To School Committee of Boston? Compare Wessmann v. Gittens, 160 F.3d 790, 809810 (CA1 1998) (Boudin, J., concurring), with Comfort, 418 F. 3d, at 2829 (Boudin, C.J., concurring). Furthermore, it would leave our equal-protection jurisprudence at the mercy of elected government officials evaluating the evanescent views of a handful of social scientists. [Footnote 16]. According to the schools most recent annual report, [a]cademic excellence is its primary goal. See African American Academy 2006 Annual Report, p.2, online at http://www.seattleschools.org/area/ The transfer might have had an adverse effect on the effort to approach district-wide racial proportionality at Young, but it had nothing to do with preventing either the black or other group from becoming small or isolated at Young. Most white families live north of the downtown area where four high schoolsBallard, Ingraham, Nathan Hale, and Rooseveltare located. The Seattle Plan: Mandatory Busing, 1978 to 1988. Like the Texas court, the Ninth Circuit relied upon Swann and North Carolina Bd. And appropriately so. The board began to implement the Seattle Plan in 1978. If a school has reached the extremes of the racial guidelines, a student whose race would contribute to the schools racial imbalance will not be assigned there. Yet, as explained, each has failed to provide the support necessary for that proposition. See also Grutter, supra, at 326 ([G]overnmental action based on racea group classification long recognized as in most circumstances irrelevant and therefore prohibitedshould be subjected to detailed judicial inquiry (internal quotation marks and emphasis omitted)). In respect to elementary schools, the plan first drew a neighborhood line around each elementary school, and it then drew a second line around groups of elementary schools (called clusters). Bd. [Footnote 22] The dissent argues that todays decision threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation, post, at 2, and claims that todays decision risks serious harm to the law and for the Nation, post, at 65. 1996) (Perhaps desegregation does not have a single effect, positive or negative, on the academic achievement of African American students, but rather some strategies help, some hurt, and still others make no difference whatsoever. Justice Breyer questioned the utility "of looking simply to whether earlier school segregation was de jure or de facto in order to draw firm lines separating the constitutionally permissible from the constitutionally forbidden use of 'race-conscious' criteria. In 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. of Boston v. Board of Education, 389 U. S. 572 (1968) (per curiam). 06AppsChoicesBoardApril2005final.pdf. See Grutter, 539 U.S. at 334. 2d 304. Here, race becomes a factor only in a fraction of students non-merit-based assignmentsnot in large numbers of students merit-based applications. It added that the fact that a law treats [a person] unequally because of his or her race . Compare ante, at 39 (history will be heard), with Brewer v. Quarterman, 550 U. S. ___, ___ (2007) (slip op., at 11) (Roberts, C.J., dissenting) (It is a familiar adage that history is written by the victors). See Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45, 75 (1905) (Holmes, J., dissenting) (The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencers Social Statics). 3313.98(B)(2)(b)(iii) (Lexis Supp. None of these features is present in elementary and secondary schools. at 116970. There are again studies that offer contrary conclusions. Cf. In doing so, it consulted widely with parents and other members of the local community, using public presentations, public meetings, and various other methods to obtain the publics input. Finally, the kind of deference that the Supreme Court will give the School District will also have implications. This case was originally filed in 2001 in the Western District of Washington, which ruled in favor of the school district. The procedures in Gratz placed much less reliance on race than do the plans at issue here. The dissents reliance on this Courts precedents to justify the explicit, sweeping, classwide racial classifications at issue here is a misreading of our authorities that, it appears to me, tends to undermine well-accepted principles needed to guard our freedom. But that cost does not approach, in degree or in kind, the terrible harms of slavery, the resulting caste system, and 80 years of legal racial segregation. 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. 2728; 476 U. S., at 315 (Stevens, J., dissenting)). I write separately to address several of the contentions in Justice Breyers dissent (hereinafter the dissent). 1, pp. Presidential administrations for the past half-century have used and supported various race-conscious measures. App. In part for those reasons, the Court has never permitted outright racial balancing solely for the purpose of achieving a particular racial balance. 2, App. 1 is an important case to educators, parents and students. This approach is just as wrong today as it was a half-century ago. The Court need not resolve the parties dispute over whether racial diversity in schools has a marked impact on test scores and other objective yardsticks or achieves intangible socialization benefits because it is clear that the racial classifications at issue are not narrowly tailored to the asserted goal. The District contends that its plan used the narrowest possible means to achieve is educational goals. Even so the race factor was found to be invalid. To do this as an educational policy is within the broad discretionary powers of school authorities. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. Students are assigned to school based on the race makeup of each school, no less than 15%, no more than 50%. Without the racial tiebreaker, the class would have been 39.6 percent Asian-American, 30.2 percent African-American, 8.3 percent Latino, 1.1 percent Native-American, and 20.8 percent Caucasian. 