From “Good Will” to “Anachronism”

Changing Perceptions of Racial Justice in Public Education

When Chancellor Joel Klein called the Mark Twain desegregation plan “unnecessary” during a 2007 press conference, James Meyerson, the plaintiffs’ attorney in Hart, responded with outrage. “The Defendant's unfortunate position to the contrary notwithstanding,” Meyerson (2008a:7) wrote the court, “there is nothing ‘anachronistic’ about the moral and constitutional imperatives encompassed in Brown v. Board of Education.” The NAACP seconded Meyerson's position, pointing to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York's argument that as “the epicenter of segregated public education,” “New York City illustrates what a twenty-first century American city's school system may look like, absent the ability to consider race to avoid de facto segregation in the public schools… with schools as segregated, if not more segregated, than they were thirty years ago” (Blackman 2007:6). However, despite the outrage expressed by Myerson, the NAACP, and the NYC Bar Association, popular opinion and several recent policy initiatives were on Klein's side. More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, Meyerson's (2008a) argument that desegregation was a “constitutional imperative” had become a minority opinion and was itself seen as an anachronism.

How did school desegregation policy come to be considered “anachronistic” in one of the most segregated school systems in the country (Kucsera and Orfield 2014)? One immediate answer lies in the particulars of the case: Due in large part to the success of its desegregation plan, Mark Twain was transformed from a “ghetto” school, predominantly comprised of African and Latino students, into one of the most selective middle schools in the city, attractive to families of all races. However, the changes in the racial makeup of one school in one city do not fully explain shifts in broader public perceptions of school desegregation policy. In his 1974 decision to desegregate Mark Twain, Judge Weinstein argued that school segregation had been caused by “many people of good will and fine intentions” who were “overwhelmed by social tides beyond their individual control” (p. 50). To understand the persistence of school segregation and the limitations of civil rights litigation in the post–Brown era, we must look to how definitions of the public good have depended on evolving assumptions about the purpose of schools, the nature of racial categories, and definitions of “good will” itself.

In the discourse related to school desegregation that has emerged since the Brown decision of 1954, questions related to race, the responsibility of the “state,” and the purposes of public education are closely intertwined but often contradictory. In their seminal work, School, Work and the Democratic State, Carnoy and Levin (1985) contend that because American society is marked by “perpetual tension between two dynamics, the imperatives of capitalism and those of democracy” (p. 4), schools are pulled between reproducing the capitalist economy and expanding individuals’ access to economic and social opportunity. As a result of the tensions and contradictions created by this paradox, public education has become “both a product and a shaper of social discord” (p. 14). Building upon Carnoy and Levin, David Labaree (1997) traces the overlaps and contradictions between three understandings of how public education works for the public good: democratic equality (educating citizens for their role in government), social efficiency (training workers for their role in the economy), and social mobility (preparing individuals for competitive advantage in the marketplace). According to Labaree, these goals have worked both in concert and in conflict with each other to shape educational policy at specific historical moments. Where Carnoy and Levin focus on the state's interests in maintaining capitalism and democracy for the public good, Labaree adds the interests of the individual educational consumer who sees education as “a private good that is harnessed to the pursuit of personal advantage” (p. 43). Importantly, both Labaree and Carnoy and Levin agree that schools in the United States are fundamentally sites of struggle. As various groups defend their own interests, they define and redefine the nature of the public good that schools provide. Thus, pendulum swings in educational policy can be explained in part by the “ebb and flow of social movements” (Carnoy and Levin 1985:14) for democratic reform.

However, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) argue, “democracy has never been in abundant supply where race is concerned” (p. 79). Omi and Winant's theory of the racial state provides an important complementary framework from which to understand school desegregation debates. Omi and Winant argue that the state, composed of institutions, policies, conditions and rules, and social relations are “inherently racial” and intimately tied to America's long history of racial domination. Further, “far from intervening in racial conflicts, the state is itself increasingly the preeminent site of racial conflict” (p. 82). By recognizing the “state” as an administrative apparatus tied to the social process of maintaining racial hierarchies, we can understand school desegregation efforts not as an intervention in racial conflict but as a site of racial conflict in the post–civil rights era.

