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Justice Breyers position comes down to a familiar claim: The end justifies the means. 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. And during the same time, hundreds of local school districts have adopted student assignment plans that use race-conscious criteria. Moreover, the school boards have no interest in remedying the sundry consequences of prior segregation unrelated to schooling, such as housing patterns, employment practices, economic conditions, and social attitudes. Post, at 38. [Footnote 15] Environmental reflection, though, is just another way to say racial balancing. 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. 1 et al. And when de facto discrimination is at issue our tradition has been that the remedial rules are different. Id., at 462. In support of the argument that reducing racial isolation is a compelling interest, the District points to the U.S. Department of Educations Magnet School Assistance Program (MSAP). CRYSTAL D. MEREDITH, custodial parent and next friend of JOSHUA RYAN M c DONALD, PETITIONER. Even supposing it mattered to the constitutional analysis, the race-based student assignment programs before us are not as benign as the dissent believes. 1117, 2528. One conference participant described white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious. in No. 1, supra. Louisville's population is about 58% White; 38% Black, 2% Asian, 1.3% Hispanic. 2d 834, 839840, and n. 6 (WD Ky. 2004) (McFarland I). See, e.g., Citizens for Better Ed. The board opposed dissolution, arguing that the old dual system had left a demographic imbalance that prevent[ed] dissolution. In 2000, after reviewing the present plan, the District Court dissolved the 1975 order. See also Ho v. San Francisco Unified School Dist., 147 F.3d 854, 865 (CA9 1998). See Welch 8391. Jefferson County has failed to present any evidence that it considered alternatives, even though the district already claims that its goals are achieved primarily through means other than the racial classifications. 3, p.4647 (If this case were to be decided solely on the basis of precedent, this brief could have been much more limited. About 68% received their first choice. Yet the district also maintains that the guidelines do not apply to kindergartens, Brief for Respondents in No. In Grutter, the Court gave significant deference to the University of Michigan Law Schools judgment that diversity was essential to achieving the schools educational mission. A 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District #1, limited the. Jefferson County operated under this decree until 2000, when the District Court dissolved the decree after finding that the district had achieved unitary status by eliminating [t]o the greatest extent practicable the vestiges of its prior policy of segregation. Garfield was the only oversubscribed school whose composition during the 19992000 school year was within the racial guidelines, although in previous years Garfields enrollment had been predominantly nonwhite, and the racial tiebreaker had been used to give preference to white students. The legal showdown came in a landmark decision called Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. See also ante, at 1517 (Thomas, J., concurring). Justia Annotations is a forum for attorneys to summarize, comment on, and analyze case law published on our site. The findings should define the scope of any injury [and] the necessary remedy, id., at 505, and must be more than inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs, id., at 506. See Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. (If petitioners purpose is to assure within its student body some specified percentage of a particular group merely because of its race or ethnic origin, such a preferential purpose must be rejected as facially invalid). of Ed., 402 U. S., at 16far more heavily than the school districts themselves. No. of Oral Arg. Given the conditions in which school boards work to set policy, see supra, at 2021, they may need all of the means presently at their disposal to combat those problems. The Jefferson County plan, however, is based on a goal of replicating at each school an African-American enrollment equivalent to the average district-wide African-American enrollment. Id., at 81. Compare Brief for Kansas on Reargument in Brown v. Board of Education, O.T. 1953, No. In each case, the school district relies upon an individual students race in assigning that student to a particular school, so that the racial balance at the school falls within a predetermined range based on the racial composition of the school district as a whole. In Louisville, a federal court entered a remedial decree. The districts argue that other factors, such as student preferences, affect assignment decisions under their plans, but under each plan when race comes into play, it is decisive by itself. That decision not only expressed our appraisal of the merits of the appeal, but it constitutes a precedent that the Court overrules today. Having made that determination (based on no objective measure that I can detect), a judge following the dissents approach will set the level of scrutiny to achieve the desired result. in No. 1, p.38 (Spring 2002); Mickelson, Subverting Swann: First- and Second-Generation Segregation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, 38 Am. . Third, the manner in which the school boards developed these plans itself reflects narrow tailoring. Each plan was devised to overcome a history of segregated public schools. It consequently held unconstitutional the use of race-based targets to govern admission to magnet schools. 