Post, at 2829. In so doing, the Illinois Supreme Court acted in explicit reliance on our decision in School Comm. When questioned about the close timing, Gordon stated that all the District had to do was "push a button" to change things over to a plan compliant with the Court's ruling. Connecticut law requires each school district to submit racial group population figures to the State Board of Education. Code Ann. By recognizing racial diversity as a compelling state interest, the Supreme Court will give public school districts nationwide the ability to make decisions about whether or not to admit a student based on the isolated factor of his or her race. School Dist. As a result, students who had ranked a school as a second, third, or lower choice sometimes received a spot at the school over those who had ranked it as their first choice. See, e.g., Columbus Bd. No State shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. U. S. "[5] He went on to say, "What the government is not permitted to do, absent a showing of necessity not made here, is to classify every student on the basis of race and to assign each of them to schools based on that classification. He also wrote about the unsettled debate concerning whether racial balance or diversity has a positive effect on educational outcomes. Justice Breyers dissent next looks for authority to a footnote in Washington v. Seattle School Dist. The district, nevertheless, has failed to make an adequate showing in at least one respect. That judge is not alone. What about historically black colleges, which have established traditions and programs that might disproportionately appeal to one race or another? The limitation of this power to instances where there has been de jure segregation serves to confine the nature, extent, and duration of governmental reliance on individual racial classifications. 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. (explaining why dicta is not binding). White Privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks. See White Privilege Conference, Questions and Answers, http://www.uccs.edu/~wpc/ As the Court notes, we recognized the compelling nature of the interest in remedying past intentional discrimination in Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U. S. 467, 494 (1992), and of the interest in diversity in higher education in Grutter. The plurality does not seem confident as to the answer. Considering the precedent of Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which is only partly applicable because it concerns higher education, it is apparent that educational institutions must use diversity as one of several admissions criteria rather than setting strict quotas. By 1984, after several schools had fallen out of compliance with the orders racial percentages due to shifting demographics in the community, the school board revised its desegregation plan. Indeed, in 1968, the Illinois Supreme Court rejected an equal protection challenge to a race-conscious state law seeking to undo de facto segregation: To support [their] claim, the defendants heavily rely on three Federal cases, each of which held, no State law being involved, that a local school board does not have an affirmative constitutional duty to act to alleviate racial imbalance in the schools that it did not cause. Ibid. See post, at 62. Opposition to Writ of Certiorari at 20; Brief for Respondent at 16. The statute establishing MSAP permits granting federal grants to magnet programs that seek to decrease minority group isolation. 20 U.S.C. Some schools are more popular than others. in No. It defines the democratic element as an interest in producing an educational environment that reflects the pluralistic society in which our children will live. Post, at 39. For instance, students who attend Franklin and Ballard will receive metro passes rather than bus service. When a court subjects governmental action to strict scrutiny, it cannot construe ambiguities in favor of the government. That is, it is not in all circumstances strict in theory, but fatal in fact. Id., at 237 (quoting Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U. S., at 519 (Marshall, J., concurring in judgment)). Id., at 493494. State laws or administrative policies, directed toward the reduction and eventual elimination of de facto segregation of children in the schools and racial imbalance, have been approved by every high State court which has considered the issue. 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. 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. Second, "the interest in diversity in higher education", as upheld in, This page was last edited on 5 February 2023, at 17:43. [Footnote 10]. 1? Brief for Petitioner at 3334. Consequently, the Courts decision today slows down and sets back the work of local school boards to bring about racially diverse schools. The record suggests, however, that the child in question was not assigned to the school he preferred because he missed the kindergarten application deadline. in No. Just prior to the plans implementation, for example, 4 of Seattles 11 high schools were imbalanced, i.e., almost exclusively black or almost exclusively white. By 1979, only two were out of balance. By 1980 only Cleveland remained out of balance (as the board defined it) and that by a mere two students. In 1969 the NAACP filed a federal lawsuit against the school board, claiming that the board had unlawfully and unconstitutionally establish[ed] and maintain[ed] a system of racially segregated public schools. The complaint said that 77% of black public elementary school students in Seattle attended 9 of the citys 86 elementary schools and that 23 of the remaining schools had no black students at all. In 20002001, with the racial tiebreaker, it was 17.9 percent Asian-American, 13.3 percent African-American, 7 percent Latino, 58.4 percent Caucasian, and 3.4 percent Native-American. Student Choice and Project Renaissance, 1991 to 1996. 