The Supreme Court ended its term today with a decision in a couple of closely watched cases involving public primary schools' efforts to achieve diversity. The Court ruled, 5-4, that having a goal of a "diverse student body" isn't sufficient reason to discriminate based on race.

Of course, that's not how much of the media coverage characterized it. I'll use the New York Times report because the vast majority of the media tend to follow their lead.

With competing blocs of justices claiming the mantle of Brown v. Board of Education, a bitterly divided Supreme Court declared Thursday that public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race.

Voting 5 to 4, the court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., invalidated programs in Seattle and metropolitan Louisville, Ky., that sought to maintain school-by-school diversity by limiting transfers on the basis of race or using race as a “tiebreaker” for admission to particular schools.

In plain English, what these schools were doing was refusing students admission to specific public schools because of their race. If the school was "too white" then white kids would be bused across the city (at least one kid in Louisville, Ky., endured a 90 minute bus ride each way) to a school with more blacks. You may think that's OK, but remember, the converse was true too. If a school was "too black" then black kids would get bused across town. You might've bought a home with an elementary school just down the block, but there was no guarantee the public school system would let your kid go there.

Roberts summarized it best:

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he said.

The court's liberals, however, believe that we need to focus more on race or we'll never get over race.

In his written opinion, Justice Breyer said the decision was a “radical” step away from settled law and would strip local communities of the tools they need, and have used for many years, to prevent resegregation of their public schools. Predicting that the ruling would “substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation,” he said, “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.”

The liberals see no difference between de jure (legally enforced) segregation and the de facto "segregation" that can occur simply because communities nationwide are simply not uniform. One is surprised that the court hasn't ordered black kids from Alabama flown into Idaho to prevent that state's schools from becoming too white.

The unfortunate fact is that this case isn't as cut and dried as it could, or should, be. Justice Anthony "whichever way the wind blows" Kennedy concurred with the decision, but left open the possibility that there just might be a way for school districts to use race -- he just didn't give them very good rules for doing so.

One more good justice needed.