1? The student population of the school district is approximately 40% white, 60% non-white. Hence, I conclude that the plans before us pass both parts of the strict scrutiny test. The following notice, published in a Louisville newspaper in 1976, gives a sense of how the districts race-based busing plan operated in practice: Louisville Courier Journal, June 18, 1976 (reproduced in J. Wilkinson, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration 19541978, p. 176 (1979)). 2, pp. 2d 876, 881882, 382 P.2d 878, 881882 (1963) (in bank). See, e.g., Swann, supra, at 16; Seattle School Dist. But I can find no case in which this Court has followed Justice Thomas colorblind approach. 1 ET AL. Another brief claims that school desegregation has a modest positive impact on the achievement of African-American students. App. In Seattle, then, the benefits of racial diversity require enrollment of at least 31 percent white students; in Jefferson County, at least 50 percent. It must be conceded its primary function in school cases was to delimit the powers of the Judiciary in the fashioning of remedies. 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?). These plans are more narrowly tailored than the race-conscious law school admissions criteria at issue in Grutter. See ante, at 3436. 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. Argued December 4, 2006Decided June 28, 2007* Respondent school districts voluntarily adopted student assignment plans that rely on race to determine which schools certain children Consequently, school boards seeking to remedy those societal problems with race-based measures in schools today would have no way to gauge the proper scope of the remedy. We rely, as did the lower courts, largely on data from the 20002001 school year in evaluating the plan. Part IV (again joined only by a plurality of the Court) addressed Justice Breyer's dissent. in No. Space was available at Bloom, and intercluster transfers are allowed, but Joshuas transfer was nonetheless denied because, in the words of Jefferson County, [t]he transfer would have an adverse effect on desegregation compliance of Young. After ninth grade, students can decide voluntarily to transfer to a preferred district high school (without any consideration of race-conscious criteria). Asian, Hispanic, White, etc. Under no fair reading, though, can the majority opinion in Gratz be cited as authority to sustain the racial classifications under consideration here. Independent School Dist., 719 S.W. 2d 350, 352-353 (Ct. App. 3, p. 76 (The question is a practical one for them to solve; it is not subject to solution in the theoretical realm of abstract principles); Tr. Bd. When formulating the plans under review, both districts drew upon their considerable experience with earlier plans, having revised their policies periodically in light of that experience. of Cal. Thus, the democratic interest, limitless in scope and timeless in [its] ability to affect the future, id., at 276 (plurality opinion), cannot justify government race-based decisionmaking. See id., at 519 (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). It again cites the MSAP to show that ensuring equal access is a compelling interest. 05908. Richmond v. J. Gratz involved a system where race was not the entire classification. Regardless of what Justice Breyers goals might be, this Court does not sit to create a society that includes all Americans or to solve the problems of troubled inner city schooling. Ibid. The dissent finds that the school districts have identified a compelling interest in increasing diversity, including for the purpose of avoiding racial isolation. This suggests that a decision against jurisdiction rather than on the merits would be a severe disappointment. 1" and "Meredith" v. "Jefferson County Board of Education" cases, therefore, significantly . If a school district has an interest in teaching racial understanding and cooperation, there is no logical reason why that interest should not extend to the composition of the teaching staff as well as the composition of the student body. When the government classifies an individual by race, it must first define what it means to be of a race. in No. 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. 