Invoking our mandatory appellate jurisdiction,[Footnote 7] the Boston plaintiffs prosecuted an appeal in this Court. See Board of Ed. 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. 32 (2004); A Great Decision, Hindustan Times (New Dehli, May 20, 1954), p.5; USA Takes Positive Step, West African Pilot (Lagos, May 22, 1954), p. 2 (stating that Brown is an acknowledgment that the United States should set an example for all other nations by taking the lead in removing from its national life all signs and traces of racial intolerance, arrogance or discrimination). 05908, at 103a (describing application of racial tiebreaker based on current white percentage of 41 percent and current minority percentage of 59 percent (emphasis added)). Simply because the school districts may seek a worthy goal does not mean they are free to discriminate on the basis of race to achieve it, or that their racial classifications should be subject to less exacting scrutiny. The District contends that the first two benefits are important because public schools are responsible for developing good citizens. First, the race-conscious criteria at issue only help set the outer bounds of broad ranges. 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. Hundreds of state and federal statutes and regulations use racial classifications for educational or other purposes. Section 1. It wrote that there was overwhelming evidence of the Boards good faith compliance with the desegregation Decree and its underlying purposes. It added that the Louisville School Board had treated the ideal of an integrated system as much more than a legal obligationthey consider it a positive, desirable policy and an essential element of any well-rounded public school education.. A victory for PICS, on the other hand, will indicate that equal protection rights are applicable to citizens of all ages and affirm the notion that race can not be an exclusive criterion of classification. in McFarland I, at 190 (Dec. 8, 2003) (Q. These include the types of activities or programs offered, the teachers, and the schools location. And it is a context in which the school boards plans simply set race-conscious limits at the outer boundaries of a broad range. Nor does any precedent indicate, as the plurality suggests with respect to Louisville, ante, at 29, that remedial interests vanish the day after a federal court declares that a district is unitary. Of course, Louisville adopted those portions of the plan at issue here before a court declared Louisville unitary. Moreover, in Freeman, this Court pointed out that in one sense of the term, vestiges of past segregation by state decree do remain in our society and in our schools. At issue were efforts for voluntary school desegregation and integration in Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky. we mean the freedom of the slave race); Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303, 306 (1879) ([The Fourteenth Amendment] is one of a series of constitutional provisions having a common purpose; namely, securing to a race recently emancipated . Contrary to what the dissent would have predicted, see post, at 3839, the children in Seattles African American Academy have shown gains when placed in a highly segregated environment. It again redrew school assignment boundaries. Protection jurisprudence of this Court and the notion of a color-blind Constitution that this country has aspired for. To this day, misconceptions abound about whether voluntary school desegregation is constitutionally permitted in the United States. Seattle Public Schools Transportation Service Standards. Educational Research 531, 550 (1994) (hereinafter Wells & Crain). 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 district has identified its purposes as follows: (1) to promote the educational benefits of diverse school enrollments; (2) to reduce the potentially harmful effects of racial isolation by allowing students the opportunity to opt out of racially isolated schools; and (3) to make sure that racially segregated housing patterns did not prevent non-white students from having equitable access to the most popular over-subscribed schools. Id., at 19. The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. Ante, at 40. in Davis v. County School Board, O.T. 1953, No. Yesterday, the plans under review were lawful. 2 1996 Memorandum 47, and Attachment 2; Hampton I, supra, at 768. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a sharply worded short dissent in which he accused the plurality of misusing and misapplying previous Supreme Court precedents including Brown v. Board of Education. Ante, at 1718 (opinion of Kennedy, J.). Race may be one component of that diversity, but other demographic factors, plus special talents and needs, should also be considered. In answering this question, the court must first consider a jurisdictional challenge raised by the District and then, if it finds jurisdiction, consider the merits of this question. It provided that each elementary school would have a black student population of between 15% and 50%; each middle and high school would have a black population and a white population that fell within a range, the boundaries of which were set at 15% above and 15% below the general student population percentages in the county at that grade level. After Grutter, however, the two Courts of Appeals in these cases, and one other, found that race-based assignments were permissible at the elementary and secondary level, largely in reliance on that case. Indeed, in the context of school desegregation, this Court has repeatedly stressed the importance of acknowledging that local school boards better understand their own communities and have a better knowledge of what in practice will best meet the educational needs of their pupils. What does the plurality say in response?
