Despite the Supreme Court's recent decision to strike down voluntary school desegregation programs in Seattle and Louisville, some on the Court recognized that high-quality, racially diverse education remains a critical national priority.

We must be careful not to overstate the positive, but far from totally banning the use of race as a tool to promote educational diversity - as some recidivists had hoped - a majority of the Court reaffirmed diversity as an important goal, specifically stating that schools can continue to use race-conscious measures where necessary and when narrowly tailored.

In the controlling opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that if school districts are concerned about how segregated schools affect their ability to provide quality education, then "they are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem."

This is good news for the nation's 17,000 school districts.

But we are not out of the woods yet. There are still nearly 1,000 school districts that still use race-conscious measures in some way in their assignment plans and they will have to look at them to be sure they will pass the constitutional muster.

Some will have to retool their plans and some won't. But we must support schools in both instances. We must ensure that all schools have the resources they need to educate their student bodies, whatever the racial makeup may be.

Schools are where the real world begins. Schools are tasked with preparing the next generation of Americans to live and work in a 21st century global economy, a far different world than the one their parents and grandparents occupied.

Today's youth will cross borders, either literally or virtually, to work with foreign nationals from diverse cultures. They will be competing with tens of millions of workers around the world, people with equal or better skills and long acquaintance with diversity and difference.

If not adequately addressed through high-quality, diverse education, American students, no matter their race or color, will be at a disadvantage and the United States' economic potential will be threatened.

That future is already being called into question by low graduation and high drop out rates.  High school graduation rates have been stalled at 70 percent since 1990, according to a 2005 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research study; with the rate for minorities closer to 50 percent.

Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens saved the nation from further slide by keeping open the use of race-conscious measures to attain high-quality education for all students.

Today, high-quality schools are linked to high property value areas because local property taxes fund schools. Segregated housing patterns have meant that, historically, less well-off residents are concentrated in lower property value areas, leading to fewer resources, and, less well-funded schools.

This is a housing pattern that holds sway across the nation and the reason that Seattle and Louisville, in an effort to give all their students high-quality, diverse education, created their programs in the first place. 

The Supreme Court struck down these two cities programs, but Justice Kennedy's opinion means that they, and other school districts, can still turn to other tools that take race into consideration – redrawing , for example, school and district boundaries or using inter-district transfer programs to achieve high-quality, diverse education.

Opponents of integration claim that any use of race to place students in schools, particularly outside their neighborhood, is unconstitutional.

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts.

It is highly disturbing, and suggests a deep hostility to voluntary desegregation, that Chief Justice Roberts -- joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito -- would have overturned almost all of the most effective efforts to promote inclusion in our nation's schools.

It would have been tragic for the nation's future if the other Justices had let them.