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. We relied on the fact that the courts of last appeal of some sixteen or eighteen States have passed upon the validity of the separate but equal doctrine vis-a-vis the Fourteenth Amendment. The dissents approach confers on judges the power to say what sorts of discrimination are benign and which are invidious. See 539 U. S., at 320. Segregation is not the only possible explanation for a racial imbalance, and there may be no educational benefit from diversity that is artificially created. The pluralitys position, I fear, would break that promise. See also Bakke, supra, at 312, 313 (opinion of Powell, J.). See Brief for Petitioner at 4647. Because attending Ingraham would have placed a burden on the family and would have limited the students ability to participate in after school activities of their choice, both parents elected to send their children to parochial high schools. summary.aspx?schoolId=1104&reportLevel=School&orgLinkId=1104&yrs=; 1617. of Ed. The Western District of Washington dismissed the suit, upholding the tiebreaker. In reaching this conclusion, the Court did not directly address the constitutional merits of the underlying Seattle plan. Second, broad-range limits on voluntary school choice plans are less burdensome, and hence more narrowly tailored, see Grutter, supra, at 341, than other race-conscious restrictions this Court has previously approved. 2d 257 (2003) (quoting [***38] Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U.S. 448, 537, 100 S. Ct. 2758, 65 L. Ed. The Washington Supreme Court issued its decision on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, the seminal cases which addressed the constitutionality of using race in college and law school admissions at the University of Michigan. No. At that time one high school, Garfield, was about two-thirds minority; eight high schools were virtually all white. The public school population had fallen from about 100,000 to less than 50,000. 2, 4, 5 (WD Ky. 1999) (Hampton I). 05908, at 128a, 129a. Opinions differed. If the need for the racial classifications embraced by the school districts is unclear, even on the districts own terms, the costs are undeniable. These are not affirmative action plans, and hence individualized scrutiny is simply beside the point. 1 a decision affirming the goal of integrated education as a compelling interest but rejecting the means many school districts use to maintain some integration in a rapidly resegregating society. This, in turn, could encourage policy-makers to be more accountable to families and implement policy that is innovative and responsive to local needs. See supra, at 12. 2d 834 (WD Ky. 2004); McFarland v. Jefferson Cty. The School District relies on Grutter in describing the educational benefits of a diverse student body as (1) instilling the civic virtue of cross-racial understanding; (2) creating better-informed citizens by exposing students to a wide range of viewpoints; and (3) enabling students to achieve more success. See supra, at 2224. See Tometz v. Board of Ed., Waukegan School Dist. 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)). Dawkins & Braddock 401403; Wells & Crain 550. In the districts public schools approximately 41 percent of enrolled students are white; the remaining 59 percent, comprising all other racial groups, are classified by Seattle for assignment purposes as nonwhite. School boards may pursue the goal of bringing together students of diverse backgrounds and races through other means, including strategic site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones with general recognition of the demographics of neighborhoods; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race. The district concedes it denied his request under the guidelines, which is to say, on the basis of Joshuas race. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. How do the remedial interests here differ in kind from those at issue in the voluntary desegregation efforts that Attorney General Kennedy many years ago described in his letter to the President? Cf. The Washington Supreme Court determined that the State Civil Rights Act bars only preferential treatment programs where race or gender is used by government to select a less qualified applicant over a more qualified applicant, and not [p]rograms which are racially neutral, such as the [districts] open choice plan. