The Supreme Court dealt a severe blow to school integration efforts today, ruling that the Constitution forbids assigning students to particular schools because of their race, even when the goal is campus diversity.
The 5-4 ruling, on the last day of the 2006-07 term, came 53 years after the court unanimously outlawed racial segregation in public schools and declared that segregated schools are inherently unequal. Today’s decision invoked some of the same concepts of racial equality to strike down race-conscious enrollment systems in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., similar to programs in hundreds of school districts nationwide according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“The state must seek alternatives to the classification and differential treatment of individuals by race, at least absent some extraordinary showing not present here,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the decisive fifth vote against the Seattle and Louisville districts.
The court’s most conservative members, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, would have gone further and banned all school district efforts at racial balancing, saying they violated the principle of a “color-blind” Constitution. Kennedy disagreed, saying racial diversity in public schools is a legitimate goal, but that it generally must be pursued by such measures as designing attendance zones or locating new schools to minimize racial isolation rather than assigning individual students on the basis of their race.
If those measures are inadequate, he said, a school may be able to justify an enrollment system that takes a student’s race into account. Kennedy did not define those circumstances but said the Seattle and Louisville districts failed to meet his test.
Dissenting justices said the ruling endangered the principles of racial equality established in the landmark 1954 ruling, Brown vs. Board of Education.
“The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown,” said Justice Stephen Breyer. “To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The (Roberts) position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.”
Read it here: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/28/BAGQRQN0PE11.DTL