A step backward for school diversity

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published June 29, 2007

A closely divided U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday sharply limited the ability of public schools to use race to achieve diversity in the classroom. The disappointing ruling leaves school districts with only broad concepts for managing racial diversity and, we fear, will accelerate the trend toward school resegregation in many parts of the country. As far as the high court is concerned, school boards are required to do little or nothing to promote racially integrated schools.

It could have been worse had it not been for Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose concurring opinion limited the reach of the majority ruling.

Both the liberals and conservatives on the court invoked the landmark ruling of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, striking down a legal regime of racial segregation in our schools on equal protection grounds. Chief Justice John Roberts, the author of Thursday's opinion, wrote: "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again - even for very different reasons."

In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens spoke for many when he said "there is a cruel injustice in the chief justice's reliance on" the Brown decision to turn back the clock on school integration. And Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the minority opinion, accused the majority of abandoning "the promise" of Brown.

Justice Kennedy, who now sits at the court's fulcrum between its liberal and conservative wings, joined the court's four conservative justices in determining that two student assignment systems that classify students by race and allocate school slots on that basis, one in Louisville, Ky., and one in Seattle, Wash., were constitutionally defective. However, Kennedy wrote a decisive concurring opinion that would still allow school districts to consider the racial makeup of schools.

The ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No. 1, demonstrated the stark balkanization of the high court. Unlike the unanimity with which the court handed down the Brown decision, the court here offered a muddy brew, with no clear majority for any one ruling.

Chief Justice Roberts' plurality opinion goes too far in essentially barring school districts from seeking to achieve racial balance, as a violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. We are more comfortable with the views of the four dissenting justices, who would leave broad discretion in the hands of school officials to "achieve positive race-related goals."

Because Kennedy's concurring opinion makes up the fifth vote, his views are controlling. Kennedy declared that racial diversity in schools is a compelling educational goal, meaning that the Constitution doesn't entirely preclude the use of race in school assignment. But he said government may not reach the goal of diversity by seeking to "classify every student on the basis of race."

"Crude measures of this sort threaten to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school's supply and another's demand, " Kennedy wrote.

He called for an indirect route to diversity, such as the use of "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."

Those are not easy concepts to transform into practical reality, and there are no guarantees they will be successful in fostering integration or withstanding future legal challenges. But they are now the tools the court has left the nation's school districts to use to enhance student diversity. Good faith will be required more than ever on the part of communities and school districts committed to integrated schools.

On this worthy goal, the court has taken the nation backward.

[Last modified June 28, 2007, 22:41:17]