Distinctions based upon race, gender, and socioeconomic class have permeated American education during the past century in the form of segregated schools, dual classes and special admissions tracks. Three years after the United States Supreme Court's ruling on the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the battle for equality of educational opportunity continues to be waged from courtrooms to the streets. On the one hand, the Department of Education, (and, formerly, the Department of Health, Education, & Welfare) has provided universities and professional schools with a flexible interpretation of the scope of affirmative action pro grams allowable under the broad guidelines of the Supreme Court's Bakke decision. Obvious quotas are outlawed, but not numerical goals for recruiting a diversified student body. Admission on the sole criterion of race, color, or national origin is prohibited, but not its consideration as one of several factors in admissions decisions. Even special efforts to enroll minorities and to prepare them for higher or professional education are permissible, without the showing of past discrimination. On the other hand, the Office for Civil Rights has demanded that the Chicago Board of Education bus about a fourth of its 475,000 pupils, so that no school in the nation's third largest system would have more than 50 percent white or 63 percent black enrollment. Such a busing plan is Summer 1981
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