let's craft a jurisprudential theory: judicial activism is ok if it concerns education.

I haven't yet read a convincing essay of why Brown v. Board was not judicially active, written, anyway, by a person that purports to ascribe to strict construction or a heavy deference to established precedent (ie- Justices Thomas and Scalia would, I assume, have to have written a dissent in the case, if they were to be intellectually honest with their judicial approaches).

North Carolina did what the federal courts have not and made a sound, basic education a constitutional right. The state Supreme Court put Judge Howard Manning in charge of overseeing that right.

Have a read of a column in my old town Greensboro's local paper.

Here's a snippet:

His actions border on exceeding his authority -- "judicial activism of the most blatant sort," John Hood of the conservative John Locke Foundation asserts -- but they may be the only way to force the state's disjointed education establishment to get its act together.

"This letter is to put you on notice," Manning wrote March 3 to State Board of Education Chairman Howard Lee and Superintendent June Atkinson. If consistently poor-performing high schools don't meet their goals on end-of-course tests this spring, they "will not be allowed to open in the fall of 2006" without significant changes.