Though he said he's been considering the change for four years, Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant admitted his decision to remove the racial factor comes largely from the urgency of last month's class action lawsuit filed against the school system.

The suit alleges that the plan illegally limits the numbers of white students attending any one school through unfairly configured school zones and by providing priority placement to minority students.

If the case goes to court, he said, it would drag the city through an expensive battle it is likely to lose.

"We have a low probability of meeting the constitutional standard," Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant said of the recent conservative tenor of the federal court system.

The Boston Public schools faced a major blow in November 1998, when the first circuit court ruled in favor of Sarah Wessman, a white student who claimed that race-based admissions policies illegal denied her admission to the exam-based Boston Latin School.

"We are united in our belief that long court battle would only distract us from our real challenge of raising the level of achievement in all our schools," Menino said.

Willie argued that the recent suit is "substantially different" from the Wessman case and deserves a court battle. "No one got kicked out of school because of their race. No one was harmed," he said. "What we did was guarantee that everyone had to be included."

White Spaces

Willie and plan co-designer Michael Alves, the senior planner at Brown University's Equity Assistance Center, voluntarily produced a 26-page analysis of Walsh's lawsuit, calling the suit "frivolous and without merit."

"We conclude that the 'Controlled Choice' student assignment plan is not one of rigid racial quotas intended to obtain racial and ethnic balance," they wrote. "It is a flexible plan that guarantees access for all population groups to all the regular educational offerings of the Boston School System."

Armed with stacks of data and color-coded charts in her Dorchester home, Walsh said Boston's Children First is simply trying to improve all schools through a return to a neighborhood schooling system.

Walsh said that the group is working to make race disappear as a significant form of difference in the Boston school system.

"I'm not a social engineer," said Ann F. Walsh, president of Boston's Children First, the first plaintiff listed in the lawsuit.

"That's Nazism--to take human beings and use aspects of them to make decisions about them. Discriminate against none," she said.

Willie said Walsh's ideas threaten civil society. "You can't get beyond racism without taking race into consideration," countered Willie.