Both parents appealed the Districts placement but were unable to have their children reassigned. [Footnote 3] The only justification for refusing to acknowledge the obvious importance of that difference is the citation of a few recent opinionsnone of which even approached unanimitygrandly proclaiming that all racial classifications must be analyzed under strict scrutiny. See, e.g., Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peńa, 515 U. S. 200, 227 (1995). 05908, at 1920; Brief for Respondents in No. 733 (1998). See, e.g., Springfield School Comm. These changes conformed with the concurring opinion of Justice Kennedy. of Average Black Student. of Ed., 402 U. S. 1, 16 (1971), by then-Justice Rehnquist in chambers in Bustop, Inc. v. Los Angeles Bd. The concerns of Parents Involved are illustrated by Jill Kurfirst, who sought to enroll her ninth-grade son, Andy Meeks, in Ballard High Schools special Biotechnology Career Academy. At the time, the districts public school population was approximately 30% black. Parents Involved, the Court noted that: Seattle and Louisville had not demonstrated that they seriously considered race-neutral alternatives; the individual racial classifications used had a minimal impact that cast doubt on their necessity; the districts defined The only counter argument in the record is the Ninth Circuits resolution of the question. 1 is an important case to educators, parents and students. This leads it to advance propositions that, in my view, are both erroneous and in fundamental conflict with basic equal protection principles. 22, 1977) (OCR Complaint) (filed with Court as Exhibit in Seattle School Dist. That necessary implication of the pluralitys position strikes the 13th chime of the clock. Many school districts in the South adopted segregation remedies (to which Swann clearly applies) without any such federal order, see supra, at 1920. If the need for the racial classifications embraced by the school districts is unclear, even on the districts own terms, the costs are undeniable. App. See also Statement of Appellees Opposing Jurisdiction and Motion to Dismiss or Affirm in Davis v. County School Board, O.T. 1952, No. Most white families live north of the downtown area where four high schoolsBallard, Ingraham, Nathan Hale, and Rooseveltare located. This will surely, however, restrict school districts efforts to achieve diversity and the benefits that arguably come with it. Moreover, giving some degree of weight to a local school boards knowledge, expertise, and concerns in these particular matters is not inconsistent with rigorous judicial scrutiny. An adoption by the court of a rule that has such connotations as authorizing discrimination of young people will surely question prior decisions holding the opposite and spur related litigation in years to come. As the Court recently reaffirmed, racial classifications are simply too pernicious to permit any but the most exact connection between justification and classification. Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 244, 270 (2003) (quoting Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U. S. 448, 537 (1980) (Stevens, J., dissenting); brackets omitted). First, in schools that were formerly segregated by law, race-based measures are sometimes constitutionally compelled to remedy prior school segregation. 233234 (Summer 2001) (describing this effect in schools in Charlotte, North Carolina). Consequently, the Courts decision today slows down and sets back the work of local school boards to bring about racially diverse schools. This racially imbalanced environment has reportedly produced test scores higher across all grade levels in reading, writing and math. Ibid. Accord, post, at 68 (Today, almost 50 years later, attitudes toward race in this Nation have changed dramatically. How could such a plan be lawful the day before dissolution but then become unlawful the very next day? Because Louisville could use race-based measures only as a remedy for past de jure segregation, it is not incoherent, post, at 56, to say that race-based decisionmaking was allowed to Louisville one daywhile it was still remedyingand forbidden to it the nextwhen remediation was finished. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. schoolId=1043&reportLevel=School&orgLinkId=1043& 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. To the contrary, there is every reason to believe that it represented part of an effort to implement the 1978 desegregation order. Brief for Respondent at 3342. Assigning to each student a personal designation according to a crude system of individual racial classifications is quite a different matter; and the legal analysis changes accordingly. These districts have followed this Courts holdings and advice in tailoring their plans. This assertion is inexplicable. To McDaniel? Accordingly, the school boards cannot satisfy strict scrutiny. He admits that there is a cost in applying a state-mandated racial label, post, at 67, but he is confident that the cost is worth paying. Indeed, the very school districts that once spurned integration now strive for it. (For ease of exposition, I shall still use Louisville to refer to what is now the combined districts.) This conclusion is divorced from any evaluation of the actual impact of the plans at issue in these casesother than to note that the plans often have no effect. Post, at 46. Second, broad-range limits on voluntary school choice plans are less burdensome, and hence more narrowly tailored, see Grutter, supra, at 341, than other race-conscious restrictions this Court has previously approved. 