A federal District Court dismissed the suit, upholding the tiebreaker. See, e.g., Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U. S. 467, 495 (1992). . Our Nation from the inception has sought to preserve and expand the promise of liberty and equality on which it was founded. See also Bakke, supra, at 312, 313 (opinion of Powell, J.). The allocation of governmental burdens and benefits, contentious under any circumstances, is even more divisive when allocations are made on the basis of individual racial classifications. I am not certain just how the remainder of Justice Kennedys concerns affect the lawfulness of the Louisville program, for they seem to be failures of explanation, not of administration. of Oral Arg. These generic lessons in socialization and good citizenship are too sweeping to qualify as compelling interests. Indeed, the very school districts that once spurned integration now strive for it. Yet, like so many other legal categories that can overlap in some instances, the constitutional distinction between de jure and de facto segregation has been thought to be an important one. Decisions to assign students to schools within each cluster are based on available space within the schools and the racial guidelines in the Districts current student assignment plan. Id., at 38. Narrow tailoring requires serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives, id., at 339, and yet in Seattle several alternative assignment plansmany of which would not have used express racial classificationswere rejected with little or no consideration. The Court emphasized that education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. 347 U. S., at 493. No. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S. 469 (1989); Shaw v. Reno, 509 U. S. 630 (1993); Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peńa, 515 U. S. 200 (1995); Grutter, supra; Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 244 (2003); Johnson v. California, 543 U. S. 499 (2005). Swann addresses only a possible state objective; it says nothing of the permissible meansrace conscious or otherwisethat a school district might employ to achieve that objective. Parents of students denied assignment to particular schools under these plans solely because of their race and brought suit, arguing that allocating children to different public schools on the basis of race violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection. Having made that determination (based on no objective measure that I can detect), a judge following the dissents approach will set the level of scrutiny to achieve the desired result. Fourteen of the districts nineteen non-vocational middle and high schools were close to totally black or totally white. These interests combine remedial, educational, and democratic objectives. in No. into account. Adarand, supra, at 228 (internal quotation marks omitted). The plans here are more narrowly tailored than the law school admissions program there at issue. The Sixth Circuit affirmed. See also ante, at 15 (opinion of Kennedy, J.). Next, the dissent argues that the interest in integration has an educational element. And they are not uniquely relevant to schools or uniquely teachable in a formal educational setting. Id., at 347. of Oral Arg. of Oral Arg. Indeed, the social scientists brief rather cautiously claims the existence of any benefit at all, describing the positive impact as modest, id., at 13, acknowledging that there appears to be little or no effect on math scores, id., at 14, and admitting that the underlying reasons for these gains in achievement are not entirely clear, id., at 15. (a)As part of its burden of proving that racial classifications are narrowly tailored to further compelling interests, the government must establish, in detail, how decisions based on an individual students race are made in a challenged program. to achieve its own ends; and thus it fails to pass strict scrutiny. Grutter recognized a compelling interest in a law schools attainment of a diverse student body. Pp. of Ed., 102 F.Supp. Thus, Congress has enacted numerous race-conscious statutes that illustrate that principle or rely upon its validity. 05915, at 81; McFarland I, supra, at 842. And the combination of the three unsubstantiated elements does not produce an interest any more compelling than that represented by each element independently. . What emerges is a version of strict scrutiny that combines hollow assurances of harmlessness with reflexive acceptance of conventional wisdom. Some of the concurrence consists of social science citations and statistics showing that black students can succeed in majority black schools such as HBCUs. 