Omi and Winant (1994) contend that the successful Civil Rights movements following World War II created a reformed racial state with new “rules of the game.” Jodi Melamed (2011) argues that this postwar racial break marked not merely a shift in power between movement efforts and white supremacy, but the emergence of a new conception of the public good: “a new worldwide racial project, a formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity that revises, partners with, and exceeds the capacity of white supremacy without replacing or ending it” (p. 6-7). Melamed's work traces three phases of official antiracism. The notion of good will—so central to the original Mark Twain decision—plays an important part in each. The first, postwar racial liberalism, had roots in the 1930s but was articulated most clearly in the decade following World War II. Racial liberalism explains racism as an individual, psychological, or moral problem of prejudice, that requires the “social re-engineering of white attitudes” (p. 20). The next phase, the liberal multiculturalism of the 1960s and 1970s, socialized whites to vocalize antiracist sentiments as well as their desire for diversity. The current phase, neoliberal multiculturalism, operates from the neoliberal assumption that the best way to distribute resource is through the market, rather than state regulation. In the contemporary era, the state's responsibility is to ensure that the educational marketplace offers equal access to social mobility, not to regulate the disparate impact of these markets on children or communities of color. Within this marketplace, the public good is advanced by color blindness in both individual intent and legal doctrine (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Haney-Lopez 2012).

The Supreme Court officially embraced the doctrine of social mobility in the 2007 decision of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, describing desegregation plans as “crude measures” that “threaten to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school's supply and another's demand” (Kennedy 2007:18). The Supreme Court's concern is with ensuring that individuals, rather than institutions, benefit from the law of the marketplace. School integration—once pursued as a means to advance antiracist “good will”—is neither a salient goal nor a public good. As former civil rights attorney and the then cancellor of New York City Schools Joel Klein put it, the Mark Twain desegregation order was an “anachronism.” In fact, the term “anachronism,” with its attendant connotations of willful forgetfulness, futility, and fatigue, perfectly illustrates the “official antiracist” (Melamed 2011) stance on school desegregation: the position that “we’ve done enough” (Tushnet 1995) despite the fundamental and widely documented inequities of New York City's highly segregated public education system.

School Segregation in the Urban North, Circa 1973

By 1973, New York City was in its fourth year of school decentralization. City schools had been divided into community districts governed by locally elected school boards. While the citywide board of education continued to provide guidance through the Chancellor's office, most decisions were left to the community school boards, who were held accountable by voters. District 21, the home of Mark Twain Junior High School, had nine school board members, all of whom were white (Berger 1978). The District, however, was not.

Curtis Berger, the Special Master appointed by Judge Weinstein to develop a desegregation plan for Mark Twain, described District 21 as including neighborhoods ranging from Sea Gate, a white middle-class gated community patrolled by private guards, to Coney Island, a predominantly African American and Latino community that contained multiple public housing projects. While Coney Island was famous for its public beaches and amusement park, it was also widely known as “one of the city's worst neighborhoods” by the early 1970s (Fishman 1978:117). In 1974, a New York Times article on attempts to revitalize Coney Island had the revealing title “Desperate Battle Against Urban Blight” (Fowler 1974). Berger described neighborhood demographics in the following terms:

District 21's 290,000 population is that of a small city. Like most older cities of this size, it houses both poverty and material comfort, decaying slums and better neighborhoods. The slums lie in the heart of Coney Island, a squalid, crime-ridden, socially disordered community, which is also the scene of the city's second largest (still uncompleted) urban renewal project. Today, central Coney Island is mostly non-white; only a dwindling number of elderly, mostly Jewish tenants and an enclave of home-owning Italians remain to share the neighborhood with a fast growing, much larger, relatively younger settlement of blacks and Hispanics. (P. 707)

Although Mark Twain was a well-equipped school with many resources, its location in Coney Island placed it at the epicenter of white flight. Even as the school utilization rate dramatically decreased between 1966 and 1973, the presence of students of color in Twain's student body increased from 19 percent to 82 percent. This sharp increase was a direct result of not only shifting neighborhood demographics but also changes in school feeder patterns. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the district deliberately directed graduates of predominantly white elementary schools away from Mark Twain to other District 21 junior high schools. These changes did not go unprotested; between 1970 and 1972, community organizers called for rezoning, the Mark Twain Parents Association appealed to the Central Board of Education, and the chancellor directed the District 21 Board to address the racial imbalance at Mark Twain (Fishman 1978). However, the board was desperate to avoid taking any steps that might increase white flight from the district, and for that reason, nothing changed until Hart v. Community School 21.

