Kicking off Black History Month, the Reformies whine that desegregation is too hard.

February is Black History Month.

Since our public schools are more segregated now than they have been in a quarter century, it is clearly the proper time for the Reformy types, EdSec Arne Duncan included, to complain that it turns out that desegregation is too hard.

I believe that was the wording of Brown v Board of Education. “Separate but equal schools are unlawful unless it is too difficult and complicated to desegregate them.” Uh huh. That was it.

The Reformy Kevin Carey in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

So it’s not that Arne Duncan and education reformers don’t care about desegregation. The problem is that the legal and logistic barriers to creating anything like a comprehensive, effective national policy around the issue are very high. The best-known examples don’t travel all that well, and it’s not a coincidence that they are generally local policies. Where students go to school is an intensely personal decision for parents, one they often organize their whole lives around. I’m a pretty hardcore local control skeptic but this is an area where shifting decision-making up to state and federal governments strikes me as unusually hard to pull off.