Accepting Justice Breyers approach would do no more than move us from separate but equal to unequal but benign. Metro Broadcasting, supra, at 638 (Kennedy, J., dissenting). See, e.g., S. Carter, No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools 4950, 5356, 7173, 8184, 8788 (2001); A. Thernstrom & S. Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning 4364 (2003); see also L. Izumi, They Have Overcome: High-Poverty, High-Performing Schools in California (2002) (chronicling exemplary achievement in predominantly Hispanic schools in California). See also Kennedy Report. Like the University of Michigan undergraduate plan struck down in Gratz, 539 U. S., at 275, the plans here do not provide for a meaningful individualized review of applicants but instead rely on racial classifications in a nonindividualized, mechanical way. By and large, public education in our Nation is committed to the control of state and local authorities); Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294, 299 (1955) (Brown II) (Full implementation of these constitutional principles may require solution of varied local school problems. Each of these premises is, in my respectful view, incorrect. Thus, the opinions reasoning is long. Moreover, this Court from Swann to Grutter has treated these civic effects as an important virtue of racially diverse education. When a court subjects governmental action to strict scrutiny, it cannot construe ambiguities in favor of the government. See id., at 380 (The very analysis for dissolving desegregation decrees supports continued maintenance of a desegregated system as a compelling state interest). See 539 U. S., at 320. Without the racial tiebreaker, the class would have been 39.6 percent Asian-American, 30.2 percent African-American, 8.3 percent Latino, 1.1 percent Native-American, and 20.8 percent Caucasian. Will Louisville and all similar school districts have to return to systems like Louisvilles initial 1956 plan, which did not consider race at all? More recently, the school district sent a delegation of high school students to a White Privilege Conference. See Equity and Race Relations White Privilege Conference, https://www.seattleschools. See Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U. S. 467, 494 (1992). "[27], Part III C[14] addressed the school districts' claim that "the way in which they have employed individual racial classifications is necessary to achieve their stated ends." . See, e.g., Cohens v. Virginia, 6 Wheat. of Ed., 476 U. S. 267, 274 (1986), the plurality noted: This Court never has held that societal discrimination alone is sufficient to justify a racial classification. of Boston v. Board of Education, 389 U. S. 572 (1968) (per curiam) (dismissing for want of a federal question a challenge to a voluntary statewide integration plan using express racial criteria). Even supposing it mattered to the constitutional analysis, the race-based student assignment programs before us are not as benign as the dissent believes. 05908, p.9, n. 9. If a parent identifies more than one race on the form, [t]he application will not be accepted and, if necessary, the enrollment service person taking the application will indicate one box. App. But segregation policies did not simply tell schoolchildren where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin, ante, at 40 (plurality opinion); they perpetuated a caste system rooted in the institutions of slavery and 80 years of legalized subordination. And as I explained above, the school districts have no remedial interest in pursuing these programs. Id., at 494. The Court rejected the interests asserted to justify the layoff program as insufficiently compelling. See Part IB, supra. Yet, like so many other legal categories that can overlap in some instances, the constitutional distinction between de jure and de facto segregation has been thought to be an important one. . For several decades this Court has rested its public school decisions upon Swanns basic view that the Constitution grants local school districts a significant degree of leeway where the inclusive use of race-conscious criteria is at issue. (PDF) Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District See Brief for Petitioner at 45. And what of respect for democratic local decisionmaking by States and school boards? One approach, reflected in the . Respondent school districts voluntarily adopted student assignment plans that rely on race to determine which schools certain children may attend. What about historically black colleges, which have established traditions and programs that might disproportionately appeal to one race or another? The compelling interest at issue here, then, includes an effort to eradicate the remnants, not of general societal discrimination, ante, at 23 (plurality opinion), but of primary and secondary school segregation, see supra, at 7, 14; it includes an effort to create school environments that provide better educational opportunities for all children; it includes an effort to help create citizens better prepared to know, to understand, and to work with people of all races and backgrounds, thereby furthering the kind of democratic government our Constitution foresees. No. Primary Documents: (Slip Opinion) December 4, 2006, Argued June 28, 2007, * Decided SYLLABUS: Respondent school districts voluntarily adopted student assignment plans that rely on race to determine which schools certain children may attend. The present cases, unlike Fullilove but like our decision in Wygant, 476 U. S. 267, require us to ask whether the Board[s] actions[s] advanc[e] the public interest in educating children for the future, id., at 313 (Stevens, J., dissenting) (emphasis added). v. Barksdale, 348 F.2d 261, 266 (CA1 1965). The dissent elides this distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, casually intimates that Seattles school attendance patterns reflect illegal segregation, post, at 5, 18, 23,[Footnote 15] and fails to credit the judicial determinationunder the most rigorous standardthat Jefferson County had eliminated the vestiges of prior segregation. At the same time, it is urged that these laws are valid as a matter of constitutionally permissible social experimentation by the States. As the Court explains, a school with 50 percent Asian-American students and 50 percent white students but no African-American, Native-American, or Latino students would qualify as balanced, while a school with 30 