1, a consolidated 2007 ruling that resolved both cases, the Court ultimately struck down the school plans at issue, holding that they violated the . Compton, California, on the other hand, became over 99 percent black in the 1980s, while Buffalo, New York had a virtual 5050 split between white and minority students prior to its 1977 plan. of Los Angeles, 458 U. S. 527, 535536 (1982) ([S]tate courts of California continue to have an obligation under state law to order segregated school districts to use voluntary desegregation techniques, whether or not there has been a finding of intentional segregation. 1806, 20 U. S.C. 7231 et seq. Pitts, 503 U. S. 467 , that interest is not involved here because the Seattle schools were never segregated by law nor subject to court-ordered desegregation, and the desegregation decree to which the Jefferson County schools were previously subject has been dissolved. The Seattle School District has begun providing transportation to students who live more than 2.5 miles from their assigned high school. Therefore, if governments may constitutionally use racial balancing to achieve these aspirational ends in schools, they may use racial balancing to achieve similar goals at every levelfrom state-sponsored 4H clubs, see Bazemore v. Friday, 478 U. S. 385, 388390 (1986) (Brennan, J., concurring), to the state civil service. The segregationists in Brown argued that their racial classifications were benign, not invidious. Other problems are evident in Seattles system, but there is no need to address them now. This view is informed by dissents in our previous cases and the concurrences of two Court of Appeals judges. Accord, post, at 22 ([T]he Court set forth in Swann a basic principle of constitutional lawa principle of law that has found wide acceptance in the legal culture (citations and internal quotation marks omitted)); post, at 25 (Lower state and federal courts had considered the matter settled and uncontroversial even before this Court decided Swann); post, at 26 (Numerous state and federal courts explicitly relied upon Swanns guidance for decades to follow); post, at 27 (stating how lower courts understood and followed Swanns enunciation of the relevant legal principle); post, at 30 (The constitutional principle enunciated in Swann, reiterated in subsequent cases, and relied upon over many years, provides, and has widely been thought to provide, authoritative legal guidance); post, at 61 ([T]odays opinion will require setting aside the laws of several States and many local communities); post, at 66 (And what has happened to Swann? That school was founded in 1990 as part of the school boards effort to increase academic achievement.[Footnote 12] See African American Academy History, online at http://www. Four of Seattles high schools are located in the northBallard, Nathan Hale, Ingraham, and Rooseveltand five in the southRainier Beach, Cleveland, West Seattle, Chief Sealth, and Franklin. Ohio adds that a district may object to the enrollment of a native student in an adjacent or other district in order to maintain an appropriate racial balance. 3313.98 (F)(1)(a). The Ninth Circuit affirmed. Is Seattle free on remand to say that its schools were de jure segregated, just as in 1956 a memo for the School Board admitted? In both cities, the school boards adopted plans designed to achieve integration by bringing about more racially diverse schools. Disfavoring a color-blind interpretation of the Constitution, the dissent would give school boards a free hand to make decisions on the basis of racean approach reminiscent of that advocated by the segregationists in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S.483 (1954). The dissent refers repeatedly and reverently to integration. However, outside of the context of remediation for past de jure segregation, integration is simply racial balancing. PICS argues, however, that the Seattle School District is doing just thatemploying racial balancing for the sole purpose of achieving racial diversity in its individual schools. It is an interest in maintaining hard-won gains. 05915, at 7 (quoting McFarland I, supra, at 842). Executive and legislative branches, which for generations now have considered these types of policies and procedures, should be permitted to employ them with candor and with confidence that a constitutional violation does not occur whenever a decisionmaker considers the impact a given approach might have on students of different races. of Jefferson Cty., 489 F.2d 925 (CA6 1973), vacated and remanded, 418 U. S. 918 (1974), reinstated with modifications, 510 F.2d 1358 (CA6 1974) (per curiam); Judgment and Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law in Newburg Area Council, Inc. v. Board of Ed., of Jefferson Cty., Nos. Parents of students denied assignment to particular schools under these plans solely because of their race brought suit, contending that allocating children to different public schools on the basis of race violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection. The plurality's decision should not be read so broadly that it prevents the government from engaging in any race-conscious action.