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist., No. Specifically, Kennedy finds that the districts could have achieved the same goal through less racially charged means. Since Grutter explicitly stated that seeking to maintain a specific percentage of minority students in the student body was patently unconstitutional, PICS contends that the Districts plan is also ipso facto unconstitutional. W. Bowen & D. Bok, The Shape of the River 118 (1998) (hereinafter Bowen & Bok). No. Id. Yet the district also maintains that the guidelines do not apply to kindergartens, Brief for Respondents in No. 05908, at 283a. 1, 458 U. S. 457, 472, n. 15 (1982). The District argues that under the Courts jurisprudence, strict scrutiny does not require sacrificing every other goal to that of avoiding the use of race, but that it requires a proper balancing of goals. See Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peńa, 515 U. S. 200, 240 (1995) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Moreover, the school districts did not consider other options that might have been more narrowly tailored. See post, at 1824. Elementary schools in central Seattle were between 60% and 80% black; Garfield, the central district high school, was more than 50% minority; schools outside the central and southeastern sections of Seattle were virtually all white. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. of Ed., 402 U. S. 1, 24 (1971) (The constitutional command to desegregate schools does not mean that every school in every community must always reflect the racial composition of the school system as a whole), and here Jefferson County has already been found to have eliminated the vestiges of its prior segregated school system. In 2001, the district adopted its plan classifying students as black or other in order to make certain elementary school assignments and to rule on transfer requests. 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. in Davis v. County School Board, O.T. 1953, No. The statement by Justice Harlan that [o]ur Constitution is color-blind was most certainly justified in the context of his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537, 559 (1896). The Court in Grutter expressly articulated key limitations on 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 uphold race-based assignments in elementary and secondary schools. We have emphasized that the harm being remedied by mandatory desegregation plans is the harm that is traceable to segregation, and that the Constitution is not violated by racial imbalance in the schools, without more. Milliken v. Bradley, 433 U. S. 267, 280, n.14 (1977). 05908, pp. At the same time it relies on inapplicable desegregation cases, misstatements of admitted dicta, and other noncontrolling pronouncements, Justice Breyers dissent candidly dismisses the significance of this Courts repeated holdings that all racial classifications must be reviewed under strict scrutiny, see post, at 3133, 3536, arguing that a different standard of review should be applied because the districts use race for beneficent rather than malicious purposes, see post, at 3136. To McDaniel? 2d 304 (brackets and internal quotation marks omitted). Compare post, at 3, 2228, with Brief for Respondents in No. On what legal ground can the majority rest its contrary view? ante, at 1517 (opinion of Thomas, J.) Furthermore, Kennedy found that race-conscious mechanisms can be used by school districts to further the goal of diversity, a position rejected by the plurality. 1, No. The cost of busing, the harm that members of all racial communities feared that the Seattle Plan caused, the desire to attract white families back to the public schools, and the interest in providing greater school choice led the board to abandon busing and to substitute a new student assignment policy that resembles the plan now before us. 1, a case decided by the United States Supreme Court in 2007, established the Seattle School District's racial tiebreaker plan as unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The discrepancy identified is not some simple and straightforward error that touches only upon the peripheries of the districts use of individual racial classifications. 841340, pp. 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. I quote the Illinois Supreme Court at length to illustrate the prevailing legal assumption at the time Swann was decided. ", 488 U.S., at 519, 109 S. Ct. 706, 102 L. Ed. See also ante, at 1517 (Thomas, J., concurring). '"[17], Part III B[14] (joined only by a plurality of the Court) rejected the notion that racial balancing could be a compelling state interest, as to do so "would justify the imposition of racial proportionality throughout American society, contrary to our repeated recognition that "[a]t the heart of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection lies the simple command that the Government must treat citizens as individuals, not as simply components of a racial, religious, sexual or national class. Id. In particular, they emphasize that the children on whose high school admissions the case was originally based have since graduated high school, while the children of the other involved parents are not yet at the high school age. It is an interest in continuing to combat the remnants of segregation caused in whole or in part by these school-related policies, which have often affected not only schools, but also housing patterns, employment practices, economic conditions, and social attitudes. SCHOOLS, PETITIONER, on writ of certiorari to the united states court of But the Court set forth in Swann a basic principle of constitutional lawa principle of law that has found wide acceptance in the legal culture. Dickerson v. United States, 530 U. S. 428, 443 (2000) (internal quotation marks omitted); Mitchell v. United States, 526 U. S. 314, 330 (1999); id., at 331, 332 (Scalia, J., dissenting) (citing wide acceptance in the legal culture as adequate reason not to overrule prior cases).