[29] The districts have also failed to show that they considered methods other than explicit racial classifications to achieve their stated goals. That case involves the original Seattle Plan, a more heavily race-conscious predecessor of the very plan now before us. It also argues that these plans can be justified as part of the school boards attempts to eradicat[e] earlier school segregation. See, e.g., post, at 4. Andy suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, but had made good progress with hands-on instruction, and his mother and middle school teachers thought that the smaller biotechnology program held the most promise for his continued success. Having looked at dozens of amicus briefs, public reports, news stories, and the records in many of this Courts prior cases, which together span 50 years of desegregation history in school districts across the Nation, I have discovered many examples of districts that sought integration through explicitly race-conscious methods, including mandatory busing. On appeal, a three-judge panel the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed, but upon en banc rehearing the court affirmed the lower court decision. 1961) (If men were angels, no government would be necessary). See post, at 62. It is clear to us that focusing simply on demographic issues detracts from focusing on improving schools). As becomes clearer when the districts plan is further considered, Jefferson County has explained how and when it employs these classifications only in terms so broad and imprecise that they cannot withstand strict scrutiny. Project Renaissance again revised the boards racial guidelines. Pp. Just as diversity in higher education was deemed compelling in Grutter, diversity in public primary and secondary schoolswhere there is even more to gainmust be, a fortiori, a compelling state interest. Public School Dist., 34 (Apr. Second, the plurality downplays the importance of Swann and related cases by frequently describing their relevant statements as dicta. These criticisms, however, miss the main point. The dissent does not explain how its recognition of an interest in teaching racial understanding and cooperation here is consistent with the Courts rejection of a similar interest in Wygant. 1*, How are the Equal Protection rights of public high school students affected by the jurisprudence of. appeals for the ninth circuit, CRYSTAL D. MEREDITH, custodial parent and next Rather, such powers should have been temporary and used only to overcome the widespread resistance to the dictates of the Constitution. 515 U. S., at 125 (Thomas, J., concurring). v. Swann, 402 U. S. 43, 45 (1971), this Court, citing Swann, restated the point. of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell, 498 U. S. 237, 249250 (1991); Green v. School Bd. In Grutter, the consideration of race was viewed as indispensable in more than tripling minority representation at the law schoolfrom 4 to 14.5 percent. In this Courts finest hour, Brown v. Board of Education challenged this history and helped to change it. of Oral Arg. in No. Seattles racial tiebreaker results, in the end, only in shifting a small number of students between schools. [Footnote 2] If an oversubscribed school is not within 10 percentage points of the districts overall white/nonwhite racial balance, it is what the district calls integration positive, and the district employs a tiebreaker that selects for assignment students whose race will serve to bring the school into balance. Id., at 38a. I shall consequently ask whether the school boards in Seattle and Louisville adopted these plans to serve a compelling governmental interest and, if so, whether the plans are narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. of Ed., 102 F.Supp. See The Federalist No. Because equal protection on the basis of race is at issue, the applicable standard of review to be applied in this case is strict scrutiny, as both parties agree, and as is well established in the Courts prior case law. Here the most Jefferson County itself claims is that because the guidelines provide a firm definition of the Boards goal of racially integrated schools, they provide administrators with the authority to facilitate, negotiate and collaborate with principals and staff to maintain schools within the 1550% range. Brief in Opposition in No. Public Schools, 197 F.3d 123, 133 (CA4 1999); Tuttle v. Arlington Cty. Const., Art. For the 2006-2007 school year, the school district has suspended the tiebreaker pending litigation. The district retained a racial tiebreaker for oversubscribed schools, which takes effect only if the schools minority or majority enrollment falls outside of a 30% range centered on the minority/majority population ratio within the district. pols 101 ch 4 Flashcards | Quizlet The boards work in communities where demographic patterns change, where they must meet traditional learning goals, where they must attract and retain effective teachers, where they should (and will) take account of parents views and maintain their commitment to public school education, where they must adapt to court intervention, where they must encourage voluntary student and parent actionwhere they will find that their own good faith, their knowledge, and their understanding of local circumstances are always necessary but often insufficient to solve the problems at hand. The 2007 Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. in No. [Footnote 28]. Voluntary School Diversity Efforts A decade ago, on June 28, 2007, the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District ("PICS"), the only Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. Justice Breyer would not only put such extraordinary weight on admitted dicta, but relies on the statement for something it does not remotely say. School Bd., 195 F.3d 698, 701 (CA4 1999); Wessman v. Gittens, 160 F.3d 790, 809 (CA1 1998). See also Richmond v. J. In each city the school board modified its plan several times in light of, for example, hostility to busing, the threat of resegregation, and the desirability of introducing greater student choice. Who exactly is white and who is nonwhite? of Boston in 1968. Thus, at worst, a student would have to spend one year at a high school he did not pick as a first or second choice. Law is not an exercise in mathematical logic. It argues that it should not be force to walk the tightrope between violating the constitution by failing to integrate schools and violating the constitution by integrating schools. It was not the inequality of the facilities but the fact of legally separating children based on race on which the Court relied to find a constitutional violation in that case. The practice can lead to corrosive discourse, where race serves not as an element of our diverse heritage but instead as a bargaining chip in the political process. are classified as "Other". 1 Hampton I, supra, at 757758, 762; Newburg Area Council, Inc. v. Board of Ed. Brief for Respondents in No. In 1956, two years after Brown made clear that Kentucky could no longer require racial segregation by law, the Louisville Board of Education created a geography-based student assignment plan designed to help achieve school integration. Under that approach, the school districts have not carried their burden of showing that the ends they seek justify the particular extreme means they have chosenclassifying individual students on the basis of their race and discriminating among them on that basis. See Bustop, Inc. v. Los Angeles Bd. The plurality opinion is at least open to the interpretation that the Constitution requires school districts to ignore the problem of de facto resegregation in schooling. 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. Because of its importance, I shall repeat what this Court said about the matter in Swann. In Grutter, the Court gave significant deference to the University of Michigan Law Schools judgment that diversity was essential to achieving the schools educational mission. Again, neither school board asserts that its race-based actions were taken to remedy prior discrimination. The plurality refers to no case in support of its demand. Primary Documents: (Slip Opinion) December 4, 2006, Argued June 28, 2007, * Decided SYLLABUS: Respondent school districts voluntarily adopted student assignment plans that rely on race to determine which schools certain children may attend. Written by: Cecelia Sander & Breanne Atzert, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Seattle Public Schools Transportation Service Standards, Full History of Grutter v. Bollinger & Gratz v. Bollinger, Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Affirmative Action, Parents Involved in Community Schools Website, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. He made it clear that "To be forced to live under a state-mandated racial label is inconsistent with the dignity of individuals in our society". I have explained why I do not believe the Constitution could possibly find compelling the provision of a racially diverse education for a 23-year-old law student but not for a 13-year-old high school pupil. 2. exemplifies the long-running disagreement over the meaning of racial discrimination under the Constitution. The dissent refers repeatedly and reverently to integration. However, outside of the context of remediation for past de jure segregation, integration is simply racial balancing. v. Goose Creek Consol. 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. See Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 351354 (2003) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). 2d 304 (quoting Bakke, supra, at 315, 98 S. Ct. 2733, 57 L. Ed. Public Schools, 330 F.Supp. The plans here are not tailored to achieving a degree of diversity necessary to realize the asserted educational benefits; instead the plans are tailored, in the words of Seattles Manager of Enrollment Planning, Technical Support, and Demographics, to the goal established by the school board of attain-ing a level of diversity within the schools that approximates the districts overall demographics. App. CitationParents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. Resort to the record, including the parties Stipulation of Facts, further confuses the matter. Grutter, supra, at 326; see also Part IIA, infra. See also Parents Involved VII, 426 F.3d, at 1194 (Kozinski, J., concurring); Strauss, Discriminatory Intent and the Taming of Brown, 56 U. Chi. 05908, at 283a. Many parents, white and black alike, want their children to attend schools with children of different races. of Oral Arg. The upshot is that these plans specific features(1) their limited and historically-diminishing use of race, (2) their strong reliance upon other non-race-conscious elements, (3) their history and the manner in which the districts developed and modified their approach, (4) the comparison with prior plans, and (5) the lack of reasonably evident alternativestogether show that the districts plans are narrowly tailored to achieve their compelling goals. See ibid. 19. Student Choice and Project Renaissance, 1991 to 1996. The Current Lawsuit, 2003 to the Present. As a result of this Courts insistence on strict scrutiny of that policy, but see id., at 538547, inmates in the California prisons were killed. There is ample precedent in the decisions of this Court to uphold school segregation); Brief for Petitioners in Gebhart v. Belton, O.T. 1952, No. [Footnote 3]. One schoolGarfieldis more or less in the center of Seattle. 