1" (2007) and "Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education" (2007), the high court forbade those . 22, 1977) (OCR Complaint) (filed with Court as Exhibit in Seattle School Dist. Seattles plan, by contrast, relies upon a mechanical formula that has denied hundreds of students their preferred schools on the basis of three rigid criteria: placement of siblings, distance from schools, and race. See Grutter, 539 U. S. 347348 (opinion of Scalia, J.). Classifying and assigning schoolchildren according to a binary conception of race is an extreme approach in light of this Courts precedents and the Nations history of using race in public schools, and requires more than such an amorphous end to justify it. 1986) (upholding rezoning plan under rational-basis review). The Seattle district, which has never operated legally segregated schools or Read More(2007) Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School . I also join Parts IIIA and IIIC for reasons provided below. The segregationists also relied upon the likely practical consequences of ending the state-imposed system of racial separation. Choice, therefore, is the predominant factor in these plans. 1117. It then placed some grades (say, third and fourth grades) at one school building and other grades (say, fifth and sixth grades) at the other school building. Students are assigned to school based on the race makeup of each school, no less than 15%, no more than 50%. 05915, at 410. The plurality refers to no case in support of its demand. The student assignment plan of Seattle Public Schools and Jefferson County Public Schools does not meet the narrowly tailored and compelling interest requirements for a race-based assignment plan because it is used only to achieve "racial balance." But under the Seattle plan, a school with 50 percent Asian-American students and 50 percent white students but no African-American, Native-American, or Latino students would qualify as balanced, while a school with 30 percent Asian-American, 25 percent African-American, 25 percent Latino, and 20 percent white students would not. The dissent rests on the assumptions that these sweeping race-based classifications of persons are permitted by existing precedents; that its confident endorsement of race categories for each child in a large segment of the community presents no danger to individual freedom in other, prospective realms of governmental regulation; and that the racial classifications used here cause no hurt or anger of the type the Constitution prevents. The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. Ante, at 40. The dissent makes much of the supposed difficulty of determining whether prior segregation was de jure or de facto. are subject to strict scrutiny, not all are invalidated local tax dollars will be spent. Three years after that decision was handed down, the Governor of Arkansas ordered state militia to block the doors of a white schoolhouse so that black children could not enter. In a typical year, say, 1995, about 20,000 potential high school students participated. [12] In order to survive strict scrutiny analysis, "a narrowly tailored plan" must be presented in order to achieve a "compelling government interest. 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. And in light of those challenges, they have asked us not to take from their hands the instruments they have used to rid their schools of racial segregation, instruments that they believe are needed to overcome the problems of cities divided by race and poverty. Most are not. Again, neither school board asserts that its race-based actions were taken to remedy prior discrimination. Guided by these principles, the Court concluded: [W]e cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia. Id., at 550551. The Nations schools strive to teach that our strength comes from people of different races, creeds, and cultures uniting in commitment to the freedom of all. 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. 4, pp. Kennedy argued that the government had an interest in ensuring racial equality: "The plurality opinion is too dismissive of the legitimate interest government has in ensuring all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race.". of New Kent Cty., 391 U. S. 430, 435 (1968) ([T]he State, acting through the local school board and school officials, organized and operated a dual system, part white and part Negro. It was such dual systems that 14 years ago Brown I[, 347 U. S. 483,] held unconstitutional and a year later Brown II[, 349 U. S. 294 (1955)] held must be abolished). A majority of these desegregation techniques explicitly considered a students race. McFarland I, 330 F.Supp. There is every reason to think that, if the dissents rationale were accepted, Congress, assuming an otherwise proper exercise of its spending authority or commerce power, could mandate either the Seattle or the Jefferson County plans nationwide. Those entrusted with directing our public schools can bring to bear the creativity of experts, parents, administrators, and other concerned citizens to find a way to achieve the compelling interests they face without resorting to widespread governmental allocation of benefits and burdens on the basis of racial classifications. