Someone has, finally, decided to sue the Boston School Committee over race-based school assignment.  The School Committee is, finally, coming to a conclusion that has been evident for years: school assignment for racial reasons, at least as practiced in Boston, will fail a federal court challenge.

The School Committee and Mayor's office are now sending out strong signals that they may not challenge the lawsuit.  Instead of defending a case it will lose, the School Committee may simply vote to eliminate racially-related busing in the upcoming school year.

It's about time.  For over a decade the School Committee has been under no obligation to assign kids to schools based on their race. Race-based assignment isn't the only technique available to achieve the laudable goal of keeping schools racially diverse. It just happens to be the easiest one -- one that, regrettably, has been used far too long.

A bit of history is in order.  In the early 1970s, a group of black parents successfully sued the city's School Committee, arguing that over a period of years it had intentionally segregated schools.  District lines had been drawn so that different races attended different schools.  Moreover, the white schools were clearly favored over the black schools.  White schools got more resources, better teachers, more attention.  Black schools got little.

Faced with this record, Federal Judge Arthur Garrity in 1974 imposed swift and strong remedies on the city.  The schools were to be desegregated immediately.  Garrity demanded that children be assigned to schools such that all schools had an equally diverse racial mix.  White kids were sent to black schools; black kids were sent to white schools. Busing ensued.

Many have argued -- I think correctly -- that Garrity's remedy had disastrous side effects.  It increased white flight to the suburbs, pushed whites into public and parochial schools, and destabilized neighborhoods.  By sending kids to schools often far from home, Garrity's remedy hurt kids themselves, making it harder for parents to stay involved in their children's education.

Be that as it may, Garrity's busing scheme ended in 1986.  By then, the world had changed considerably.  The School Committee was no longer intentionally segregating schools.  Garrity turned the school system back to the city.  Boston then itself adopted the busing scheme in place today.  Called "controlled choice," the new assignment scheme divides the city into three zones.    Parents choose their top three schools and are assigned as space is available.

Controlled choice still keeps race as part of its assignment methodology, however.  Each school has to meet a certain racial target of 49 percent African American, 15 percent white, and 35 percent from other races.  If a school varies from that prescribed racial balance, white or black students (as the case may be) will then be assigned to those schools, notwithstanding their parents' wishes.

It's those targets that are under attack and those targets that will fall if the lawsuit proceeds forward.

So what happens if the targets are removed?  The School Department claims that over 90 percent of parents receive one of their top three choices for schools.  That doesn't mean the remaining ten percent are assigned based on race, however.  Indeed, most of them are denied one of their choices simply because the schools they wanted were filled.

It appears that, if race-related school assignment was eliminated, only a handful of schools would start to re-segregate.  Even that is suspect, because "re-segregation" is imprecise.  Most of us, for example, would think a school with 60 percent whites and 40 percent minorities to be reasonably integrated.  Not so the School Department, however, which still holds to substantially higher targets.

For too long, the city has relied on racial assignment as a crutch to achieve diverse schools.  The beauty of the controlled choice system is that it was self-executing; a computer program could do the job.  Now the School Committee will have to look in earnest at other strategies that are, admittedly, harder and more management-intensive.  One way is to build schools in areas that attract students from black and white communities.  Another is to make some schools into magnet schools (with special resources and programs).  A third is to redraw zone lines themselves. (One phenomenon that should make this easier, by the way, is that Boston's neighborhoods themselves are dramatically less segregated than they were back in 1974.)

Parents are not being unreasonable when they object to their children, against their wishes, being sent across town to school.  The School Committee has known this for a long time.  It's too bad it takes a lawsuit to make them do something about it.