The U.S. Supreme Court rejects race as a factor in school assignments
Based in part on a Seattle Public Schools case, justices ruled 5-4 that ethnicity cannot be used to determine which school a student attends.
This is the long-anticipated decision that resulted from a lawsuit by Seattle parents and another case from Louisville, Ky. Writes The New York Times, which bannered the story on its Web site: "In a decision of sweeping importance to educators, parents and schoolchildren across the country, the Supreme Court today sharply limited the ability of school districts to manage the racial makeup of the student bodies in their schools."
Continues the Times story, which is the best in explaining the opinion itself:
The court voted, 5 to 4, to reject diversity plans from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., declaring that the districts had failed to meet "their heavy burden" of justifying "the extreme means they have chosen – discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments," as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court.
While The New York Times has the best overview, both the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Seattle Times combine Associated Press material with local context. The P-I concisely explains how this all started:
The Seattle case began when a group of parents formed Parents Involved in Community Schools and sued the district in 2000, claiming the policy of using race as a tiebreaker when determining school assignments was unfair and violated students' civil rights.
Both local papers have reaction from the plaintiffs in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, who held a news conference today. The Times quotes Kathleen Brose, president of the organization:
When the school district made this assignment they didn't look at the academic needs of these kids. They didn't look at the social needs of these kids. It's like they had no value except for their skin color. The thing that really bugs me the most about it is that they teach our kids in the schools that discrimination is wrong. You can't have it both ways. You just can't.
Here's the Supreme Court's written ruling (1.4 MB PDF) and a transcript of the oral argument (352K PDF) before the court last December.
Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
The Seattle Times has a Q&A backgrounder about the Seattle Public Schools assignment system in which, until this lawsuit, race was used as a tie-breaker to determine who gets to attend what school. And here's a timeline.
Here's a thorough backgrounder about Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District. The companion case from Louisville is Meredith v. Jefferson County Bd. of Education.
The Supreme Court's decision today reverses an earlier decision on the Seattle case by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (477K PDF), which held that the school district was justified in using race as a factor in school assignments.
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jun 28, 9:15 a.m. inappropriate
Common Sense (At Last): There is much to digest in the 185-page opinion. However (betraying my views on the matter), I will offer my two favorite passages. The first is Justice Roberts' penultimate sentence: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." The second is from Justice Thomas, in his Concurrence: "Indeed, if our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories." (By way of precedent, Justice Thomas then cites the Dred Scott decision! Wonderful stuff, eh?) By the way, the Seattle School District should be congratulated on the fine work done by its Department of Equity and Race Relations, whose pronouncements on the definition of "racism" (which generated controversy last summer) and its participation in the so-called "White Privilege Conference" (in April of this year) were cited by both Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas. (See footnote 14 of Justice Roberts' opinion, and footnote 30 of Justice Thomas' Concurrence.)
Posted Thu, Jun 28, 11:07 a.m. inappropriate
Say goodbye to ethnicity and diversity, please: Why do government school districts and their customers suffer the wrath of ethnicity and race based only diversity zealots? Time for thousands and millions more to join the private school paths to excellent education.
Posted Fri, Jun 29, 3:48 p.m. inappropriate
Creating Equal Schools: Now that race-based racism is out, the right way to ensure equal educational opportunities is to attack the problem of unequal schools by creating, you guessed it, equal schools! How do you do that? The main emphasis must be on making the weaker schools better. How are weaker schools weaker? They have more poor students than the better schools. (Race, unfortunately, was used as a proxy for socio-economic status. A better and more reliable and predictable proxy is zip code.) How do poor students manifest themselve? In several ways:
1. More crime and drug use
2. More babysitting
3. More drop-outs
4. Less educated parents, less involved parents, more single-family parents
5. More English as a second-language kids
6. Lower property tax funding of schools
7. Less expectation of achievement
If these negative drivers can be factored out of the equation, then the actual teaching done by teachers should be roughly equivalent given the socialized nature of teacher salaries. (I won't go into the mess of under-motivated teachers here.) Thus LOTS more resources need to be applied to these problems.