3:02CV00620JGH; Doc. Moreover, these cases are not governed by Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 328, in which the Court held that, for strict scrutiny purposes, a government interest in student body diversity in the context of higher education is compelling. When the government classifies an individual by race, it must first define what it means to be of a race. (Fourteenth Amendment creates rights guaranteed to the individual. 1, supra, at 461; Complaint and Motion to Dismiss or Affirm in Seattle School Dist. . The dissent half-heartedly attacks the historical underpinnings of the color-blind Constitution. What has happened to stare decisis? Mr. Korrell. 7231. As for the Seattle case, the school district has gone further in describing the methods and criteria used to determine assignment decisions on the basis of individual racial classifications. There, a Georgia school board voluntarily adopted a desegregation plan. [D]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. Adarand, 515 U. S., at 214 (internal quotation marks omitted). Gratz involved a system where race was not the entire classification. In that case, I stressed the importance of confining a remedy for past wrongdoing to the members of the injured class. J.) Parents Involved . Some districts, such as Richmond, California, and Buffalo, New York, permitted only one-way transfers, in which only black students attending predominantly black schools were permitted to transfer to designated receiver schools. 05908, pp. The decision was a 5-4 split on the Court, with both sides claiming that their position was truest to the precedent set in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). And it is a context in which the school boards plans simply set race-conscious limits at the outer boundaries of a broad range. These plans are unconstitutional. The Court was not persuaded that these plans were acceptable because race was integrated with other criteria or because ratios based on race gave children the benefit of a more diverse environment. A compelling interest exists in avoiding racial isolation, an interest that a school district, in its discretion and expertise, may choose to pursue. 1 McFarland v. Jefferson Cty. 3, p. 71 ([T]o make such a transition, would undo what we have been doing, and which we propose to continue to do for the uplift and advancement of the education of both races. See also ante, at 17 (opinion of Kennedy, J.) Moreover, there is research-based evidence supporting, for example, that a ratio no greater than 50% minoritywhich is Louisvilles starting point, and as close as feasible to Seattles starting pointis helpful in limiting the risk of white flight. See Orfield, Metropolitan School Desegregation: Impacts on Metropolitan Society, in Pursuit of a Dream Deferred: Linking Housing and Education Policy 121, 125. 1, 458 U. S. 457, 472, n.15 (1982), post, at 5657, but there this Court expressly noted that it was not passing on the propriety of race-conscious student assignments in the absence of a finding of de jure segregation. 1, 2, and 4 p.65 (That the Constitution is color blind is our dedicated belief); Brief for Appellants in Brown v. Board of Education, O.T. 1952, No. Part II dismissed the respondent's attempts to argue that Parents Involved lacks standing. The districts argue that other factors, such as student preferences, affect assignment decisions under their plans, but under each plan when race comes into play, it is decisive by itself. In 1972, civil rights groups and parents, claiming unconstitutional segregation, sued the Louisville Board of Education in federal court. Any other approach would freeze the status quo that is the very target of all desegregation processes.). That seemingly odd turnaround is merely a result of the fact that the remediation of de jure segregation is a jealously guarded exception to the Equal Protection Clauses general rule against government race-based decisionmaking. We have emphasized that the harm being remedied by mandatory desegregation plans is the harm that is traceable to segregation, and that the Constitution is not violated by racial imbalance in the schools, without more. Milliken v. Bradley, 433 U. S. 267, 280, n.14 (1977). The groups members have children in the districts elementary, middle, and high schools, App. 5 Memorandum Opinion and Order, Haycraft v. Board of Ed. How could the plurality adopt a constitutional standard that would hold unconstitutional large numbers of race-conscious integration plans adopted by numerous school boards over the past 50 years while remaining true to this Courts desegregation precedent? The dissent refers repeatedly and reverently to integration. However, outside of the context of remediation for past de jure segregation, integration is simply racial balancing. To use race in this way is not to set a forbidden quota. See id., at 335 (Properly understood, a quota is a program in which a certain fixed number or proportion of opportunities are reserved exclusively for certain minority groups (quoting Croson, 488 U. S., at 496)). in No. From almost the beginning, the Supreme Court contended that under this article it was unconstitutional for federal courts to issue mere advisory opinions; rather, the federal courts jurisdiction is restricted to deciding actual cases and controversies. Lower state and federal courts had considered the matter settled and uncontroversial even before this Court decided Swann. Even if this purported distinction, which Justice Stevens would adopt, post, at 2, n.3 (dissenting opinion), had not been already rejected by this Court, the distinction has no relevance to these cases, in which students of all races are excluded from the schools they wish to attend based solely on the racial classifications. When a court subjects governmental action to strict scrutiny, it cannot construe ambiguities in favor of the State. Fifty years of experience since Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), should teach us that the problem before us defies so easy a solution. See Appendix A, infra. In part for those reasons, the Court has never permitted outright racial balancing solely for the purpose of achieving a particular racial balance. 