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THE WAIT IS OVER:  It has been a full year since the kids got their fix of the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. We picked up "Old School" today, and the kids each tore through it in an hour or less, I'd guess. I'll ask them for a written review tomorrow. I think it's going to be four thumbs up.

THE SUPREMES: We continue in our "Introduction to Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases" from the University of Pennsylvania via Coursera.

Yesterday's lectures had to do with asking the question, "What is discrimination?" At one point, affirmative action and quotas came up, and the professor (Kermit Roosevelt) started talking about a relatively recent case involving a public school district assigning students to schools based on their race. It was a contrived, convoluted plan to bring about the district's own perceived measure of racial equality, driven by quotas. "That's Seattle!" I told the kids, much to their surprise. I remember the issue was before the court when we moved up here, back in 2007, and it was driven by parents of a girl living in our neighborhood whose daughter wanted to go to the closest high school (Ballard) to her home, rather than being forced to go across town. It seemed like a reasonable enough request, but SPS was steadfast that their crazy transportation spider web was in everyone's best interest. The issue wound up in front of the United States Supreme Court. I'll let Annabelle give you a synopsis. ...

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 was a Supreme Court case about the use of race to determine which schools you could go to. The gist is that schools in Seattle and Louisville decided that, because they wanted racially diverse schools, kids of certain races could not attend some schools. This means they would have to attend schools much further away than they might desire. Kindergartners could be put on a bus for 2 hours or more a day and transported far from home, just to attain a racial balance district officials wanted. The supreme court ruled in favor of Parents Involved in Community Schools (usually abbreviated as PICS), saying that it was racial discrimination because kids of a certain race were excluded from certain schools. It’s certainly interesting that this is racial discrimination in an opposite way we usually think about it.

In the decision, the court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court’s judgment.  “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts said at the time.

Another topic we learned about is people's very different viewpoints when it comes to race and constitution-related issues. I'll let CJ try to explain it.  

Our course professor described two kinds of people on our Coursera course about the constitution: "Anti-Subordinationists", and "Anti-Classificationists". Both of those represent different viewpoints on the current treatment of African-Americans in the United States. If you are Anti-Subordination, that means that you think African-Americans should get special treatment due to the horrible things the government did to them in the past. If you are Anti-Classification, that means that you think that if one racial group does not get special treatment, the others shouldn't, either. According to our professor, in the past, the Supreme Court mostly had an Anti-Subordination view, but in more recent times, they have taken an Anti-Classification view.

If you want to read something a whole lot more in-depth on the topic, check out this Yale law school article:
 http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/articles/theamericancivilrightstradition1.pdf

SALSA TIME!: We continue to make the most of our garden's bounty. 

Today, we made our third double batch of salsa verde, using tomatillos from our garden, along with (this time) FOUR of CJ's ghost chiles.