The first two problems should be addressed in concert with the Seattle Police Department. Teachers cannot teach if their first priority is dealing with a criminal element within their class rooms, or drug using and selling students. Crime fighting is the job of the SPD. Get them in the schools fighting crime: drug selling, bullying, assault, intimidation, gangs, etc. This needs to be done with a light hand, but it's a must. Kids can learn if they're scared to go to school.
The problem of dropouts is related to a culture which encourages dropping out because students who aren't trying or don't show up weight down overall test scores. Dropouts are also the cumulative result of poor educational practices in earlier years. If students are allowed to progress with little or no real educational achievement, then that is more the fault of the school system than the student. Hopefully, WASL testing will start to identify the cadre of uneducated students who are largely cast adrift. The school district MUST create programs to really educate them. In any event, a school system that FAILS to educate these students is a colossal FAILURE.
The relative lack of parental support from poorer families needs to be addressed by outreach programs to parents to enable them to support their children in school. Programs similar to what Bloomberg is doing in NYC where parents are provided monetary rewards for parent conference attendance and the like would seem to make sense. These rewards could be provided to all parents, but the motivation would be greater to poorer families because of their relative poverty. Note that involving parents is a highly leveraged activity for parents who can really help out. And for families who may be in dissarray for a variety of problems, the School District needs to work hand-in-hand with various social agencies in assuring that students don't come home to dysfuncitional home situations where parents are absent or alcoholic or using drugs or mentally ill. Note that partnerships are key here. The schools shouldn't bear the burden of these social problems, and should focus as much as possible on real educational achievement within each school.
Hard-core immersive teaching of English needs to take place for new students who come from Hispanic or other non-English speaking cultures. This is a prerequisite for all subsequent learning. Students should not be thrown into classes without this basic, tested ability. (Alternatively, a premium should be placed on bi-lingual teachers who can help students transition to an English-oriented curriculum.)
(continued in next post...)
Posted Fri, Jun 29, 4:04 p.m. inappropriate
Creating Equal Schools - continued: (continued)
Rich school districts will always tax themselves to build better physical infrastructure than poorer school districts. Insofar as education is dependent on high-quality infrastructure, then these districts will always be better. So, to compete with private schools and richer school districts on the Eastside, infrastructures need to be compared and rationalized. In this respect, schools can become higher functioning if they improve the use of the schools during non-school hours (and increase the revenue from such use), and also if they segregate athletic field infrastructure and offload it to the Parks department or some other provider. Millions are spent on fields while children go uneducated. This is an area where the City of Seattle could help schools indirectly through assuming the infrastructure burden that the district currently assumes, similar to what is happening with school buses and Metro.
Finally, expectations need to be raised dramatically. Funding and focus needs to be made on the weaker schools so that they are competing, and sometimes winning, with the so-called "better schools" in terms of WASL scores, AP students, and college entry. Every student needs to expect excellence, and each school needs to expect a preponderance of excelling students. Nothing short will do.
FINALLY, the emphasis on EQUAL EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY is the real role of the school district. Diversity is a value that will arise naturally out of creating equal schools, not the other way around. The "racial discrimination is racial discrimination" argument is a valid one, but can become simply the justification for perpetuating unequal schools and unequal opportunities. The Seattle School District has the opportunity to use the Supreme Court ruling to initiate a program that will truly create equal educational opportunity for students of all races and all socio-economic classes. The solution, in my thinking, is simple rational assignment of kids to schools based on neighborhood. The poorer neighborhoods would get the bulk of resources to raise them up to the level of the better schools as outlined above. A five-year transition plan would have to exist to allow students to stick with their current schools and assignments. In the mean-time the school district would work like hell to keep its great schools and to make it's weaker schools great as well. That's the school district, school system, and the population of students I will be proud of. Students from private schools will want to consider transferring into this system. Their parents would save a lot of money and their children will benefit from a great education at a nearby school. Poorer students and their parents will not need to consider transferring to "rich" schools because they will have educational jewels smack-dab in the middle of their own neighborhoods. These schools will help to transform neighborhoods in ways that go way beyond education. That's my dream. Pass it on.