The district assigned students to create racially balanced schools, then developed strategies like magnet schools to encourage voluntary desegregation.
For 18 years, this city of 55,000 has maintained racially balanced schools without the white flight that has followed integration plans in places like Boston and Canarsie, Brooklyn.
I think it's good for children to be exposed to all different kinds of people, and I don't disagree with the idea of racially balanced schools.
Now, judges and parents are questioning the constitutionality and value of programs that try to create racially balanced schools without busing, by restricting who can go to school where.
In a 2007 case that prohibited using race to determine school assignments (the district in this case was in Seattle, had no history of segregation, and was trying to achieve racially balanced schools), Justice Roberts wrote: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race".
This means that hundreds of otherwise sensible and well-balanced school leaders will soon develop temporary hysteria.
He says: "We greatly welcome government recognition of the importance of a broad and balanced senior school education, measured through rigorous exams in academically challenging subjects and including humanities and languages as well as in other core curriculum areas".
Currently, these foods are unregulated in many states and can consist of junk food and sugary beverages, both competing with the nutritionally-balanced federal school meal (hence the name, "competitive food") and undercutting efforts to reduce childhood obesity.
This is what balanced approaches in school performance measurement are intended to capture.
In Chicago, Mr. Vallas will leave a legacy of balanced budgets, modernized school buildings, and an upward curve on the testing charts.