1 (2007) Term 1 / 8 What are the core facts of the case? in No. The District argues that under the Courts jurisprudence, strict scrutiny does not require sacrificing every other goal to that of avoiding the use of race, but that it requires a proper balancing of goals. Other amici dispute these findings. In Johnson v. California, 543 U. S. 499 (2005), this Court considered a California prison policy that separated inmates racially. No. Bd. Today we enjoy a society that is remarkable in its openness and opportunity. When litigation, as here, involves a complex, comprehensive plan that contains multiple strategies for achieving racially integrated schools, Brief for Respondents in No. This refers back to a time when public schools were highly segregated, often as a result of legal or administrative policies that facilitated racial segregation in public schools. There is every reason to think that, if the dissents rationale were accepted, Congress, assuming an otherwise proper exercise of its spending authority or commerce power, could mandate either the Seattle or the Jefferson County plans nationwide. For one thing, consider the effect of the pluralitys views on the parties before us and on similar school districts throughout the Nation. For schools that never segregated on the basis of race, such as Seattle, or that have removed the vestiges of past segregation, such as Jefferson County, the way to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis, Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. 05908. The Seattle school district runs ten public high schools. [Footnote 9] The Sixth Circuit affirmed in a per curiam opinion relying upon the reasoning of the District Court, concluding that a written opinion would serve no useful purpose. McFarland v. Jefferson Cty. Classifying and assigning schoolchildren according to a binary conception of race is an extreme approach in light of our precedents and our Nations history of using race in public schools, and requires more than such an amorphous end to justify it. The dissent points to data that indicate that black and white students in desegregated schools are less racially prejudiced than those in segregated schools. Post, at 40 (internal quotation marks omitted). The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. And even if the determination is difficult, it is one the dissent acknowledges must be made to determine what remedies school districts are required to adopt. At least one of the academic articles the dissent cites to support this proposition fails to establish a causal connection between the supposed educational gains realized by black students and racial mixing. And the present context requires a court to examine carefully the race-conscious program at issue. School Dist. The dissent appears to pin its interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause to current societal practice and expectations, deference to local officials, likely practical consequences, and reliance on previous statements from this and other courts. See Brief of the States of New York, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, the District of Columbia, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents at 11. . See ante, at 9 (Executive and legislative branches, which for generations now have considered these types of policies and procedures, should be permitted to employ them with candor and with confidence that a constitutional violation does not occur whenever a decisionmaker considers the impact a given approach might have on students of different races). The dissents persistent refusal to accept this distinctionits insistence on viewing the racial classifications here as if they were just like the ones in McDaniel, devised to overcome a history of segregated public schools, post, at 47explains its inability to understand why the remedial justification for racial classifications cannot decide these cases. The statistics cited in Appendix A to the dissent are not to the contrary. The dissent attempts to buttress the integration interest by claiming that it follows a fortiori from the interest this Court recognized as compelling in Grutter. Sch. 05915, at 31. PICS contends that while in Grutter the Court recognized diversity in a holistic sense as a compelling interest, it specifically held that mere racial diversity is not a compelling government interest. Upon realizing that the litigation would not be resolved in time for assignment decisions for the 20022003 school year, the Ninth Circuit withdrew its opinion, 294 F.3d 1084 (2002) (Parents Involved III), vacated the injunction, and, pursuant to Wash. Rev. The student assignment plan of Seattle Public Schools and Jefferson County Public Schools does not meet the narrowly tailored and compelling interest requirements for a race-based assignment plan because it is used only to achieve "racial balance." Justice Breyers reliance on McDaniel v. Barresi, 402 U. S. 39 (1971), post, at 2324, 2930, highlights how far removed the discussion in the dissent is from the question actually presented in these cases. The Seattle Plan achieved the school integration that it sought. See Brief for Petitioner at 26. [Footnote 25] And just as the dissent argues that the need for these programs will lessen over time, the segregationists claimed that reliance on segregation was lessening and might eventually end.
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