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit originally reversed, 285 F. 3d 1236 (9th Cir. The State Supreme Court wrote: Despite the initiatives undertaken by the defendants to alleviate the severe racial and ethnic disparities among school districts, and despite the fact that the defendants did not intend to create or maintain these disparities, the disparities that continue to burden the education of the plaintiffs infringe upon their fundamental state constitutional right to a substantially equal educational opportunity. Id., at 42, 678 A. See post, at 79, 23. . [Footnote 24], The similarities between the dissents arguments and the segregationists arguments do not stop there. The 50/50 hypothetical has no support in the record here; it is conjured from the imagination. To be forced to live under a state-mandated racial label is inconsistent with the dignity of individuals in our society. We relied on the fact that this Court had not once but seven times, I think it is, pronounced in favor of the separate but equal doctrine. In 1958, black parents whose children attended Harrison Elementary School (with a black student population of over 75%) wrote the Seattle board, complaining that the boundaries for the Harrison Elementary School were not set in accordance with the long-established standards of the School District but were arbitrarily set with an end to excluding colored children from McGilvra School, which is adjacent to the Harrison school district.. Second, Seattle noted that it has ceased using the racial tiebreaker pending the outcome of this litigation. Neither school district has made any such specific findings. See Welch 8391. Third, a more important response is the pluralitys claim that later casesin particular Johnson, Adarand, and Gruttersupplanted Swann. 1996). Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a sharply worded short dissent in which he accused the plurality of misusing and misapplying previous Supreme Court precedents including Brown v. Board of Education. The Ninth Circuit asked whether the Seattle school districts particular use of race in its admission process violated the state constitution. Furthermore, it is unclear whether increased interracial contact improves racial attitudes and relations. The Ninth Circuit below stated that it share[d] in the hope expressed in Grutter that in 25 years racial preferences would no longer be necessary to further the interest identified in that case. Approximately half the districts public school enrollment was black; about half was white. in No. Then-Justice Rehnquist, in denying emergency relief, stressed that equitable consideration[s] counseled against preliminary relief. Consequently, school boards seeking to remedy those societal problems with race-based measures in schools today would have no way to gauge the proper scope of the remedy. To uphold these programs the Court is asked to brush aside two concepts of central importance for determining the validity of laws and decrees designed to alleviate the hurt and adverse consequences resulting from race discrimination. Instead of strict scrutiny, Judge Kozinski would have analyzed the plans under robust and realistic rational basis review. Id., at 1194. The two children were denied their first, second, and third choice schools, and consequently assigned to Ingraham High School. Seattle operates a K8 African-American Academy, which has a nonwhite enrollment of 99%. A racial imbalance determination requires the district to submit a plan to correct the racial imbalance, which plan may include mandatory pupil reassignment. 10226e5(a) and (c)(4). Other problems are evident in Seattles system, but there is no need to address them now. Numerical racial balance in a district's schools is far from a compelling interest, and in fact it is not even a legitimate purpose. 05915, at 81. Roberts cites to: "Id., at 330, 123 S. Ct. 2325, 156 L. Ed. If a parent identifies more than one race on the form, [t]he application will not be accepted and, if necessary, the enrollment service person taking the application will indicate one box. App. Croson, supra, at 505; Wygant, supra, at 279, n.5 (plurality opinion). Compare ante, at 39 (It was not the inequality of the facilities but the fact of legally separating children on the basis of race on which the Court relied to find a constitutional violation in 1954), with Juris. Both districts faced problems that reflected initial periods of severe racial segregation, followed by such remedial efforts as busing, followed by evidence of resegregation, followed by a need to end busing and encourage the return of, e.g., suburban students through increased student choice. Fifty-three of the 125 studied districts used transfers as a component of their plans. It initially assigned each student to his or her neighborhood school, but it permitted each student freely to transfer between elementary schools within each cluster provided that the transferring student (a) was black if transferring from a predominantly black school to a predominantly white school, or (b) was white if transferring from a predominantly white school to a