The Supreme Court is considering oral arguments in two cases that pit school choice against school desegregation. The high court’s ruling, expected in Spring 2007, will determine whether a public school system can use a race-based formula to promote diversity at individual schools at the expense of individual students.

Or to put the issue in stark, black-and-white terms: Is the state’s interest in improving the quality of the education minority kids receive compelling enough to justify destroying the quality of life of white kids?

On one side, are white parents in Louisville, KY, and Seattle, WA, who wanted their children to go to neighborhood schools, or to schools with academic or extra-curricular activities in which their children were interested.

On the other side, are school officials who think nothing of putting a child as young as five years old in a school so far from his home that his round-trip commute is three hours, and he has to be on the school bus at 5:35 am to get to school on time.

The Washington Post reports that in its brief, the Louisville school system argued that "the small harm done to a few students … is outweighed by the value of an integrated school system that ‘significantly advances the goal of teaching students how to participate in a democracy that has formed a single society out of many diverse people.’"

According to The Seattle Times, the Seattle school system used a similar argument to justify it’s "tie-breaker policy" which used race as a determining factor in school assignments: the practice enhanced their education by "introducing them to people with multiple backgrounds and points of view."

This is "the small harm" that was done to the children at the center of these cases:
† Being assigned to schools they did not want to attend because they are white is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.

† Instead of attending kindergarten at a local school, Crystal Meredith’s son Joshua – then just 5-years old - was bused 90 minutes away.

† Jill Kurfirst’s son and Winnie Bachwitz’s daughter wanted to attend Seattle’s Ballard High School because of its Biotech Academy. They were instead assigned to an academically inferior school. The round-trip commute, which involved taking three city buses, would have meant being away from home from 5:30 am until at least 8 pm – and they would have had to be out on the streets in the dark twice a day waiting for those buses.

Most adults would balk at a three-hour commute between work and home – particularly if they were forced to use mass transit. Yet many school systems require young children to navigate the complexities of city bus systems alone, and to travel to parts of town where nothing and no one is familiar.

In addition, commutes of two to three hours destroy both a child’s and family’s quality of life in several ways, and can adversely effect academic performance:
† Sitting down to dinner together as a family is out of the question – younger siblings cannot be expected to wait until 8 pm to eat.

† There’s little time left for homework - and no time for such after-school interests as private music or dance lessons, which entail hours of practice to make progress.

† Forget a part-time job after school.

† Getting the 8 or 9 hours of sleep a night that experts say adolescents and teens need is impossible - chronic lack of sleep has been linked to irritability, hyperactivity and poor scholastic performance.

The putative benefits these children receive in return for these considerable harms rest on several dubious pedagogic and social engineering assumptions:
† A school is the only place children interact with people of other races.

† White parents are incapable of teaching their children to "play well with others" when those others are nonwhite.

† Simply sharing a classroom with students of diverse backgrounds provides white students with a more valuable education than attending a school with an outstanding science or music program.

At present, roughly 400 of the 15,000 school districts nationwide are under court orders to desegregate. There are no statistics on how many school systems voluntarily use racial criteria to integrate schools by spreading white students evenly around.

Editorial Note: The Stiletto knows first-hand what it's like to take three city buses to get to a school miles from her neighborhood, having been the victim of forced public school assignment at the tender age of 10. The Stiletto had to wait for each bus anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes - they never kept to a set schedule - and remembers being so cold in the winter that she would start crying because her fingers and toes hurt so much. School desegregation is a laudable goal, but it should not be achieved by subjecting young children to such hardship.

Old Wine In New Bottle

Disgraced one-time CBS anchor Dan Rather, 75, who hosts Dan Rather Reports, a weekly news program on HDNet, told the HD World Conference and Exposition in New York last week that, because network news is not broadcast in high-def, viewers are apt to confuse war-zone footage with a video game. "Some of the realities of war will hit home in a way it has never done before" when viewers can see the carnage in crisp, crystal-clear high-def – as, coincidentally they would if they subscribed to HDNet, the 24-hour high-def TV network available on satellite and a handful of cable systems.

The Stiletto, for one, would have loved to see those fake National Guard memos in high-def – on a 46-inch flat panel LCD.

One Billboard Paris Hilton Won’t Be On

Paris Hilton pulled out of a commitment to host tonight’s Billboard Music Awards. Her spokesperson, Elliot Mintz, claims that the hotel heiress objected to some of the jokes she was supposed to read off the teleprompter. Wanna know the real reason she crapped out on the show? Rumor has it she couldn’t pronounce most of the words in the script. She was fine with monosyllabic words, such as "good," but more complicated words, such as "evening," apparently flummoxed the flaxen-haired celebutante. The award show will be held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, and is scheduled to air live on Fox at 8 pm ET.

US Air Passengers, Crew: Those Imams Don’t Have A Prayer

Blog aggregator Pajamas Media has pulled together passenger interviews, a five-page, single-spaced e-mail one passenger, "Pauline," had written to US Air, and the police report with attached eyewitness statements (starting on page 11) that describe what happened on that Minneapolis-to-Phoenix flight from which six imams were ejected for suspicious behavior.

This thorough, well-researched account supports the series of articles published in The Washington Times last week that refuted earlier knee-jerk MSM accounts that characterized the incident as "flying while Muslim." Pauline wrote the e-mail because she was "ENRAGED" over national and local news reports of the incident, which she termed "incomplete and inaccurate." She also believes that the imams’ actions were pre-meditated and orchestrated so as "to intimidate not just US Airways, but all airlines and all airports to get them to back off on their security efforts." She also praised how US Airways personnel handled the crisis: "No panic was created we felt protected at all times." [sic]

The Stiletto reiterates that the federal government should try all six on terrorism charges if a thorough investigation of the incident and these imams makes the case that their intent was to test airline security procedures and/or to terrorize their fellow passengers.

Editorial Note: The seatbelt extender that at least one of the imams asked for and received from a flight attendant could have been used to garrote the crew or other passengers; swung like a mace, a blow to the back of the head with the metal buckle could knock someone out. In the wrong hands, an otherwise innocent seatbelt extender can be a deadly weapon. Make no mistake, the "imams" (they have also referred to themselves as "scholars") were up to no good.