417, 428429 287 N.E. 2d 438, 447448 (1972). As to drawing neighborhood attendance zones on a racial basis, Louisville tried it, and it worked only when forced busing was also part of the plan. all the civil rights that the superior race enjoy). Whenever the board finds that racial imbalance exists in a public school, it shall give written notice to the appropriate school committee, which shall prepare a plan to eliminate imbalance and file a copy with the board. The amicus briefs in the cases before us mirror this divergence of opinion. This cannot be justified in the name of the Equal Protection Clause. 3, p.8283 (Our many hours of research and investigation have led only to confirmation of our view that segregation by race in Virginias public schools at this time not only does not offend the Constitution of the United States but serves to provide a better education for living for the children of both races); Tr. The student could then choose among those schools, indicating a first choice, and other choices the student found acceptable. In the pages following the ones the dissent cites, the author of that article remarks that the main reason white and minority students perform better academically in majority white schools is likely that these schools provide greater opportunities to learn. Government action dividing us by race is inherently suspect because such classifications promote notions of racial inferiority and lead to a politics of racial hostility, Croson, supra, at 493, reinforce the belief, held by too many for too much of our history, that individuals should be judged by the color of their skin, Shaw v. Reno, 509 U. S. 630, 657 (1993), and endorse race-based reasoning and the conception of a Nation divided into racial blocs, thus contributing to an escalation of racial hostility and conflict. Metro Broadcasting, 497 U. S., at 603 (OConnor, J., dissenting). Is it not the height of wisdom that the manner in which that shall be conducted should be left to those most immediately affected by it, and that the wishes of the parents, both white and colored, should be ascertained before their children are forced into what may be an unwelcome contact?). in No. This school was 10 miles from home, and Meredith sought to transfer Joshua to a school in a different cluster, Bloom Elementary, whichlike his resides schoolwas only a mile from home. Choice, therefore, is the predominant factor in these plans. Today, more than one in six black children attend a school that is 99100% minority. That, though, is not the case. We rely, as did the lower courts, largely on data from the 20002001 school year in evaluating the plan. Strict scrutiny is not strict in theory, but fatal in fact. . of Ed., 439 U. S. 1380, 1383 (1978). The history of each school system reveals highly segregated schools, followed by remedial plans that involved forced busing, followed by efforts to attract or retain students through the use of plans that abandoned busing and replaced it with greater student choice. But eventually a state court found that the mandatory busing was lawful. That necessary implication of the pluralitys position strikes the 13th chime of the clock. Second, the distinction between de jure segregation (caused by school systems) and de facto segregation (caused, e.g., by housing patterns or generalized societal discrimination) is meaningless in the present context, thereby dooming the pluralitys endeavor to find support for its views in that distinction. See also Kennedy Report. The dissent claims that the law requires application here of a standard of review that is not strict in the traditional sense of that word. Post, at 36. That the school districts consider these plans to be necessary should remind us our highest aspirations are yet unfulfilled. The racial makeup of the school population amounted to 43% white, 24% black, and 23% Asian or Pacific Islander, with Hispanics and Native Americans making up the rest. See, e.g., Schofield, Review of Research on School Desegregations Impact on Elementary and Secondary School Students, in Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education 597, 606607 (J. It is this part that went before the US Supreme Court as the other two cases were not appealed by JCPS. Light, New Evidence on School Desegregation v (1987) (hereinafter Welch) (prepared for the Commission on Civil Rights) (reviewing a sample of 125 school districts, constituting 20% of national public school enrollment, that had experimented with nearly 300 different plans over 18 years). 1.9 In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. That is particularly true given that, when Swann was decided, this Court had not yet confirmed that strict scrutiny applies to racial classifications like those before us. One can attempt to identify a construction of Jefferson Countys student assignment plan that, at least as a logical matter, complies with these competing propositions; but this does not remedy the underlying problem. See Brief for Petitioner at 35. See, e.g., D. Armor, Forced Justice (1995). VI (1978) (prescribing percentage enrollment requirements for minority students); Siqueland 55 (discussing HEW definition of minority). Notwithstanding these concerns, allocation of benefits and burdens through individual racial classifications was found sometimes permissible in the context of remedies for de jure wrong. 1986). Compare ante, at 29, with supra, at 69. While we do not suggest that greater use of race would be preferable, the minimal impact of the districts racial classifications on school enrollment casts doubt on the necessity of using racial classifications. 05915, at 159, 147. See Brief for Petitioner at 2526. of Cal. According to the dissent, integration involves an interest in setting right the consequences of prior conditions of segregation. Post, at 37. See, e.g., Brief for Appellees on Reargument in Davis v. County School Board, O.T. 1953, No. The Grutter Court expressly limited its holdingdefining a specific type of broad-based diversity and noting the unique context of higher educationbut these limitations were largely disregarded by the lower courts in extending Grutter to the sort of classifications at issue here.
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