Hart v. Community School District 21, 1973 to 1974

On August 4, 1972, the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Jeffrey Hart, an African American boy, and other students assigned to Mark Twain (Fishman 1978). Following a year of contentious public hearings, Judge Weinstein issued an informal opinion holding Community School Board 21 liable for Mark Twain's racial imbalance. Public interpretations of this initial opinion varied widely. The New York Times highlighted Weinstein's declaration that “my finding of liability does not imply any criminal conduct or quasi-criminal conduct… I am impressed by all the witnesses, including the school board. People of good will are trying to do the best they can under difficult circumstances” (Kaplan 1973). In their coverage of the case, the Times focused its attention on the school board's good intentions of keeping white families in the district. The New York Amsterdam News, in contrast, focused on the discriminatory outcomes of the board's actions. It dismissed Weinstein's discussion of good will, reporting that the decision ultimately “heaped the blame for the wave of segregation in the school on the chancellor's office and the Community School Board” (Anon 1973:C1).

On January 28, 1974, Weinstein issued his formal ruling. This was the first federal court decision ever written on segregation in New York City schools, considered important enough to be abridged and published in the journal Equity and Excellence in Education. Once again, Weinstein explicitly set aside the question of racist or “malign” intent in cases of de jure segregation by ruling that “it is virtually impossible for a court to divine the collection of motives which underlies a multi-member school board's various administrative decisions” (p.55). While Weinstein considered discriminatory intent important insofar as it “increases the probability, as well as the stigma, of discrimination,” he based his decision on the Supreme Court's ruling that “the existence of a permissible purpose cannot sustain an action that has an impermissible effect” (p.55). Ultimately, Weinstein assessed “good will” not in terms of intentions but through an evaluation of policy outcomes. Drawing on the logic of postwar racial liberalism, he argued that what mattered was whether or not the school board's actions interfered with the public good, as manifested through the goal of democratic equality.

In the face of empirical evidence of a “racial double standard” (p.57), Weinstein dismissed concerns about white flight as missing the point:

There is no reason not to take effective steps to desegregate except the constitutionally impermissible one that some white parents do not wish to send their children to black schools or neighborhoods… The State may not use taxpayers’ money to support a segregated system. Blacks or whites desiring to utilize such a system must find it without the aid of the state. (P. 55)

Public responses to the decision centered on debates over the purpose of integrated schools. On the day after the decision, a headline in the New York Times proclaimed, “Mark Twain Pupils, Happy at Their School, Find Integration Order Puzzling” (Maeroff 1974). The reporter quoted students questioning the purpose of school integration: “this school is run very well and it wouldn’t make me feel any different if there were more whites here.” In response, a letter to the editor from a “long-time Coney Islander” argued:

While today's student may express satisfaction with the atmosphere at Mark Twain, both carefree and low-pressure, the reading and mathematics levels under current conditions leave much to be desired; the learning competition that exists in a well-integrated school is missing… Black and Puerto Rican families who are concerned about the welfare of their children and the community in general will welcome a change that enhances the prospects of success in our multiracial nation; improved education is an essential ingredient for such success. (Siel 1974)

If by “the community in general,” the letter-writer meant white families, he was destined to be disappointed. Public response to the Mark Twain decision was a reminder that “to challenge the position of blacks in society is to challenge the position of whites” (Omi and Winant 1994:91). On April 15, Republican Senator James L. Buckley held hearings to gather testimony from white parents opposed to the court order. Appealing directly to the logic of education as personal property, Buckley proclaimed, “The parents of children in this district must not be deprived by judicial adventurism of their God-given rights as parents for the ultimate responsibility for the education and welfare of their children” (Montgomery 1974). At the same hearings, the president of the local civic association took care to state for the record that he “took umbrage at attempts to label this community racist.” While Weinstein's decision was true to the Brown decision's logic of racial liberalism, key leaders in the white community argued that their good will and commitment to the public good should not be questioned. They contended that their opposition to Weinstein's order was not based on prejudice but a matter of individual rights to education.

