This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 6th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

School districts in Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky are still reeling from a Supreme Court decision striking down

student assignment plans based on race. How other districts react to the

ruling has yet to be determined. Andrew Coulson is the director of the Cato

Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

The ruling, he says, may be useful to school choice advocates, but it's not clear that

greater school choice is an inevitable outcome.

School districts will have to take some time to digest this ruling.

Will many district student assignment plans be affected?

Well, it seems likely that on the order of 100 hundred programs nationwide will be affected immediately by

this ruling and it will also cause districts that we're thinking about

implementing some kind of program like this to rethink what they're doing.

Now instead of switching to a system in which parents have greater choice of the schools

where their children might attend, won't some districts simply supplant their current

race-based policies with those based on income?

Yes absolutely in fact there are two alternatives that a lot of districts are thinking about basically using something as a proxy for

race as a stand-in for race that will give them the integration targets that they are

looking for without actually explicitly taking

race into consideration.

One of those is income because that's known to be correlated with race in the

United States and another is place of residence.

...