4. Contrary to the dissents rhetoric, neither of these school districts is threatened with resegregation, and neither is constitutionally compelled or permitted to undertake race-based remediation. ices Office, District Summaries 19992005, available at But see ante, at 1213, 17, n. 12. No. [Footnote 18]. And the Court repeated this same statement in Grutter. Richmond v. J. 7276 (Feb. 1989); see also Clotfelter, Interracial Contact in High School Extracurricular Activities, 34 Urban Rev., No. 2006). Accord, post, at 22 ([T]he Court set forth in Swann a basic principle of constitutional lawa principle of law that has found wide acceptance in the legal culture (citations and internal quotation marks omitted)); post, at 25 (Lower state and federal courts had considered the matter settled and uncontroversial even before this Court decided Swann); post, at 26 (Numerous state and federal courts explicitly relied upon Swanns guidance for decades to follow); post, at 27 (stating how lower courts understood and followed Swanns enunciation of the relevant legal principle); post, at 30 (The constitutional principle enunciated in Swann, reiterated in subsequent cases, and relied upon over many years, provides, and has widely been thought to provide, authoritative legal guidance); post, at 61 ([T]odays opinion will require setting aside the laws of several States and many local communities); post, at 66 (And what has happened to Swann? Each respondent has failed to provide the necessary support for the proposition that there is no other way than individual racial classifications to avoid racial isolation in their school districts. The wide variety of different integration plans that school districts use throughout the Nation suggests that the problem of racial segregation in schools, including de facto segregation, is difficult to solve. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 R. Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black Americas Struggle for Equality, p. x (1975) (arguing that perhaps no other Supreme Court case has affected more directly the minds, hearts, and daily lives of so many Americans); Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education xxvii (2001) (identifying Brown as the most eagerly awaited and dramatic judicial decision of modern times). Jefferson County estimates that the racial guidelines account for only 3 percent of assignments. Post, at 43. Jefferson County has articulated a similar goal, phrasing its interest in terms of educating its students in a racially integrated environment. App. 1117, 2528. Compare ante, at 12 (opinion of the Court) ([T]he Seattle public schools have never shown that they were ever segregated by law (emphasis added)), with ante at 2930 (plurality opinion) (assuming the Seattle school district was never segregated by law, but seeming to concede that a school district with de jure segregation need not be subject to a court order to be allowed to engage in race-based remedial measures). 05915, p.7, n.4; Tr. 1 (PICS): Resources On U.S. Supreme Court Voluntary School Desegregation Rulings The Civil Rights Project at UCLA", http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=000&invol=05-908, "Justices Limit the Use of Race in School Plans for Integration", "Not Hearing History: A Critique of Chief Justice Roberts's Reinterpretation of, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. Given the conditions in which school boards work to set policy, see supra, at 2021, they may need all of the means presently at their disposal to combat those problems. Justice Breyer also suggests that other means for achieving greater racial diversity in schools are necessarily unconstitutional if the racial classifications at issue in these cases cannot survive strict scrutiny. Between 80% and 90% of all students received their first choice assignment; between 89% and 97% received their first or second choice assignment. of Ed. They asked the court to dissolve the desegregation order and to hold the use of magnet school racial guidelines unconstitutional. A non-profit group, Parents Involved in Community Schools (Parents), sued the District, arguing that the racial tiebreaker violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Washington state law. In Seattle, the plaintiffs alleged that school segregation unconstitutionally reflected not only generalized societal discrimination and residential housing patterns, but also school board policies and actions that had helped to create, maintain, and aggravate racial segregation. Roberts cites to: Grutter, supra, at 327, 328, 334, 123 S. Ct. 2325, 156 L. Ed. of Ed. Just as the school districts lack an interest in preventing resegregation, they also have no present interest in remedying past segregation. No. See, e.g., App. Brief for Petitioner at 38. App. 36, 71 (1872) ([N]o one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in [all the Reconstruction amendments] . By 1991, the board had concluded that assigning elementary school students to two or more schools during their elementary school years had proved educationally unsound and, if continued, would undermine Kentuckys newly adopted Education Reform Act. In 20002001, with the racial tiebreaker, it was 17.9 percent Asian-American, 13.3 percent African-American, 7 percent Latino, 58.4 percent Caucasian, and 3.4 percent Native-American. This is especially true when we seek assurance that opportunity is not denied on account of race. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the District had a compelling state interest in achieving the benefits of racial diversity and that its plan was narrowly tailored. Numerical racial balance in a district's schools is far from a compelling interest, and in fact it is not even a legitimate purpose. That, though, is not the case. Grutter, supra, at 326. Moreover, the school districts did not consider other options that might have been more narrowly tailored. The first consists of the District Court determination in the Louisville case when it dissolved its desegregation order that there was overwhelming evidence of the Boards good faith compliance with the desegregation Decree and its underlying purposes, indeed that the Board had treated the ideal of an integrated system as much more than a legal obligationthey consider it a positive, desirable policy and an essential element of any well-rounded public school education. Hampton II, 102 F.Supp. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI tutional Provisions in the States Where Segregation in Education is Institutionalized). Finally, the dissent asserts a democratic element to the integration interest. Parents Involved, the Court noted that: Seattle and Louisville had not demonstrated that they seriously considered race-neutral alternatives; the individual racial classifications used had a minimal impact that cast doubt on their necessity; the districts defined A further 16% were assigned to a school they had not listed. of Los Angeles City Unified School Dist., 610 F.2d 661, 662664 (1979), the Ninth Circuit rejected a federal constitutional challenge to a school districts use of mandatory faculty transfers to ensure that each schools faculty makeup would fall within 10% of the districtwide racial composition. Justia Annotations is a forum for attorneys to summarize, comment on, and analyze case law published on our site. Disappointed students are not rejected from a States flagship graduate program; they simply attend a different one of the districts many public schools, which in aspiration and in fact are substantially equal. But the Seattle schools had never been segregated by law; and the Kentucky schools, though previously segregated by law, had their desegregation decree dissolved by a District Court in 2000 on the finding the school district had "eliminated the vestiges associated with the former policy of segregation and its pernicious effects". Whether or not the Court chooses to afford similar deference to public secondary schools will shape the control school districts have over their own policies. No. 1, 458 U. S. 457, 472, n.15 (1982), post, at 5657, but there this Court expressly noted that it was not passing on the propriety of race-conscious student assignments in the absence of a finding of de jure segregation. To equate the achievement of a certain statistical mix in several schools with the elimination of the system of systematic de jure segregation trivializes the latter accomplishment. Invoking our mandatory appellate jurisdiction,[Footnote 7] the Boston plaintiffs prosecuted an appeal in this Court. From a legal perspective, this case will test the limits of the Equal Protection Clause and demonstrate its application to secondary education, as compared to its application to higher education as was explained in Grutter and Gratz. 2, p. 76 ([A] State has power to establish a school system which is capable of efficient administration, taking into account local problems and conditions). Id. Regardless of the outcome, this decision will surely have an effect on public schools, be it in the composition of their student body, their admissions policies, or their educational approach generally. But the principle of inherent equality that underlies and infuses our Constitution required the disestablishment of de jure segregation. [Footnote 16]. Pp. School authorities are traditionally given broad discretionary powers to formulate and implement educational policy and may properly decide to ensure to their students the value of an integrated school experience. Citizens for Better Ed. would support indefinite use of racial classifications, employed first to obtain the appropriate mixture of racial views and then to ensure that the [program] continues to reflect that mixture. The Court has allowed school districts to remedy their prior de jure segregation by classifying individual students based on their race. They do not seek to award a scarce commodity on the basis of merit, for they are not magnet schools; rather, by design and in practice, they offer substantially equivalent academic programs and electives. 205, 961 F.2d 1335, 1338 (CA7 1992) (Easterbrook, J.) The Seattle school district has tried a variety of plans over the past several decades to prevent the de-facto segregation that would occur if students were assigned to schools on a purely geographic basis. This past June, a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court declared integration plans in Louisville and Seattle unconstitutional because of their focus on race as one factor in assigning students to schools. In the Jefferson County case, the District Court found that the school district had asserted a compelling interest in maintaining racially diverse schools, and that its plan was, in all relevant respects, narrowly tailored to serve that interest. Indeed in Louisville itself the achievement gap between black and white elementary school students grew substantially smaller (by seven percentage points) after the integration plan was implemented in 1975. in No. In cases where an opinion or parts of an opinion do not reach a majority, the narrower opinion represents the holding, so Justice Kennedy's opinion represents parts of the holding of the case. The justification for race-conscious remedies in McDaniel is therefore not applicable here. The Courts emphasis on benign racial classifications suggests confidence in its ability to distinguish good from harmful governmental uses of racial criteria. I cannot rely upon Swanns statement that the use of race-conscious limits is permissible without