Between January and July 1974, the school board and housing agencies developed proposals and Weinstein held hearings to determine the shape of the Twain desegregation plan. Housing agencies were resolute in their resistance, arguing that it simply was not possible to interrupt residential segregation patterns in the way that Weinstein had ordered. The district school board, meanwhile, proposed that Mark Twain become a magnet school, offering special programs that would attract white students. The rationale for this plan was based on the assumption that the rights of a “neglected minority,” namely, gifted and talented children, could be better served through such a program. These children, the plan reminded the court, are not “confined to upper- or middle-class neighborhoods”; they might also be found “in low-income neighborhoods and among the poor” (Rubin 2008:19). Citing a recent Commissioner's Report, the district argued that gifted and talented children's risk of “suffering psychological damage and permanent impairment of their abilities… is equal to or greater than the similar deprivation suffered by any other population with special needs served by the Office of Education” (p.19). In a significant shift of rationale, good will and official antiracism were to be demonstrated by ensuring equal access to education based on talent, rather than race.

In an almost textbook example of Bell's (1980) interest convergence dilemma, special programs for gifted and talented children from all racial groups were created in an effort to convince white parents to remain in (or return to) the school system. The board proposed to address this “deprived” group's needs through a new, desegregated Mark Twain School for the Gifted and Talented, which would offer advanced classes, carefully tailored curricula, and individual attention to a carefully recruited and selected 30 percent “minority” and 70 percent “Caucasian” student body—percentages that were based on the racial demographics of District 21 at the time. Curtis Berger, the court-appointed Special Master, spent three months investigating educational and residential desegregation in District 21 before preparing his recommendations to the court regarding District 21's proposal. In Berger's (1974) final report, he endorsed the school board's plan for a magnet school as the only option that avoided “a too-rapid change in the ethnic composition of the District's schools” (p. 86). The stakes, he argued, were too high to risk white flight.

Four years later, Berger (1978) explained that his support for the magnet school came after he spoke with the white members of the District 21 Board and Parents’ Associations. He was convinced by their passion that an effective desegregation plan depended on enticing, rather than forcing, white students to attend Mark Twain (pp. 714-15). Unless white parents were convinced of the school's value to their children, he reasoned, they would withdraw them from public schools altogether. Berger acknowledged, “it might be argued that if offending the sensibilities of white parents were always the standard, school integration in this country would have been a dead issue from the start” (p. 88). However, he dismissed those claims, because “this is not the Old South in 1957… This is Brooklyn in 1974, where ethnic surgery of the most delicate order is needed to preserve a fragile social order” (p. 88). In the “Old South,” it might be appropriate to mandate blunt school desegregation measures such as busing. In the liberal multicultural world of 1974 Brooklyn, Berger argued, we can safely assume good will on the part of all and make accommodations for the sake of the greater public good.

Berger's endorsement of delicate ethnic surgery was greeted with outright hostility by much of the African American community. Dan Dodson—an NAACP expert witness on rezoning schools and busing—directly attacked the plan in court as “blatantly racist,” arguing that it would “provide 750 majority children [with] a deluxe program that exacerbates the problem of inequality” (Goodman 1974). The New Amsterdam News was even more blunt, saying the plan “would give whites ‘goodies’ while minorities ‘get the shaft’” (Anon 1974c). In an editorial, The New Amsterdam News maintained that the very idea of voluntary desegregation contradicted the spirit of Brown:

Under the Berger plan, the integration of Mark Twain High School would be left to the whims, fancies, and possible good will of white parents. This is not what the Supreme Court ordered in its 1954 desegregation case; it is not what Judge Weinstein ordered in his sweeping decision of last January. (“Not on goodwill,” 1974d, italics in original)

Others argued that, questions of race and equity aside, a magnet program for the gifted and talented would inherently subvert the goal of desegregation and the democratic purpose of public education. Psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose testimony had proved so influential in Brown, attacked the Mark Twain plan as “obscene, immoral, illegal and unconstitutional.” By 1974, the only African American member of the New York State Board of Regents, Kenneth Clark accused the proposal of “reinforcing the fears and prejudices of whites” and, worse, establishing “a school which is the embodiment … of educational elitism” (“Clark hits integration plan,” 1974a:C1). This elitism, Clark argued, contradicted the purpose of schools: “the immorality of American racism has now infected and threatens the rights of all human beings without regard to race or color… [Segregation] according to intellect and talent is offered as an acceptable cure for—or evasion of—racial desegregation” (Lissner 1974). Discrimination of any kind, Clark argued, moves schools away from working for the public good and toward reproducing social advantage.

