No Decision in School Assignment Cases

Thursday, June 14th, 2007 10:10 am | Jason Harrow | Print This Post

The Court’s three decisions today did not include a ruling in the closely-watched voluntary school integration cases. The next day for opinions is Monday, June 18.

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Referring to the school-assignment cases as the “voluntary school integration cases” begs the question, since the entire dispute is about what “integration” means — a subject on which the parties profoundly disagree.

The parents challenging the use of race in Seattle and Louisville argue that, as a general matter, a school that does not exclude students based on race is an integrated school, even if the racial composition of the student body varies from school to school.

That position finds support in the text of the Civil Rights Act and Supreme Court decisions such as Freeman v. Pitts and Grutter v. Bollinger.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act (in Title IV, Section 401(b)) declares that:

“‘Desegregation’ means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but ‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.”

Similarly, the Supreme Court has stated that “racial balance is not to be achieved for its own sake” in Freeman v. Pitts (1992), and that “racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional” in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).

Moreover, the plaintiffs in the Seattle case are seeking the same thing that the plaintiffs sought in the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education case: the right to attend their preferred school without being excluded on the basis of race.

The complaint of Linda Brown, the Topeka elementary-school student who gave the Brown decision its name, was that she was barred from attending her neighborhood school and forced to attend a distant school because of her race.

Ethel Louise Belton, whose case was consolidated with Brown’s, was assigned to a school nine miles away from her home, rather than being allowed to attend a school a short walk from her home, because of her race.

Similarly, some students in Seattle are forced to endure long bus rides to distant schools, based on their race, rather than being permitted to attend their preferred schools closer to home.

By contrast, the Seattle and Louisville school districts define segregation very differently, to mean a school system in which the racial composition of the student body varies widely from school to school, even if the school is open to all comers regardless of race.

To them, racial imbalance is thus ipso facto segregation.

Their definition of segregation has been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, but it is consistent with the contrary definitions of segregation used by some liberal state courts, such as the Connecticut Scheff v. O’Neil decision, which appear to treat racial imbalance as segregation under state law.

But even if U.S. Supreme Court precedent and the Civil Rights Act did not define segregation, and the definition of “segregation” were susceptible to ambiguity, it would still be inappropriate to defer to the Seattle Schools’ definition, since they have not demonstrated any greater expertise in defining segregation than the federal courts.

Indeed, the Seattle schools should receive no deference from the Supreme Court in their use of race, since they have made absurd and insulting claims about racial matters, such as claiming on their web site that “individualism” is a form of “cultural racism,” claiming that only whites can be racist, and claiming that planning ahead (”future time orientation”) is a white characteristic that it is racist to expect minorities to exhibit.

Comment by Hans Bader — June 15, 2007 @ 6:14 pm
Hans Bader: blah, blah, blah.

In any event, it is plain enough that some of the parents who litigated this case suffered no harm and had political — and perhaps hateful - aims in mind. See http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/2006/12/a_new_perspecti_2.html.

Comment by Jacques McKenzie — June 15, 2007 @ 11:30 pm
I must admit that I’ve been waiting for the court to rule on this issue for some time since I heard about it six months ago

I think it’s important that people be treated as individuals, not as group members. The plaintiffs were denied admission to schools closest to their residences because of their race. That is patently wrong. I thought Brown cleared all that up. And as Hans quoted in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, desegregation doesnt mean assignment to schools to achieve racial balence. It means that public schools cannot discriminate against students on the basis of race. How could it not be more clear than that?

Busing didnt do anything but drive middle-class students out of big-city school systems. I should know. Im from Cleveland, OH, where we had a drastic student assignment plan hoisted on us by a left-wing judge. It destroyed our city. in 1970, Cleveland had 750,000 residents. Ten years later, and three years after the judge called for busing, we had 575,000 residents. We lost almost 180,000 people to the suburbs, never to return. We lost the best and brightest students. If they stayed in the city, they went to private schools. We now have only about 450,000 people

Luckily, I was not bussed. But my brother, sister, and a few cousins were bussed out of their neighborhoods to distant schools. It’s unbelievable too. When I was growing up in the late 80s and 90s (Im 27 now), our neighborhood high school was South, which was in a white neighborhood. The area we lived in was black and white. My older brother was not allowed to go to South and had to attend East Tech, which was alot farther from our home in an all-black neighborhood (By the way, we are black, and I know plenty of people from the neighborhood, black and white, who had to go to East Tech. My younger brother and I were able to attend South and were never bused out of our community). The point Im trying to make is that all of this racial balance stuff is silly and wrong, and it didnt help minorities one bit. It only drove whites (and blacks) outta the district. Just because a school is (or would be) 100% white or black doesnt mean that’s wrong at all. So what? There’s nothing wrong with neighborhood schools. We need to go back to them.

I hope the court sides with the plaintiffs and puts and end to quotas and discrimination in schools, just like Brown intended

-Dexter Sims

Comment by dex216sims — June 16, 2007 @ 12:10 pm