The public schools of Chicago’s response to a recent court ruling ordering them to implement the plan of segregating students by using their economic and social profiles instead of race in order to create classroom diversity is raising fears that this will slow the progress of the district in addressing the issue of racial diversity. Chicago schools are hardly a model of racial integration to begin with. But the culture is changing little by little especially in the private, classical, and selective-enrollment schools. Schools like these have, for nearly three decades, used race as a requirement for admission in evaluating their prospects.

This progress may be made slower due to the court rulings that require schools to look for other criteria in admitting students other than their race. Nationwide, court rulings have urged school districts to search for innovative ways to diversify classrooms without using a student’s race as a criterion. School authorities in Chicago moved ahead with their own experiment last week.

Instead of judging and admitting students based on their race, Chicago schools now are trying to judge potential students through other factors, specifically socioeconomic data from the student’s neighborhood like education levels, owner-occupied homes, income, single-parent households, and the use of language other than English as the primary dialect. These factors will determine whether a student can be placed in selective exclusive schools or not.

For three decades, Chicago schools made the use of race as a factor in admission to Chicago’s more selective and high class schools. In September, a federal district court judge in Chicago abolished that decree. In the district’s neighborhood schools, race was not used as a criterion in allocating students.

School authorities have turned to socioeconomic data to allocate students because studies suggest a close relationship between race and those measures. The fear that things can go back to the way they used to be and erase the modest gains made by the community is what bothers parents about this new decree. Still, Chicago schools are rolling the dice on this new procedure for admissions.