'Parents Involved,' A Decade Later - The American Prospect One of those plans, which involved using race as a factor in assigning students to high schools, is the subject of this litigation. Swann did not hide its understanding of the law in a corner of an obscure opinion or in a footnote, unread but by experts. This Court then held that the initiativewhich would have prevented the Seattle Plan from taking effectviolated the Fourteenth Amendment. There seems to be no principled rule, moreover, to limit the dissents rationale to the context of public schools. wa. 733, 741742 (1998) (hereinafter Hallinan). The government bears the burden of justifying its use of individual racial classifications. Nevertheless, Justice Kennedy suggests that 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. Ante, at 8. ); internal quotation marks omitted). The NAACPs First Legal Challenge and Seattles Response, 1969 to 1977. 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. First, there is a historical and remedial element: an interest in setting right the consequences of prior conditions of segregation. Part IV (again joined only by a plurality of the Court) addressed Justice Breyer's dissent. As well, there is precedent for finding jurisdiction in situations where the passage of time has prevented a direct remedy. See Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peńa, 515 U. S. 200, 240 (1995) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). See post, at 79, 23. Segregation at the time of Brown gave way to expansive remedies that included busing, which in turn gave rise to fears of white flight and resegregation. It contains 34 countywide districts with central cities (the 11 Florida districts fit this description, plus Clark County, Nevada and others) and a small number of consolidated districts (New Castle County, Delaware and Jefferson County, Kentucky). The dissents characterization of Swann as recognizing that the Equal Protection Clause permits local school boards to use race-conscious criteria to achieve positive race-related goals isat besta dubious inference. 05915, at 31. Purportedly benign race-based decisionmaking suffers the same constitutional infirmity as invidious race-based decisionmaking. 05915, pp. 1, 2, and 4 and for Respondents in No. That, though, is not the case. 1 uses an open choice plan in which students rank their preferred schools. 67759, p.11 (It is implicit in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U. S. 483, that color or race is a constitutionally impermissible standard for the assignment of school children to public schools. Attorney General, to John F. Kennedy, President (Jan. 24, 1963) (hereinafter Kennedy Report), available at http://www.gilderlehrman.org/search/collection_pdfs/05/63/0/05630.pdf (all Internet materials as visited June 26, 2007, and available in Clerk of Courts case file) (reporting successful efforts by the Government to induce voluntary desegregation). Yet our tradition is to go beyond present achievements, however significant, and to recognize and confront the flaws and injustices that remain. It pledged the use of other resources in order to encourage all schools to achieve an African-American enrollment equivalent to the average district-wide African-American enrollment at the schools respective elementary, middle or high school level. And the plan continued use of magnet schools. in No. The broad interest in racial diversity in education generally could potentially filter through all facets of the school, and even into elementary education. The issue in Gratz arose, moreover, in the context of college admissions where students had other choices and precedent supported the proposition that First Amendment interests give universities particular latitude in defining diversity. . School authorities concerned that their student bodies racial compositions interfere with offering an equal educational opportunity to all are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a general way and without treating each student in different fashion based solely on a systematic, individual typing by race. Brief for Petitioner at 38. [Footnote 26], What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today. Before the Lawsuit, 1954 to 1972. See ibid. We described the various types of diversity that the law school sought: [The law schools] policy makes clear there are many possible bases for diversity admissions, and provides examples of admittees who have lived or traveled widely abroad, are fluent in several languages, have overcome personal adversity and family hardship, have exceptional records of extensive community service, and have had successful careers in other fields. Id., at 338 (brackets and internal quotation marks omitted). See Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294, 300 (1955) (Brown II) (At stake is the personal interest of the plaintiffs in admission to public schools on a nondiscriminatory basis (emphasis added)). In administering public schools, it is permissible to consider the schools racial makeup and adopt general policies to encourage a diverse student body, one aspect of which is its racial composition. Indeed, the race-conscious ranges at issue in these cases often have no effect, either because the particular school is not oversubscribed in the year in question, or because the racial makeup of the school falls within the broad range, or because the student is a transfer applicant or has a sibling at the school. For the 20002001 school year, five of these schools were oversubscribedBallard, Nathan Hale, Roosevelt, Garfield, and Franklinso much so that 82 percent of incoming ninth graders ranked one of these schools as their first choice. The transfer might have had an adverse effect on the effort to approach district-wide racial proportionality at Young, but it had nothing to do with preventing either the black or other group from becoming small or isolated at Young. Though Brown decisively rejected those arguments, todays dissent replicates them to a distressing extent. 