predominantly black school. See, e.g., Powell, Living and Learning: Linking Housing and Education, in Pursuit of a Dream Deferred: Linking Housing and Education Policy 15, 35 (J. Powell, G. Kearney, & V. Kay eds. at 315 (opinion of Powell, J. The Equal Protection Clause, ratified following the Civil War, has always distinguished in practice between state action that excludes and thereby subordinates racial minorities and state action that seeks to bring together people of all races. in No. The Amendment sought to bring into American society as full members those whom the Nation had previously held in slavery. The Current Plan, 1999 to the Present. Eight of those States condition approval of transfers to another school or district on whether the transfer will produce increased racial integration. At the other extreme, Santa Clara, California had a relatively even racial distribution prior to its 1979 desegregation plan. The reason for this omission is clear enough, since the case did not involve any voluntary means adopted by a school district. Unlike todays decision, they were also entirely loyal to Brown. 2, p. 83 (It [South Carolina] is confident of its good faith and intention to produce equality for all of its children of whatever race or color. 539 U. S., at 316, 335336. They were further persuaded that these plans differed from other race-based programs this Court has considered because they are certainly more benign than laws that favor or disfavor one race, segregate by race, or create quotas for or against a racial group, Comfort, 418 F.3d, at 28 (Boudin, C.J., concurring), and they are far from the original evils at which the Fourteenth Amendment was addressed, id., at 29; 426 F.3d, at 1195 (Kozinski, J., concurring). As Jefferson County explains, the racial guidelines have minimal impact in this process, because they mostly influence student assignment in subtle and indirect ways. Brief for Respondents in No. 2d 834 (WD Ky. 2004); McFarland v. Jefferson Cty. None of these elements is compelling. in No. in No. That is what is at issue here. This case was originally filed in 2001 in the Western District of Washington, which ruled in favor of the school district. 551 U.S. 701. See Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U. S. 70, 124125 (1995), (Thomas, J., concurring). Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard . Nonetheless, in light of Grutter and other precedents, see, e.g., Bakke, 438 U. S., at 290 (opinion of Powell, J. . That is a gamble I am unwilling to take, and it is one the Constitution does not allow. It was a promise embodied in three Amendments designed to make citizens of slaves. No. Accordingly, the plans are unconstitutional. Because of its importance, I shall repeat what this Court said about the matter in Swann. Subsequent to the District Courts dissolution of the desegregation order (in 2000) the board simply continued to implement its 1996 plan as modified to reflect the courts magnet school determination. 05915, at 12, and n.13. Id., at 494. This, in turn, could encourage policy-makers to be more accountable to families and implement policy that is innovative and responsive to local needs. Rather, we employ the familiar and well-established analytic approach of strict scrutiny to evaluate the plans at issue today, an approach that in no way warrants the dissents cataclysmic concerns. Cf. 05908, at 36 (For Seattle, racial balance is clearly not an end in itself but rather a measure of the extent to which the educational goals the plan was designed to foster are likely to be achieved). Because Louisville could use race-based measures only as a remedy for past de jure segregation, it is not incoherent, post, at 56, to say that race-based decisionmaking was allowed to Louisville one daywhile it was still remedyingand forbidden to it the nextwhen remediation was finished. Andy was accepted into this selective program but, because of the racial tiebreaker, was denied assignment to Ballard High School. The complaint charged that the school board had brought about this segregated system in part by mak[ing] and enforc[ing] certain rules and regulations, in part by drawing . Even if the district maintains the current plan and reinstitutes the racial tiebreaker, Seattle argues, Parents Involved members will only be affected if their children seek to enroll in a Seattle public high school and choose an oversubscribed school that is integration positivetoo speculative a harm to maintain standing. The District Court granted summary judgment to the school district, finding that state law did not bar the districts use of the racial tiebreaker and that the plan survived strict scrutiny on the federal constitutional claim because it was narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. in No. If the dissent were to say that college cases are simply not applicable to public school systems in kindergarten through high school, this would seem to me wrong, but at least an arguable distinction. of Boston v. Board of Education, O.T. 1967, No. He contended that whatever trends toward classroom racial imbalance have obtained, they were not the result of state-sanctioned segregation as in the pre-Brown