Supreme Court Rules in School Diversity Cases
Feature Story by Tyler Lewis - 6/28/2007
The Supreme Court handed down the long-awaited decisions in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education on June 28.
In a split decision, five justices voted to reaffirm that educational diversity remains a compelling governmental interest. At the same time, a majority of the court found that the plans in Louisville and Seattle were not narrowly tailored to meet the constitutional standard.
"Although striking down specific programs in Seattle and Louisville, the majority upheld important precedents which advance the national ideal of equality." said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR).
According to Henderson, the "good news" of the decision is that "a majority of the court recognized that educational diversity and overcoming our history of segregation are compelling interest that communities and governments can pursue through careful race-conscious effort."
Chief Justice John Roberts authored the plurality opinion, which was joined, in part, by Justice Anthony Kennedy, to find the programs in Seattle and Louisville unconstitutional. Justice Kennedy and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separate concurrences. Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens each authored dissents.
The cases involved constitutional challenges to local school authorities' use of voluntary, race-conscious student assignment plans in their K-12 systems. Two federal courts of appeal upheld the plans.
The voluntary integration programs in Seattle, Washington and Jefferson County, Kentucky, which includes the Louisville metropolitan area, were adopted by the districts to prevent individual schools from becoming segregated.
In Seattle, the program allowed all students to rank their choices among the city's 10 high schools; race was used as one of several factors in assignment if a high school was both overcrowded and becoming segregated. Even in those cases, proximity to the school was usually the determining factor and among the 10 percent of students who didn't get their first choice all got their second choice.
In Louisville, which also uses a voluntary choice-based plan, all students have the option of transferring to any school in the district. Race is only used as a factor in transfer decisions if the transfer would push the receiving school out of its broadly defined diversity goal.
Several amicus, or friend-of-the-court, briefs were filed in support of the school districts, which argued that the programs were constitutional.
A brief filed by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund (LCCREF) in October 2006 argued that school integration has been a central and essential part of national policy since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a policy reinforced by the declarations of presidents of both parties, acts of Congress, and decisions of the federal courts.