2d 304 (brackets and internal quotation marks omitted). The present cases are before us, however, because the Seattle school district was never segregated by law, and the Jefferson County district has been found to be unitary, having eliminated the vestiges of its prior dual status. 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. 1, pp. Here the racial balance the districts seek is a defined range set solely by reference to the demographics of the respective school districts. The District Court found that Jefferson County had asserted a compelling interest in maintaining racially diverse schools, and that the assignment plan was (in all relevant respects) narrowly tailored to serve that compelling interest. 2. See id., at 494 (The impact [of segregation] is greater when it has the sanction of the law). This discrepancy is not some simple and straightforward error that touches only upon the peripheries of the districts use of individual racial classifications. Not every decision influenced by race is equally objectionable, and strict scrutiny is designed to provide a framework for carefully examining the importance and the sincerity of the reasons advanced by the governmental decisionmaker for the use of race in that particular context. 539 U. S., at 326327. Ibid. These decisions illustrate well how lower courts understood and followed Swanns enunciation of the relevant legal principle. Narrow tailoring requires serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives, Grutter, supra, at 339, and yet in Seattle several alternative assignment plansmany of which would not have used express racial classificationswere rejected with little or no consideration. PARENTS INVOLVED IN COMMUNITY SCHOOLS, PETITIONER. 1, 458 U. S. 457); see generally Siqueland 2324. . 1, 458 U. S. 457, 461466 (1982). The new plan permitted each student to choose the school he or she wished to attend, subject to race-based constraints. Federal law also assumes that a similar target percentage will help avoid detrimental minority group isolation. See No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Title V, Part C, 115 Stat. The School District, however, argues that the plan was narrowly tailored to achieve the compelling interests of promoting diversity, eliminating harms of racial isolation, and providing equal access to popular schools. No. See ante, at 4041 (plurality opinion); see also ante, at 26 (Thomas, J., concurring). 2d 304 (quoting Bakke, supra, at 315, 98 S. Ct. 2733, 57 L. Ed. Consequently, regardless of the perceived negative effects of racial imbalance, I will not defer to legislative majorities where the Constitution forbids it. The districts past and current plans are not unique.
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 at 116970. 72); Brief for Respondents in No. Adarand, 515 U. S., at 227; Grutter, 539 U. S., at 326; Johnson v. California, 543 U. S. 499, 505 (2005) (We have insisted on strict scrutiny in every context, even for so-called benign racial classifications). And each plans use of race-conscious elements is diminished compared to the use of race in preceding integration plans. Perhaps recognizing that reliance on Grutter cannot sustain their plans, both school districts assert additional interests, distinct from the interest upheld in Grutter, to justify their race-based assignments. 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? MacFarland v. Jefferson County Public Schoolsand Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 05908, at 103a. 458 U. S., at 472, n. 15. Given this tenuous relationship between forced racial mixing and improved educational results for black children, the dissent cannot plausibly maintain that an educational element supports the integration interest, let alone makes it compelling. in Davis v. County School Board, O.T. 1952, No. It was about the nature of a democracy that must work for all Americans. in No. If todays dissent said it was adhering to the views expressed in the separate opinions in Gratz and Grutter, see Gratz, 539 U. S., at 281 (Breyer, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 282 (Stevens, J., dissenting); id., at 291 (Souter, J., dissenting); id., at 298 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); Grutter, supra, at 344 (Ginsburg, J., concurring), that would be understandable, and likely within the traditionto be invoked, in my view, in rare instancesthat permits us to maintain our own positions in the face of stare decisis when fundamental points of doctrine are at stake. Both school districts voluntarily used individualized racial classifications to achieve diversity and/or to avoid racial isolation through student assignment. of Ed., 402 U. S. 1, 6 (1971); see also Monroe v. Board of Commrs of Jackson, 391 U. S. 450, 452 (1968). 1, this Court struck down a state referendum that effectively barred implementation of Seattles desegregation plan and burden[ed] all future attempts to integrate Washington schools in districts throughout the State. Id., at 462463, 483. "[11] To McDaniel? If we look at cases decided during the interim between Brown and Adarand, we can see how a rigid adherence to tiers of scrutiny obscures Browns clear message. And the combination of the three unsubstantiated elements does not produce an interest any more compelling than that represented by each element independently. Many parents, white and black alike, want their children to attend schools with children of different races. And the inquiry into less restrictive alternatives demanded by the narrow tailoring analysis requires in many cases a thorough understanding of how a plan works. See also Brief for Appellees in Davis v. County School Board, O.T. 1952, No.
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