Back to “separate but equal”

The Supreme Court rules against school integration

By GILLIAN RUSSOM

ON THE final day of its 2006–07 term, the Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4 against racial integration programs in the Seattle and Louisville public school districts. At a time when American public schools are more segregated than they were in 1970, the decision is a major blow to the goal of integrated schools established in the Brown v. Board of Education decision more than fifty years ago, and threatens the integration efforts of hundreds of school districts.

In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, the right-wing majority of the Court ruled that the integration efforts in Seattle and Louisville were unconstitutional because they classified students by race. In the plurality opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “In design and operation, the plans are directed only to racial balance, an objective this Court has repeatedly condemned as illegitimate.” In predictable fashion, the conservatives adopted the mantle of nondiscrimination (against whites) as a cover for a decision that will surely deepen the racial divide. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts continued, adding that his side of the debate was “more faithful to the heritage of Brown…. Government action dividing people by race is inherently suspect because such classifications…endorse race-based reasoning and the conception of a Nation divided into racial blocs, thus contributing to an escalation of racial hostility and conflict.”

The ridiculous implication is that the mere act of classifying people by race in order to ensure equal access causes racism in society—with no regard for the institutionalized racism of segregated neighborhoods, discrimination in hiring, a racist criminal justice system, and a legacy of inequality going all the way back to slavery. Unfortunately, it is not a false “conception” that the United States is divided by race—and that policies of affirmative action are needed to rectify inequities.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens correctly noted that the chief justice’s invocation of Brown v. Board of Education was “a cruel irony” when the opinion in fact “rewrites the history of one of this court’s most important decisions.”
The Seattle and Louisville programs struck down by the Court were in fact quite modest in their methods for achieving school integration. When a court order to desegregate expired in 2000, Louisville’s Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) established a voluntary integration program which set the broad guideline that every school should seek 15–50 percent Black enrollment (Louisville is 34 percent Black, 61 percent white, and 5 percent other). The guideline helped JCPS evaluate students’ requests to transfer to schools outside their home area. Yet, as a district court noted in upholding the program, “Even where race does ‘tip’ the balance in some cases, it does so only at the end of the process, after residence, choice and all the other factors have played their part.”

The Seattle plan applied only to high schools that received more applicants than they had openings. If the oversubscribed school were racially imbalanced, race would be used as a “tiebreaker” to determine which students would be admitted. The tiebreaker helped to ensure that Seattle high schools maintained a racial balance close to that of the school district’s residents: 40 percent white and 60 percent nonwhite.

Seattle has in fact not used the racial tiebreaker for the past five years while the case has been in court. As Seattle’s superintendent of schools predicted, this led to “enhanced…racial segregation in our schools.” The incoming ninth-grade class at Seattle’s Ballard High went from 45 percent nonwhite in 2000 to 32 percent nonwhite in 2002. In the spring of 2002, Ballard’s principal, David Engle, resigned when it became apparent that the school’s racial diversity was threatened. In an address to students announcing his resignation, Engle said, “The racial divide is widening in Seattle…. As a privileged leader of a school at the center of the new racial controversy, I have decided I could not dodge the decision.”

Many Seattle and Louisville parents reacted with dismay to the Court’s decision and the prospect that their children will be attending much more segregated schools in the future. “I have been so proud of Louisville’s very diverse schools system,” Fran Ellers, a white parent who sends her kids to school in a black neighborhood, told the New York Times. “My son has a group of buddies from all over the county, and they’re black and white, and only one is from our neighborhood. Going back to neighborhood schools would be a big loss.”

Much attention has been paid to the fact that the fifth member of the Court’s majority decision—Justice Anthony M. Kennedy—issued a separate opinion in which he argued that race could still be “taken into account” as long as individual students were not “sorted” by race. Yet years of experience and social science research show that schools cannot achieve racial integration without making it an explicit goal through policies that consider the race of the students. The drastic decrease in diversity at Seattle schools over the past five years provides ample proof.

Kennedy’s opinion mirrors the separate decision of Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. in the Bakke affirmative action case twenty-nine years ago. Powell accepted diversity as a rationale for affirmative action in university admissions, but argued that schools could not use “quotas” to count the number of students of different races. Powell’s opinion defined the law for the next twenty-five years, in which diversity in higher education was drastically reduced.

Despite high profile court challenges brought by a small number of white parents, school integration is strongly supported by a majority of the public. In a 2000 University of Kentucky survey, 82 percent of respondents believed that students benefited from a racially integrated school environment. Seventy-seven percent of the parents (and 89 percent of the African-American parents) believed schools should have enrollment guidelines to ensure that children attend school with students of different racial backgrounds.

The key lesson of Brown v. Board of Education is that in a racist society, separate can never be equal. As education expert Jonathan Kozol exhaustively documents in his book The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, the resegregation of schools over the past thirty years has gone hand-in-hand with increased inequality between predominantly white and predominantly Black and Brown schools.

Liberal organizations such as People for the American Way (PAW) are responding to the Court’s rash of conservative decisions by urging voters to elect a Democratic president in 2008. PAW sent out 400,000 e-mail messages as part of a campaign to make the Court a central issue in the 2008 Senate and presidential elections.

Yet it is unlikely that any of the five most conservative justices will be up for replacement during the next president’s term. And as dissenting Justice Stevens pointed out in his opinion, in a different political climate, even conservatives on the Court supported integration. “It is my firm conviction that no member of the court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision,” Justice Stevens said. At that time, integration and affirmative action programs were passed as a natural outgrowth of the civil rights movement’s demand for equal access.

Instead of a focus on elections, what is urgently needed is a new civil rights movement that opposes apartheid schooling and unapologetically demands integration. In Shame of the Nation, Kozol asks Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Gary Orfield whether such a movement is realistic today. Orfield responds:

The notion that apartheid in the South could be dismantled 50 years ago seemed wildly improbable as well…. We will certainly need some better people on the courts. But look at what Charles Hamilton Houston and DuBois and those who worked with them during the decades long before the Brown decision faced when they were looking at a system of apartheid in the South which nobody was seriously resisting and which neither political party was opposing. And they nonetheless were asking, “How do you take this thing apart?” And they did it. They started a movement…. This is what we need to do as well.