Supreme Court Ruling on Parents Involved in Community Schools vrs. Seattle School District

On June 28^th, 2007 the Supreme Court of the

United States

voted to severely restrict the application of the landmark Brown versus Board of Education decision, which determined that maintaining segregated facilities based on race was unconstitutional.

Two cases, one in the 9^th District Court brought by Parent’s Involved in Community Schools against the School District of Seattle and the second case in the 6^th District Court  of parents versus the Jefferson County School District in Kentucky, that challenged the Brown versus Board of Education decision as a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment were denied by the 9^th and 6^th district courts respectively. The impetus for the cases, in both instances, were that both the Seattle School District, which had never maintained legally segregated school facilities, and the Jefferson County Schools which had been under a court order to desegregate but had been found to have fulfilled that order, maintained district wide policies aimed at creating and keeping racial diversity in its public school system.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted review to the cases, found that they had jurisdiction over the constitutional questions involved and reversed finding that in both circumstances Brown versus Board of Education did not apply and that the 14^th amendment had been violated.

The reasoning presented by Chief Justice Roberts, in a nutshell, was that Brown Versus Board of Education only applied to those school districts that had at some historical point implemented official desegregation policies and as a result found themselves under court order to desegregate after the Brown versus Board of Education decision. Since the Seattle Public Schools had never maintained policy driven segregated public schools and since the

Jefferson

County

school district had its court order rescinded the school districts could not then have policies that ensured racial diversity in their schools. The heavy burden of a compelling government interest was no longer met (and indeed could not be met), and thus any race based division of school choice was a violation of the 14^th Amendment.

My personal opinion is that this line of reasoning is politically motivated bull.

The ruling by the majority, in essence, says that the government can not justify creating systems to ensure racial diversity and equal access to quality education by underserved communities unless those communities have been officially discriminated against by the state at a particular historical moment. Any future districts found to be segregated or attempting to stave off segregation by recognizing racial distinctions will find themselves in contempt of this ruling. School districts, except those very few still under court orders to desegregate, will find themselves continuing a national trend of de facto school segregation.

As race and class are intimately connected, those schools that find themselves with large people of color populations will also find themselves in schools where poverty is concentrated and the social ills that come with extreme concentrated poverty. This ruling is a recipe for the isolation and failure of the education system for communities of color. Segregated schools create separate and unequal education opportunities. History has demonstrated this unequivocally. This new resegregation inevitability is not a doomsday scenario but the current reality many communities of color are already facing.

Justice Breyer, in a brilliant dissenting opinion, states:

As a result, different districts—some acting under court decree, some acting in order to avoid threatened lawsuits, some seeking to comply with federal administrative orders, some acting purely voluntarily, some acting after federal courts had dissolved earlier orders—adopted, modified, and experimented with hosts of different kinds of plans, including race-conscious plans, all with a similar objective: greater racial integration of public schools.

Overall these efforts brought about considerable racial integration. More recently, however, progress has stalled. Between 1968 and 1980, the number of black children attending a school where minority children constituted more than half of the school fell from 77% to 63% in the Nation (from 81% to 57% in the South) but then reversed direction by the year 2000, rising from 63% to 72% in the Nation (from 57% to 69% in the South). Similarly, between 1968 and 1980, the number of black children attending schools that were more than 90% minority fell from 64% to 33% in the Nation (from 78% to 23% in the South), but that too reversed direction, rising by the year 2000 from 33% to 37% in the Nation (from 23% to 31% in the South). As of 2002, almost 2.4 million students, or over 5% of all public school enrollment, attended schools with a white population of less than 1%. Of these, 2.3 million were black and Latino students, and only 72,000 were white. Today, more than one in six black children attend a school that is 99–100% minority. See Appendix A, infra. In light of the evident risk of a return to school systems that are in fact (though not in law) resegregated, many school districts have felt a need to maintain or to extend their integration efforts ( Justice Breyer, Dissenting Opinion,  Parents Involved in Community Schools vrs.

School District

of 

Seattle

No. 1).

This ruling is simply another example of Republican judicial activism geared at dismantling the Civil Rights Movement era achievements and the systemic revocation of racial justice gains of the last 75 years.

-

Brandon

Lacy

Campos

-Fellow, Democratizing Elections