era. Moreover, these cases are not governed by Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 328, in which the Court held that, for strict scrutiny purposes, a government interest in student body diversity in the context of higher education is compelling. Segregation at the time of Brown gave way to expansive remedies that included busing, which in turn gave rise to fears of white flight and resegregation. Todays opinion reveals that the plurality would rewrite this Courts prior jurisprudence, at least in practical application, transforming the strict scrutiny test into a rule that is fatal in fact across the board. The en banc panel came to the opposite conclusion and upheld the tiebreaker. The Seattle school district classifies children as white or nonwhite; the Jefferson County school district as black or other. In Seattle, this racial classification is used to allocate slots in oversubscribed high schools. Today, they do not. The Sixth Circuit affirmed. The plan provided for open high school enrollment. 45 (Dec. 19, 1991) (1991 Memorandum). These include the facially race-neutral means set forth above or, if necessary, a more nuanced, individual evaluation of school needs and student characteristics that might include race as a component. The dream of a Nation of equal citizens in a society where race is irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement would be lost in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs. Id., at 505506. Outside the school context, this Courts cases reflect the fact that racial mixing does not always lead to harmony and understanding. The Seattle school districts Website formerly contained the following definition of cultural racism: Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as other, different, less than, or render them invisible. 05908, at 286a. Revisited: Desegregation to Resegregation, 52 J. Negro Educ. Another amicus surveys several social science studies and concludes that a fair and comprehensive analysis of the research shows that there is no clear and consistent evidence of [educational] benefits. Brief for David J. Armor etal. 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. But see ante, at 1213, 17, n. 12. Richmond v. J. [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). Thus, only by ignoring Grutters reasoning can the dissent claim that recognizing a compelling interest in these cases is an a fortiori application of Grutter. I describe those histories at length in order to highlight three important features of these cases. ); brackets and internal quotation marks omitted). If school authorities are concerned that the student-body compositions of certain schools interfere with the objective of offering an equal educational opportunity to all of their students, they are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a general way and without treating each student in different fashion solely on the basis of a systematic, individual typing by race. As Justice Marshall said, unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U. S. 717, 783 (1974) (dissenting opinion). He concluded by saying that the current Court has greatly changed and that previously: "[I]t wasmore faithful to Brown and more respectful of our precedent than it is today. The statistics cited in Appendix A to the dissent are not to the contrary. The plurality, by contrast, does not acknowledge that the school districts have identified a compelling interest here. After agreeing to hear an appeal (Parents Involved, 2006) in Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School District Number 1 (2007), a highly divided Supreme Court f 6 struck down plans from Seattle and Louisville that classified students by race in making school assignments. Which of the following statements offers the most accurate comparison between this case and the decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954)? The districts argue that other factors, such as student preferences, affect assignment decisions under their plans, but under each plan when race comes into play, it is decisive by itself. 1. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. There seems to be no principled rule, moreover, to limit the dissents rationale to the context of public schools. Arkansas, for example, provides by statute that [n]o student may transfer to a nonresident district where the percentage of enrollment for the students race exceeds that percentage in the students resident district. Ark. PICS counters that neighborhood demographics are the result of individuals voluntary choices, and that parents tend to choose schools near their home. See 539 U. S., at 320. To School Committee of Boston? When determining where to place a child or where to transfer a child both school districts use race as the qualifying factor on where to send the child. Justice Thomas suggests that it will be easy to identify de jure segregation because [i]n most cases, there either will or will not have been a state constitutional amendment, state statute, local ordinance, or local administrative policy explicitly requiring separation of the races. Ante, at 6, n.4 (concurring opinion).
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