Racial Quotas in Desegregation Case Rejected

A federal appeals panel has shot down a series of lower-court orders that required the Rockford, Ill., schools to meet racial benchmarks in everything from test scores to teaching assignments.

In a strongly worded ruling, the appeals court also threw out quotas set by U.S. Magistrate Judge P. Michael Mahoney in the areas of student discipline, teacher hiring and assignment, remedial education, and cheerleading squads. And it denounced as "absurdly confining" the racial-balance requirements that the judge had imposed to avoid segregation within individual classes.

"Violations of law must be dealt with firmly, but not used to launch the federal courts on ambitious schemes of social engineering," the three-judge panel found. "Children, the most innocent of the innocent persons occasionally brushed by Draconian decrees, should not be made...