Much to the dismay of the NAACP and the delight of federal, state, and local housing authorities, Weinstein ruled much more narrowly in his 1974 decision than he had in his initial opinion six months before. He relented on the question of residential integration, apparently having decided that it was, indeed contrary to the goal of desegregation. Weinstein cited the Milliken v. Bradley opinion, published only one day prior to his own, as the basis for his argument that “decisions affecting the schools must be left, as much as possible, to the community's educators.” The age of racial liberalism had ended, and Weinstein accepted the Community Board 21's proposal to transform Mark Twain into a magnet school. Weinstein did, however, threaten a “Plan B”: If the magnet school did not achieve an integrated student body within two years—one that roughly (within a 10 percent margin) reflected the district demographics of 70 percent white students and 30 percent students of color—he would order district-wide busing. Clark responded with disgust to Weinstein's decision to create a magnet school: “Special educational advantages should go to all children. Given limited educational resources, one cannot provide a very small minority of children with these extra educational advantages without at the same time denying them to the other children in the district” (Peterson 1974). The role of schools in the public good, Clark argued, is not to provide a meritocratic educational marketplace; it is to protect and promote democratic equality.

The Mark Twain School for the Gifted and Talented, 1975 to 2007

The Mark Twain School for the Gifted and Talented lived up to both its proponents’ loftiest goals and its critics’ worst fears. The District 21 Board quickly realized that if the desegregation proposal was to be successful—and if Weinstein's threat of the dreaded bussing decree was to be avoided—what mattered most was the school's reputation. With white parents cast as valued customers, the community school board was placed in the role of salesman.

By February 1975, the board was bragging to the New York Times about the magnet program's 12 talent areas, ranging from natural sciences to vocal music, and raving about innovations in team-teaching and individualized instruction. In an article with the blunt subtitle “Twain Seeks to Get More White Pupils,” the school board president told the Times, “When parents see what we’re going to offer, they will know that if their child belongs there, he will be cheated if he doesn’t go there” (“New Twain integration plan,” 1975). Improving the school's reputation went beyond the academics. Six weeks later, the Times reported on the extensive safety measures put into the school plans, including an “unparalleled concentration of electronic systems” and “measures apparently intended to eliminate the need or the opportunity for the students to wander around in the school's black and Hispanic neighborhood.” The Board President explained:

We have to deal with the perceptions of parents as well as the facts. The community at large in the district was apprehensive about sending their children to a school in Coney Island, so we requested these very stringent security arrangements, although those of who are familiar with the school are persuaded that they’re not really necessary. (Peterson 1975)

District 21's marketing plan worked. By 1978, Mark Twain was soon “firmly established as an integrated school, an ornament of the District and the entire New York school system” with the highest reading achievement scores in the city for the second consecutive year (Berger 1978:734). Only three years after its reinvention as a magnet school, Mark Twain was hailed as one of the two best public schools in New York City. That year, according to District 21 records, the Mark Twain student body was only 38 percent “minority” (Rubin 2008:66). The school's principal reported, “We have some parents who said initially, ‘I’m never going to send my kid to Coney Island, I’m never going to put my kids on the bus.’” However, as the school's reputation grew, parents were calling their Congressmen to pull strings so that their children could attend Mark Twain. Even the NAACP was on board, with staff attorney Meyerson going on the record acknowledging, “It's a magnificent example of what desegregation can do” (Oelsner 1978). Over the next several decades, Twain continued to thrive academically, consistently showing reading scores among the highest in the city. Throughout this period, the school stayed within 10 percentage points of the court-mandated balance of 70 percent white students and 30 percent students of color.

Attention to the goals of both desegregation and meritocracy was key to recreating Mark Twain's rebirth as a successfully integrated, academically rigorous school. The school's admission process was complex, involving tests in school talent areas, racial and geographic quotas, and academic measures. By 1988, The Times reported, “‘It's more complicated than the football draft,’ says an assistant principal, Sandy Zoccali. ‘But what we have here is a situation that everyone loves.’” Gary Goldstein, acting principal, agreed, arguing that the school's racial diversity benefited all students: “Some of our minority kids never had the opportunity to talk to a white child before. Other kids become more sensitive and understanding of kids who come from deprived backgrounds” (Berger 1988). According to these school leaders, entry to a well-regulated educational marketplace worked for the public good: The students of color learned how talk to white students and the white students learned empathy for the “deprived” students of color.