percent Asian-American, 25 percent African-American, 25 percent Latino, and 20 percent white students would not. Ante, at 1516; see also Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae in No. This comparison makes clear that the racial demographics in each districtwhatever they happen to bedrive the required diversity numbers. The schools base their numbers in demographics, therefore making this goal a means to achieve a numerical quota to achieve racial balancing. Extending Grutter to this context would require us to cut that holding loose from its theoretical moorings. I have no quarrel with the proposition that the Fourteenth Amendment sought to bring former slaves into American society as full members. The districts have also failed to show they considered methods other than explicit racial classifications to achieve their stated goals. Id., at 525528 (Thomas, J., dissenting). The wide variety of different integration plans that school districts use throughout the Nation suggests that the problem of racial segregation in schools, including de facto segregation, is difficult to solve. 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. 05915, P.12, n.13. General claims that past school segregation affected such varied societal trends are too amorphous a basis for imposing a racially classified remedy, Wygant, 476 U. S., at 276 (plurality opinion), because [i]t is sheer speculation how decades-past segregation in the school system might have affected these trends, see Croson, 488 U. S., at 499. 2d 358, 376377 (WD Ky. 2000), that decree was dissolved in 2000, id., at 360. This suggests that a decision against jurisdiction rather than on the merits would be a severe disappointment. See Education Commission of the States, Open Enrollment: 50-State Report (2007), online at http://mb2.ecs.org/reports/Report.aspx?id=268. 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. The original litigation eventually became a lawsuit against the Jefferson County School System, which in April 1975 absorbed Louisvilles schools and combined them with those of the surrounding suburbs. v. Rodriguez, 411 U. S. 1, 4950 (1973) (extolling local control for the opportunity it offers for participation in the decisionmaking process that determines how . As the district fails to account for the classification system it has chosen, despite what appears to be its ill fit, Seattle has not shown its plan to be narrowly tailored Id., at 39a. The School District relies on Grutter in describing the educational benefits of a diverse student body as (1) instilling the civic virtue of cross-racial understanding; (2) creating better-informed citizens by exposing students to a wide range of viewpoints; and (3) enabling students to achieve more success. It does have a duty to provide all children with equal opportunities. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1011. The Court quoted the articulation of diversity from Justice Powells opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U. S. 265 (1978), noting that it is not an interest in simple ethnic diversity, in which a specified percentage of the student body is in effect guaranteed to be members of selected ethnic groups, that can justify the use of race. Grutter, supra, at 324325 (citing and quoting Bakke, supra, at 314315 (opinion of Powell, J. Ibid. The Nations schools strive to teach that our strength comes from people of different races, creeds, and cultures uniting in commitment to the freedom of all. This the Constitution forbids. Ibid. At the same time, transport from house to school involved extensive busing, with about half of all students attending a school other than the one closest to their home. In the present cases, by contrast, race is not considered as part of a broader effort to achieve exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints, ibid. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007), also known as the PICS case, is a United States Supreme Court case which found it unconstitutional for a school district to use race as a factor in assigning students to schools in order to bring its racial composition in line with the composition of the district as a whole, unless it was remedying a prior history of de jure segregation. Under Supreme Court jurisprudence, to prove there was no jurisdiction under Article III 2, the School District had to prove that they would not reinstate the policy. It was a promise embodied in three Amendments designed to make citizens of slaves. 05908, p. 38a. The Court likewise paid heed to societal practices, local expectations, and practical consequences by looking to the established usages, customs and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order. Ibid. When the court made this determination in 2000, it did so in the context of the Louisville desegregation plan that the board had adopted in 1996. Ante, at 1718 (opinion of Kennedy, J.). Thus, the school districts must demonstrate that their use of such classifications is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest. Nothing in the extensive history of desegregation efforts over the past 50 years gives the districts, or this Court, any reason to believe that another method is possible to accomplish these goals. In particular, they use race-conscious criteria only to mark the outer bounds of broad population-related ranges. See Washington State Report The State must seek alternatives to the classification and differential treatment of individuals by race, at least absent some extraordinary showing not present here. No. Stevens, J., filed a dissenting opinion. http://reportcard. Although remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination is a compelling interest under the strict scrutiny test, see Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U. S. 467, 494, 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. 05908, at 7. 1" (2007) and "Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education" (2007), the high court forbade those . First, it contends that the schools were already diverse; in particular it notes that the non-white population was made up of students from varying backgrounds such as Asian, Hispanic, and African-American, making them diverse even when there was not a significant white population. Statement in School Comm. The Chief Justice delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II, IIIA, and IIIC, concluding: 1.
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