showing, rather than simply asserting, that the statement represents a constitutional principle firmly rooted in federal and state law. Parents IV at 1169. students in Primary 1); see also Stipulation of Facts in No. Because students often attend schools closest to their homes, the result is racially segregated schools. Thus, the democratic interest, limitless in scope and timeless in [its] ability to affect the future, id., at 276 (plurality opinion), cannot justify government race-based decisionmaking. But the examples the dissent mentionsfor example, a provision of the No Child Left Behind Act that requires States to set measurable objectives to track the achievement of students from major racial and ethnic groups, 20 U. S.C. 6311(b)(2)(C)(v)have nothing to do with the pertinent issues in these cases. See also Statement of Appellees Opposing Jurisdiction and Motion to Dismiss or Affirm in Davis v. County School Board, O.T. 1952, No. See Croson, 488 U. S., at 501 (The history of racial classifications in this country suggests that blind judicial deference to legislative or executive pronouncements of necessity has no place in equal protection analysis); West Virginia Bd. 1, supra. Id., at 38a, 103a. The way Seattle classifies its students bears this out. . Eighty-four students were assigned to schools that they did not list as a choice, but 29 of those students would have been assigned to their respective school without the racial tiebreaker, and 3 were able to attend one of the oversubscribed schools due to waitlist and capacity adjustments. My views do not allow me to join the balance of the opinion by The Chief Justice, which seems to me to be inconsistent in both its approach and its implications with the history, meaning, and reach of the Equal Protection Clause. The board estimated that its new plan would lead to annual reassignment (with busing) of about 8,500 black students and about 8,000 white students. These districts have followed this Courts holdings and advice in tailoring their plans. of Education and National Center for Education Statistics Common Core data). Cf. History should teach greater humility. For instance, a Texas appeals court in 1986 rejected a Fourteenth Amendment challenge to a voluntary integration plan by explaining: [T]he absence of a court order to desegregate does not mean that a school board cannot exceed minimum requirements in order to promote school integration. Who exactly is white and who is nonwhite? 1. In 2004, he ruled the same for the traditional schools, but allowed the regular public schools to use race as the admission requirement. Other amici dispute these findings. And the board continued to describe 26 of its 112 schools as segregated.. 2, p.7 (Local self-government in local affairs is essential to the peace and happiness of each locality and to the strength and stability of our whole federal system. 05915, pp. The present cases are before us, however, because the Seattle school district was never segregated by law, and the Jefferson County district has been found to be unitary, having eliminated the vestiges of its prior dual status. 377 F.3d at 959. Both districts sought greater racial integration for educational and democratic, as well as for remedial, reasons. We have found many. After he had enrolled and after the academic year had begun, he then applied to transfer to his preferred school after the kindergarten assignment deadline had passed, id., at 21, possibly causing school officials to treat his late request as an application to transfer to the first grade, in respect to which the guidelines apply. In Brown, this Court declared that segregation was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (citing Armor & Rossell, Desegregation and Resegregation in the Public Schools, in Beyond the Color Line 239 (A. Thernstrom & S. Thernstrom eds. 2005). It also contends that racial diversity is too amorphous and uncertain a concept to be considered a compelling interest, and finally disputes as inconclusive the Districts statistics regarding the increased success rates of students in integrated schools. Brief for Respondents in No. parents involved in community schools v seattle 2007 quizlet See, e.g., Brief for Appellees on Reargument in Briggs v. Elliott, O.T. 1953, No. 2, pp. Yet the Seattle public schools have not shown that they were ever segregated by law, and were not subject to court-ordered desegregation decrees. [Footnote 12] Each school district argues that educational and broader socialization benefits flow from a racially diverse learning environment, and each contends that because the diversity they seek is racial diversitynot the broader diversity at issue in Grutterit makes sense to promote that interest directly by relying on race alone. id., at 390 (Kennedy, J., dissenting) (expressing concern about narrow fluctuation band[s]). My view of the Constitution is Justice Harlans view in Plessy: Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537, 559 (1896) (dissenting opinion). They are based upon numerous sources, which for ease of exposition I have cataloged, along with their corresponding citations, at Appendix B, infra. To the extent the plurality opinion suggests the Constitution mandates that state and local school authorities must accept the status quo of racial isolation in schools, it is, in my view, profoundly mistaken.
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