Everyone, that is, who could get in. In 1995, the Times Metropolitan section called Mark Twain a “rare oasis in the public school system,” a commodity so hot that families from Queens paid for a private bus to send their children to Coney Island (Kershaw 1995). There were reports of school board members using their power to influence admissions. These political maneuvers were particularly high stakes because the larger patterns of educational neglect in District 21 had not changed. Following Milliken, the 1974 decision that had guided Weinstein's court order, Bell (1980) warned that local control would:

result in the maintenance of a status quo that will preserve superior opportunities and facilities for whites at the expense of blacks. As one commentator has suggested, “It is implausible to assume that school boards guilty of substantial violations in the past will take the interests of black school children to heart.” (P. 527)

Rau v. NYCDOE, 2007 to 2008

By 2007, New York City schools were once again centralized. Local community school boards were abolished; the central Board of Education was demoted to an advisory Panel for Educational Policy; and Chancellor Joel Klein directed all administrative and policy decisions through the NYCDOE, including admissions into gifted and talented programs. Selection was based on test scores and applications, with students from any New York City district permitted to apply to any school. Placement decisions were made based on test scores and applicants’ ranked choices. In the case of Mark Twain—which was the first choice of most applicants due to its outstanding reputation—the NYCDOE placement office adhered to the 1974 court order to stay within 10 percentage points of the mandated 70:30 ratio by maintaining quotas in each of the school's nine “talent programs” (Berman 2008). It was this policy that would be attacked as anachronistic during the second Mark Twain lawsuit.

In the 2007 to 2008 academic year, 2,627 students from all five boroughs applied to District 21 Gifted and Talented programs, with 1,758 families listing Mark Twain as their first choice school; 463 were offered seats, 60 percent of whom were white, and 40 percent students of color. Students who did not get a seat at Mark Twain were offered places in their second or third choice Gifted and Talented programs in District 21 schools. Nikita Rau was one of these students.

Rau, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was not admitted to Mark Twain because she did not achieve the minimum test score for her chosen talent program in instrumental music. While cutoff scores varied among the school's programs, they were consistently lower for white students than for students of color. White students who scored 77 or higher were admitted to the instrumental music program, but students of color had to score 84.4 or above. Rau scored 79. Her parents sued the Department of Education, arguing that “were it not for Defendants’ discriminatory policy, she would have been offered admission to Mark Twain” (Rosman 2008:4). Rau's family was represented by the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), a conservative public-interest law group known for its success in curtailing affirmative action. Dedicated to protecting individual civil and economic liberties, CIR framed educational rights in terms of choice and social mobility; it had recently argued against affirmative action before the Supreme Court in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger (Anon 2011). The Mark Twain case was remanded to Judge Weinstein, now near the end of his career, as an intervention in the original Hart v. Community School Board 21 lawsuit.

The NYCDOE supported the Rau team in their effort to terminate the Mark Twain desegregation plan. On behalf of Chancellor Joel Klein, the city's lawyers sought an expedited hearing with the goal of ending the use of race in admissions immediately. In its request to expedite, the city argued,

Mark Twain is now a racially mixed, highly-sought-after, excellent school… The Remedial Order requiring admission to Mark Twain based on a set percentage by race has outlived its usefulness as a remedy for unlawful segregation that itself has long since disappeared. (Rubin 2008:2-3)

It was precisely this line of thought that enraged James Meyerson, the NAACP attorney from Hart v. Community School Board 21. Meyerson (2008b) knew the end of the desegregation order was a foregone conclusion. Still, he appealed to the court for an “exceedingly narrow” ruling that would allow for the use of race in future school admissions policies. Arguing that a “diverse and racially integrated school environment” is essential to a quality education, Meyerson argued that, despite the Chancellor's claim and the rise of color blindness, race was no anachronism. “We must resist the impulse to find the quest for a quality, desegregated American community to be something of the past, an outdated dream and hope,” Meyerson contended, deploring “the failure of American society and all of its institutions, both private and public, in fulfilling, even at this late date, the moral and constitutional imperatives encompassed in Brown” (2008a:7, 12). While the world around him had moved on, accepting a neoliberal version of color-blind multiculturalism, Meyerson still held to a vision of race-conscious democratic equality as the primary purpose of public education.

