There's lots coming out of the Dept. of Education that I philosophically disagree with. However, there's little that I see in a quick skim of the DoE memo or the consent decrees following the framework it establishes that really match the Chester Finn article in National Review. The main concern is equity of access and none of the cases have been about the DoE requiring a school to remove tracking or honor classes. I'll quote the criteria:
"While differentiation among schools in a district may serve important educational goals, OCR evaluates whether students of different races in a district are able to equally access and participate in a comparable variety of specialized programs whether curricular, co-curricular, or extracurricular. The selection of schools to offer particular programs and the resources made available for the success of those programs may not disproportionately deny access to students of a particular race or national origin. Also, the policies for recruitment and admission to particular schools or programs, both within and across schools, should not deny students equal access on
the basis of their race."
Note first that there is recognition that differentiation has legitimate purposes. When they identify racial disparities in participation they then.
1. Check that the criteria are neutral.
2. Confirm that the tracking etc. serves a legitimate educational purpose.
3. Analyze if there are other equally effective criteria that would be less discriminatory.
A sample outcome would be advising one district to uniformly apply its selection process for GATE programs and educate all the personal on the process so they know all the criteria or asking another to review whether there any racially based barriers in their advanced courses. Given discrimination in the past I don't have an issue with investigating whether unequal outcomes are racially motivated. Some kind of watchdog still seems necessary.
