News in Brief: A National Roundup

The Minneapolis school district has settled a desegregation lawsuit by agreeing to a plan that gives inner-city schoolchildren better access to higher-quality programs within the city and to suburban schools.

Hennepin County District Judge Gary Larson announced the basic outline of the settlement last week. It would use the state's open-enrollment laws to make magnet schools and other suburban schools more easily available to city students and would set up a four-year program to produce a school report card allowing parents to compare and monitor the performance of the schools in the district. Of the district's 49,000 students, 70 percent are from racial minorities, and most are black.

Clarence Hightower, the president of the Minneapolis Urban League, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the settlement was "on the right track." The 5-year-old lawsuit, filed against the state by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had attacked the "hypersegregation" that the NAACP said made it impossible to provide urban students...