Weinstein ruled quite narrowly, writing that the case had been effectively closed since 1990, when the Mark Twain Parents’ Association had sought the court's support with a court order requiring the city to provide citywide busing to the school, as it had when the school was desperately trying to recruit White families. Indeed, in the years since the 1974 court order, the white community's perception of busing had been transformed from a terrible threat to a highly desirable amenity. However, Weinstein had refused the Parent Association's 1990 appeal for buses; he found that the original constitutional violations at Mark Twain had been eliminated because the school was no longer segregated. When the court mandate for racial balance officially lifted in 2008, the Department of Education was free to guide admissions policy as it chose (Weinstein 2008). ² Within a week, the Department of Education promptly eliminated the use of race as it admitted students to Mark Twain for the following school year.

The Rau case led to renewed public debates over the purpose of school desegregation in the contemporary color-blind era. The headline of the first article published about the case screamed “Color-Barred Student: Shut Out by School's Race Quota” and quoted Nikita Rau's father saying, “This country believes in racial equality, and we should not face this in America” (Mangan 2007). On January 18, 2008—three days before the nation observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day—Anjan Rau told the New York Post, “Children should be judged on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin” (Mangan 2008). Rau's pleas for color blindness rested implicitly upon the ideas that schools are, first and foremost, obligated to provide opportunities for individual students to achieve social mobility; that the state should not intervene in racial conflict unless there is evidence of malicious intent; and that context—such as the poorly resourced elementary schools found in District 21—is irrelevant to the intervention of social policy in the public good (Haney-Lopez 2012).

While Nikita Rau's supporters argued in broad terms that race was irrelevant, public debate paid particular attention to her status as an Indian American. The Post editorial denouncing racial quotas as “cockamamie” made this clear:

Start with the fact that Rau is neither black nor Hispanic. Officials consider her a minority student because her father came from India in 1982. It's a stretch. But even if she were a minority, who would’ve thought the courts would force schools to reject minority kids based on their race or skin color? (Anon 2007)

The U.S. Census is a useful indicator of not only changes in racial demographics but also the state's “shifting racial perspective” (Omi and Winant 1994:83). Indian Americans were not even counted as a census subgroup until 1980, following a 141 percent increase in the Asian American population due to 1965 changes in immigration laws (Barringer, Gardner, and Levin 1993). These seismic demographic shifts meant that conversations about the relative needs and rights of “minorities” were no longer simply about African American students. New equations for racial balance would have to include Asian American (and Latino/Latina) students as well. However, desegregation orders of the 1960s and 1970s did not allow for this level of nuance. In these courts’ eyes, race was still regarded simply as a question of black and white. On this matter, the courts were not alone. On the 1970 census, “Asian Indians” were classified as white (Barnes and Claudette 2002).

The changes of the 1970s and 1980s were thus not only the results of immigration but also a reflection of the new racial understanding of Asian Americans. This was made clear in public discussion of Rau v. NYCDOE. By framing Nikita Rau as “neither Black nor Hispanic,” the Post shifted attention away from white students altogether. The editorial might have asked why, in a school system that is majority African American and Latino, Asian Americans and white students were the majority racial groups in the city's most selective middle school. Instead, it chose to argue that race was irrelevant. The Post thus used color-blind ideology to distract attention from the racial reality of school segregation. Through this “ideological sleight of hand” (Omi and Takagi 2010:121), even discussions of race were considered anachronistic and contrary to the public good.

Because Nikita Rau was not white, she was an ideal candidate to advance the cause that any policy besides color blindness violates the principles of meritocracy and the fundamental liberties of students of color as well as white students. The Post made its stance clear, charging that “programs meant to integrate public schools have flopped all across America since courts began ordering them in 1970s” and echoing Nikita Rau's father's wish for a “color-blind” admissions policy (Mangan 2008). In a later editorial, the Post maintained that “racial discrimination is an ugly injustice regardless of its target—the Rau case simply highlights the absurdity of practicing it, even in the name of social justice” (Anon 2008). These arguments echoed the language of the plurality opinion in the landmark Supreme Court Case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1: “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” (Roberts 2007:40-41). In this formulation, by acknowledging racial disparities in access and opportunities, the courts would subvert the goal of social mobility for the public good.

The public preoccupation with the use of “racial quotas” in the Rau case points to how dramatically views of the public good had changed since the first Mark Twain case. As one worried parent wrote to Judge Weinstein,

It is so upsetting to see that anyone who has the potential (and the scores) could be discounted due to a quota… A wise person once wrote that once you give one group more lenience than another you are declaring that all men are not created equal. (Fasulo 2008)