The Supreme Court rules on Obamacare (again) and on housing discrimination

More on this later - some students are writing on these topics, so heads up if you are.

King v. Burwell: The court ruled 6-3 that federal subsidies to state insurance exchanges were legal under the wording of the ACA.

Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project:  The court ruled 5-4 that a non-profit group could sue the state of Texas under Fair Housing Act for disparate treatment.

Clarity to follow, but you might want to check these sites out for now:

- ScotusBlog: Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc.
- ScotusBlog: King v Burwell.
- Oyez: Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc.
- Oyez: King v Burwell.

From the NYT: School Data Finds Pattern of Inequality Along Racial Lines

To add to last week's look - in 2305 - at civil rights policy.

The story adds to the concept of disparate treatment - the idea that illegal discrimination can occur not due to laws which mandate it, but in how policies are carried out. This also refers to the Education Department's office of Civil Rights - which we touched on last week.

Here's a recent example.

- Click here for the story.

Racial minorities are more likely than white students to be suspended from school, to have less access to rigorous math and science classes, and to be taught by lower-paid teachers with less experience, according to comprehensive data released Friday by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

In the first analysis in nearly 15 years of information from all of the country’s 97,000 public schools, the Education Department found a pattern of inequality on a number of fronts, with race as the dividing factor.

Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. A quarter of high schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students do not offer any Algebra II courses, while a third of those schools do not have any chemistry classes. Black students are more than four times as likely as white students — and Latino students are twice as likely — to attend schools where one out of every five teachers does not meet all state teaching requirements.

“Here we are, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the data altogether still show a picture of gross inequity in educational opportunity,” said Daniel J. Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Civil Rights Project.