After last year's income-based deseg plan made parents miserable and reduced diversity in popular magnet schools (for black kids in particular), Chicago knew it had to make some changes or risk losing even more families to the suburbs than it already has. But nobody's sure that the new plan, announced just yesterday, is going to do any better at balancing fairness, excellence, and diversity goals that are all pulling in different directions. (And there's not much wiggler room in a city who's school system lags behind others like New York, whose student body at this point is just 9 percent white and 10 percent nonpoor, and whose head, Ron
