with middle-class whites; whereas in Boston, poor blacks were mixed with poor whites. The answer isn't race--it's class.

Studies going back 40 years have found that the socioeconomic status of the school a child attends is, after family economic status, the most powerful predictor of academic achievement. Indeed, the positive influence of having a middle-class school environment is the central reason why racial desegregation often improves black achievement. As Harvard Professor Gary Orfield notes, "Educational research suggests that the basic damage inflicted by segregated education comes not from racial concentration but from the concentration of children from poor families."

Consider, for example, peer influences. It is a disadvantage to have classmates who misbehave, cut class, miss school, engage in violence, watch excessive television, drop out, and fail to go on to college. Research finds that all these behaviors track much more closely by economic class than by race. There is powerful evidence that even the widely discussed phenomenon in black communities of denigrating academic achievement as "acting white" is, in fact, a phenomenon more deeply rooted in class--common among low-income students of all races.

Evidence like this convinced officials in Wake County to give income-based integration a try. Starting in 2000, they began to assign students--largely through public school choice and redrawn school lines--to ensure that no school had more than 40 percent of students eligible for subsidized lunch (an indicator of low parental income) or more than 25 percent of students achieving below grade level.

The results have been promising. In 2005, low-income and minority students substantially outperformed comparable students in large North Carolina districts that have greater concentrations of school poverty. Other districts using socioeconomic integration, like La Crosse, Wisconsin, have also seen rising academic achievement.

Of course, schools are about more than boosting test scores. In a nation made up of peoples from all across the world, U.S. public schools have a special role in promoting tolerance and social cohesion--so racial integration is an important goal, whatever its effect on academic achievement. But on this score, too, Wake's socioeconomic program has been a success. Under a previous racial integration policy, in the 1999-2000 school year, 64.6 percent of Wake County schools met guidelines providing that all schools should be between 15 and 45 percent minority. Two years later, under the new socioeconomic integration policy, 63.3 percent of schools met those targets.

Socioeconomic integration should produce substantial amounts of racial integration beyond Wake County. Begin with the fact that black and other minority students are almost three times as likely to be low income as white students. Moreover, because of housing discrimination, poor blacks are more likely to live in concentrated poverty and attend high-poverty schools than poor whites. The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University found that, in the 2003-2004 school year, 76 percent of predominantly minority schools were high poverty, compared with only 15 percent of predominately white schools.

This article is adapted from a Century Foundation idea brief, "A New Way on School Integration."

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and the author of All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice.