CHANGING TIMES, STAGNANT LAW 
Responding to a class action lawsuit by the parents of an Indian girl who was denied admission to one of Brooklyn’s better public schools despite decent test scores, New York City went to court yesterday in an effort to overturn a 34-year-old school desegregation mandate. The New York Times has the story. In 1974, a court ruled that the District 21 school board in southwest Brooklyn — then overwhelmingly white — was deliberately segregating Mark Twain middle school by sending middle class whites elsewhere. The court imposed a cap on minority students that over time has become an anachronism, since the district’s minority population has dramatically increased. The ruling means that today, minorities must achieve higher test scores than white to gain admission to the school, which is praised for its programs for gifted students. After the U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled that public schools couldn’t seek integration through racially-motivated tactics, the parents of a girl who was denied admission to Mark Twain sued New York City. “I think it’s unfortunate that we had to go to a lawsuit to bring this about,” the girl’s father said. “If they had done this right away, my daughter would already be in Mark Twain.”

BULLISH MANEUVER  
The bulldozers are moving on Randall’s Island, despite a judge’s ruling that has temporarily halted a city plan to charge elite private schools for the exclusive use of new ballfields, The Daily News reports. The deal came under heavy criticism by East Harlem community leaders, and was ultimately invalidated by Acting Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Shirley Werner Kornreich, who ruled the city did not follow proper land-use review procedures and needed to get needed City Council approval for it. “They should go back to the drawing board and come back with a plan that involves both public and private schools and that meets everyone's needs,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. “The court ruling addressed the use of the fields once they are built, not the construction of the fields themselves,” said Lawrence Kahn, the Law Department's chief litigation assistant.

MASS RELEASE?
On March 3^rd, 20,000 prisoners nationwide — or 10 percent of the total prison population — will qualify for reduced sentences under a Sentencing Commission mandate designed to do away with inequitable crack cocaine sentences. The New York Sun reports on the Justice Department’s lobbying efforts before a Senate subcommittee to prevent a mass release, an early test for Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, who wants a law passed to prevent violent offenders from taking advantage of the sentence reductions. The racially-tinged debate is noteworthy for critics’ objection that crack, compared to powder cocaine, is particularly a scourge on communities. “For the attorney general of this nation to put our people in fear over the release of 1,600 people, knowing that otherwise 650,000 people are going to be released, is truly disappointing,” a Florida defense attorney, James Felman, testified, referring to the total number of U.S. prisoners who are released annually. “We're not talking about releasing 20,000 of them now. We’re talking about releasing 2,000 or less now. So we're actually talking about one percent or less of the prison population that would be released at any given time.”

NEW BROOKLYN DIGS? 
Finally, New York Magazine has a brief item about a city proposal to reintroduce a jail to downtown Brooklyn. At a meeting sponsored by the American Institute of Architects, two city commissioners lambasted the inconvenience of Rikers Island and showed early drawings by the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of a holding facility at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Smith Street that is double the size of a similar facility shut down in 2003. The plan is part of a broader effort to disperse Rikers’ detainees throughout the boroughs. “It is not worth retail to have the jail double in size,” said Sandy Barboza, head of the 150-member Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association. “I think it was just [the commissioner] throwing out a bone.”