The Justice Department complains that 570 vouchers last year went to students in schools under desegregation orders and impermissibly increased the “racial identity” of those schools. For example, the Celilia School in St. Martin Parish was 30 percent black. Six black children received vouchers “reinforcing the school’s racial identity as a white school” in a predominantly black district. In Tangiapahoa Parish, the Independence School, 61 percent black, lost five white students to vouchers and thus increased its “black identity.”

Justice wants a federal judge to approve every voucher going to a student in a school under a desegregation order.

John White, state education superintendent, called the federal request “a little ridiculous” since almost all voucher recipients are black. That’s a generous way of describing the idiocy of condemning students to shabby education in the worship of now-meaningless statistics.