1 L. Kohn, Priority Shift: The Fate of Mandatory Busing for School Desegregation in Seattle and the Nation 2730, 32 (Mar. See Hallinan 741742. But unlike the plurality, such a judge would also be aware that a legislature or school administrators, ultimately accountable to the electorate, could nonetheless properly conclude that a racial classification sometimes serves a purpose important enough to overcome the risks they mention, for example, helping to end racial isolation or to achieve a diverse student body in public schools. Because [o]ur Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens, such race-based decisionmaking is unconstitutional. Reg. tion of the races); id., at App. See ante, at 1820. 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". For at least two reasons, however, it is wrong to place the remediation of segregation on the same plane as the remediation of racial imbalance. of Oral Arg. 5, p.27 (Respondents ask this Court to upset a long established and well settled principle recognized by numerous state Legislatures, and Courts, both state and federal, over a long period of years); Tr. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI The plurality would decline their modest request. No. Under the Supreme Court's precedents on racial classification in higher education, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, race-based classifications must be directed toward a "compelling government interest" and must be "narrowly tailored" to that interest. Yesterday, the citizens of this Nation could look for guidance to this Courts unanimous pronouncements concerning desegregation. In dozens of subsequent cases, this Court told school districts previously segregated by law what they must do at a minimum to comply with Browns constitutional holding. In doing so, it distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools, it threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation, and it undermines Browns promise of integrated primary and secondary education that local communities have sought to make a reality. Five Supreme Court justices rejected voluntary desegregation plans in Seattle and . Hence, their lawfulness follows a fortiori from this Courts prior decisions. of Ed. Id., at 39a40a. Wygant, 476 U. S., at 275276 (plurality opinion); id., at 295 (White, J., concurring in judgment). Section 4. In order to create a numerical racial balance among its 10 public high schools, the Seattle School District assigned students among them. Accord, post, at 48 ([L]ocal school boards better understand their own communities and have a better knowledge of what in practice will best meet the educational needs of their pupils); post, at 66 ([W]hat of respect for democratic local decisionmaking by States and school boards?); ibid. But, as a judge, I do know that the Constitution does not authorize judges to dictate solutions to these problems. Justice Breyer nonetheless relies on the good intentions and motives of the school districts, stating that he has found no case that repudiated this constitutional asymmetry between that which seeks to exclude and that which seeks to include members of minority races. Post, at 29 (emphasis in original). In 1973 a federal court found that Jefferson County had maintained a segregated school system, Newburg Area Council, Inc. v. Board of Ed. No. 539 U.S., at 325, 123 S. Ct. 2325, 156 L. Ed. The district has identified its purposes as follows: (1) to promote the educational benefits of diverse school enrollments; (2) to reduce the potentially harmful effects of racial isolation by allowing students the opportunity to opt out of racially isolated schools; and (3) to make sure that racially segregated housing patterns did not prevent non-white students from having equitable access to the most popular over-subscribed schools. Id., at 19. While this Court has permitted the States to legislate or otherwise officially act experimentally in the social and economic fields, it has always recognized and held that this power is subject to the limitations of the Constitution, and that the tests of the Constitution must be met); Reply Brief for Appellants in Briggs v. Elliott, O.T. 1953, No. That determination typically will not be nearly as difficult as the dissent makes it seem. Thus, the programs are subject to the general rule that government race-based decisionmaking is unconstitutional. Accordingly, the plans are unconstitutional. L.Rev. See also Freeman, supra, at 495496; Dowell, 498 U. S., at 248; Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U. S. 717, 746 (1974). Although much depends on the outcome, the rationale of the Court is equally important in this case and to the future policy of public schools. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. See Church of the Lukumi v. Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520, 54647 (1993); Florida Star v. B.J.F. In the present cases, by contrast, race is not considered as part of a broader effort to achieve exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints, id., at 330; race, for some students, is determinative standing alone. IV); 34 CFR 280.2, 280.4 (2006) (implementing regulations). What has happened to stare decisis? It set forth its view prominently in an important opinion joined by all nine Justices, knowing that it would be read and followed throughout the Nation. In contrast, Seattles website formerly described emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology as a form of cultural racism, and currently states that the district has no intention to hold onto unsuccessful concepts such as [a] colorblind mentality. Harrell, School Web Site Removed: Examples of Racism Sparked Controversy, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 2, 2006, pp. In the Seattle case, the school district has gone further in describing the methods and criteria used to determine assignment decisions based on individual racial classifications, but it has nevertheless failed to explain why, in a district composed of a diversity of races, with only a minority of the students classified as white, it has employed the crude racial categories of white and non-white as the basis for its assignment decisions. Seattle School District No. The student population of the school district is approximately 40% white, 60% non-white. While diversity may lend to a robust education, parents and students have their own opinions on what factors promote the best education possible. In the case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. We rely, as did the lower courts, largely on data from the 20002001 school year in evaluating the plan. 05908, at 162a. 05908, at 299a301a; Affidavit of Kathleen Brose Pursuant to this Courts Rule 32.3 (Lodging of Petitioner Parents Involved), and the complaint sought declaratory and injunctive relief on behalf of Parents Involved members whose elementary and middle school children may be denied admission to the high schools of their choice when they apply for those schools in the future, App. Cities that have implemented successful school desegregation plans have witnessed increased interracial contact and neighborhoods that tend to become less racially segregated. This litigation was commenced in July 2000, and the record in the District Court was closed before assignments for the 20012002 school year were made. App. 05915, p. 10; see also App. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S. 469, 507 (1989); Bakke, 438 U. S., at 307 (opinion of Powell, J.) Yet neither of those briefs contains specific details like the magnitude of the claimed positive effects or the precise demographic mix at which those positive effects begin to be realized. See Seattle School District, Middle School and High School 2006-2007 Enrollment Guide for Parents, at 40. We simply do not understand how Justice Breyer can maintain that classifying every schoolchild as black or white, and using that classification as a determinative factor in assigning children to achieve pure racial balance, can be regarded as less burdensome, and hence more narrowly tailored than the consideration of race in Grutter, post, at 47, when the Court in Grutter stated that [t]he importance of individualized consideration in the program was paramount, and consideration of race was one factor in a highly individualized, holistic review. 539 U. S., at 337. The context here does not involve admission by merit; a childs academic, artistic, and athletic merits are not at all relevant to the childs placement. Ed. PICS contends that while in Grutter the Court recognized diversity in a holistic sense as a compelling interest, it specifically held that mere racial diversity is not a compelling government interest. 205, 961 F.2d 1335, 1338 (CA7 1992) (Easterbrook, J.) 05915, at 38 (Decisions to assign students to schools within each cluster are based on available space within the [elementary] schools and the racial guidelines in the Districts current student assignment plan); id., at 82 (acknowledging that a student may not be assigned to his or her resides school if it has reached the extremes of the racial guidelines). This approach is just as wrong today as it was a half-century ago. See, e.g., Milliken, 433 U. S., at 280, n.14; Freeman, 503 U. S., at 495496 (Where resegregation is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications). In these cases two school districts in different parts of the country seek to teach that principle by having classrooms that reflect the racial makeup of the surrounding community. 05915, Meredith, Custodial Parent and Next Friend of McDonald v. Jefferson County Bd. In such cases, race-based remedial measures are sometimes required. ; Grutter, supra, at 329330; Freeman, 503 U. S., at 494. See also Bakke, 438 U.S., at 312, 313, 98 S. Ct. 2733, 57 L. E. 2d 750 (opinion of Powell, J.).". First, the histories of Louisville and Seattle reveal complex circumstances and a long tradition of conscientious efforts by local school boards to resist racial segregation in public schools. See Hampton v. Jefferson Cty. 05908, at 1920; Brief for Respondents in No. The NAACPs Second Legal Challenge, 1977. 1, supra. http://reportcard. At least one of the academic articles the dissent cites to support this proposition fails to establish a causal connection between the supposed educational gains realized by black students and racial mixing. [D]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. Adarand, 515 U. S., at 214 (internal quotation marks omitted). See Grutter, 539 U.S. at 334. The dissent emphasizes local control, see post, at 4849, the unique history of school desegregation, see post, at 2, and the fact that these plans make less use of race than prior plans, see post, at 57, but these factors seem more rhetorical than integral to the analytical structure of the opinion.
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