The Madison Metropolitan School District voted Monday to stop using race as a criterion to evaluate transfer requests, thus ending years of a misguided policy aimed at achieving a racial balance in the city?s schools.
This decision comes in the wake of two U.S. Supreme Court rulings last summer that struck down similar district policies in Seattle, Wash., and Jefferson County, Ky.. But it should not have taken bringing these appeals to our nation?s highest court for Madison to see ?the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,? as Chief Justice John Roberts aptly put it in Parents v. Seattle.
The former policy refused transfer requests for white students from the district, if they were enrolled in an area with a minority attendance of more than 43 percent. District officials say the policy stemmed from a statute regulating state aid under Chapter 220 that requires districts to deny transfer requests that would increase racial imbalance.
But Chapter 220 was designed to promote integration through more, not less, choice in schools. Students in the state?s poorest areas ? namely, Milwaukee ? are given free busing to attend suburban schools, and vice versa. This is a laudable attempt to achieve integration ? one the state should continue.
The statute was likely designed to protect against ?white flight? resulting from minority students being bused into suburban schools. But MMSD superintendent Art Rainwater told The Capital Times that many of the 120 affected students last year were not even attending district schools; rather, they were home-schooled students who wished to enroll in virtual schools outside the district. And there are many other legitimate reasons parents wish to transfer their children ? from inconvenient district lines to a desire to keep siblings in the same school.
Moreover, parents repeatedly and unfairly denied transfer requests are more likely to relocate their residences altogether, or engage in costly lawsuits, which the MMSD has already twice fought. A better way to prevent a mass exodus is simply to toughen the requirements for transfer applications. If this is not enough, the district could move to cap transfers or redraw school attendance area lines, as was done in Madison at the behest of federal civil rights officials in the 1980s.
Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen issued a rare formal opinion on the statute in December, stating the provision clearly violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Madison was the only school district to have followed the transfer denial stipulation.
Legislation to remove the statute from Chapter 220?s aid eligibility regulations was introduced in the state Assembly by Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, last October and was approved 7-1 by a bipartisan committee. The Legislature should act swiftly to ensure that equitable treatment is afforded to all students.
