Parents Involved VII, 426 F.3d, at 1192. That point was challenged in Justice Breyer's dissent (joined by Stevens, Souter and Ginsberg). we mean the freedom of the slave race); Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303, 306 (1879) ([The Fourteenth Amendment] is one of a series of constitutional provisions having a common purpose; namely, securing to a race recently emancipated . 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. org/area/equityandrace/whiteprivilegeconference.xml. See also Statement of Appellees Opposing Jurisdiction and Motion to Dismiss or Affirm in Davis v. County School Board, O.T. 1952, No. The plans at issue are not overly different from other plans that school districts have used with the express or implicit approval of courts. All of those plans represent local efforts to bring about the kind of racially integrated education that Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), long ago promisedefforts that this Court has repeatedly required, permitted, and encouraged local authorities to undertake. 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. Today, they do not. Petitioner Parents Involved in Community Schools (Parents Involved) is a nonprofit corporation comprising the parents of children who have been or may be denied assignment to their chosen high school in the district because of their race. 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. By 1988, many white families had left the school district, and many Asian families had moved in. [Footnote 9] We have made it unusually clear that strict scrutiny applies to every racial classification. But the district vigorously defends the constitutionality of its race-based program, and nowhere suggests that if this litigation is resolved in its favor it will not resume using race to assign students. See, e.g., Milliken, 433 U. S., at 280, n.14; Freeman, 503 U. S., at 495496 (Where resegregation is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications). 1967) 227 N.E. 2d 729, which challenged the statute providing for elimination of racial imbalance in public schools for want of a substantial federal question. 389 U. S. 572). Although the Supreme Court must find jurisdiction in order to give an opinion on the equal protection claims, it is uncertain whether the Court will address this question in much detail. Federal law also assumes that a similar target percentage will help avoid detrimental minority group isolation. See No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Title V, Part C, 115 Stat. In both cases the efforts were in part remedial. It was consequently necessary to decide with some care which students would attend the new mixed grade. (PDF) Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District Nor does any precedent indicate, as the plurality suggests with respect to Louisville, ante, at 29, that remedial interests vanish the day after a federal court declares that a district is unitary. Of course, Louisville adopted those portions of the plan at issue here before a court declared Louisville unitary. Moreover, in Freeman, this Court pointed out that in one sense of the term, vestiges of past segregation by state decree do remain in our society and in our schools. in No. As for Louisville, its slate was cleared by the District Courts 2000 dissolution decree, which effectively declared that there were no longer any effects of de jure discrimination in need of remediation. Until today, this Court understood the Constitution as affording the people, acting through their elected representatives, freedom to select the use of race-conscious criteria from among their available options. And some have concluded that there are no demonstrable educational benefits. But to this the replication must be: Even so, measures other than differential treatment based on racial typing of individuals first must be exhausted. See post, at 3435. See T. Sowell, Education: Assumptions Versus History 738 (1986). Louisville began its integration efforts in earnest when a federal court in 1975 entered a school desegregation order. The other plaintiffs all challenged assignments to certain specialized schools, and the District Court found these assignments, which are no longer at issue in this case, unconstitutional. No. In part for those reasons, the Court has never permitted outright racial balancing solely for the purpose of achieving a particular racial balance. No. This case was originally filed in 2001 in the Western District of Washington, which ruled in favor of the school district. W. Bowen & D. Bok, The Shape of the River 118 (1998) (hereinafter Bowen & Bok). In these respects, the broad ranges are less like a quota and more like the kinds of useful starting points that this Court has consistently found permissible, even when they set boundaries upon voluntary transfers, and even when they are based upon a communitys general population. The Western District of Washington dismissed the suit, upholding the tiebreaker. In 1977, the NAACP filed another legal complaint, this time with the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfares Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The Courts holding in Grutter demonstrates that the Court meant what it said, for the Court upheld an elite law schools race-conscious admissions program. Far from being narrowly tailored, this system threatens to defeat its own ends, and the district has provided no convincing explanation for its design. See, e.g., Springfield School Comm. If the need for the racial classifications embraced by the school districts is unclear, even on the districts own terms, the costs are undeniable. 1996) (Perhaps desegregation does not have a single effect, positive or negative, on the academic achievement of African American students, but rather some strategies help, some hurt, and still others make no difference whatsoever. As I explained in Grutter, only those measures the State must take to provide a bulwark against anarchy or to prevent violence and a governments effort to remedy past discrimination for which it is responsible constitute compelling interests. See ante, at 1112 (Thomas, J., concurring); ante, at 3, 17 (opinion of Kennedy, J.). ; see also post, at 61. Attorney General, to John F. Kennedy, President (Jan. 24, 1963) (hereinafter Kennedy Report), available at http://www.gilderlehrman.org/search/collection_pdfs/05/63/0/05630.pdf (all Internet materials as visited June 26, 2007, and available in Clerk of Courts case file) (reporting successful efforts by the Government to induce voluntary desegregation). 1 operates 10 regular public high schools. It does have a duty to provide all children with equal opportunities. 693, 227 N.E. 2d 729 (1967), appeal dismd, 389 U. S. 572 (1968) (per curiam), post, at 35, is inapposite for the same reason that many of the cases cited by Justice Breyer are inapposite; the case involved a Massachusetts law that required school districts to avoid racial imbalance in schools but did not specify how to achieve this goaland certainly did not require express racial classifications as the means to do so. I describe those histories at length in order to highlight three important features of these cases. For decades now, these school boards have considered and adopted and revised assignment plans that sought to rely less upon race, to emphasize greater student choice, and to improve the conditions of all schools for all students, no matter the color of their skin, no matter where they happen to reside. The Court need not resolve the parties dispute over whether racial diversity in schools has a marked impact on test scores and other objective yardsticks or achieves intangible socialization benefits because it is clear that the racial classifications at issue are not narrowly tailored to the asserted goal. For the 2005-2006 school year, seven out of ten of the high schools had racial balances that varied more than 15 percent from the racial balance of the school district as a whole. The school districts in these cases voluntarily adopted student assignment plans that rely upon race to determine which public schools certain children may attend. Because of its importance, I shall repeat what this Court said about the matter in Swann. Ostate-imposed desegregation could only be brought about by busing children across school districts. Cf. Even apart from Grutter, five Members of this Court agree that avoiding racial isolation and achiev[ing] a diverse student population remain today compelling interests. Whatever those demographics happen to be drives the required diversity number in each district. 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. Yesterday, school boards had available to them a full range of means to combat segregated schools. 5 Memorandum Opinion and Order, Haycraft v. Board of Ed. in No. Before the merits of the case can be addressed, the Court first has to address the Districts jurisdictional challenge that no case or controversy exists within the Constitutional sense of those terms. Can the government force racial mixing against the will of those being mixed? PICS counters that neighborhood demographics are the result of individuals voluntary choices, and that parents tend to choose schools near their home. Const., Art. 05908, p.227a; Reply Brief in No. (citing Armor & Rossell, Desegregation and Resegregation in the Public Schools, in Beyond the Color Line 239 (A. Thernstrom & S. Thernstrom eds. Such measures may include strategic site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones with general recognition of neighborhood demographics; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race. Is it not of all the activities of government the one which most nearly approaches the hearts and minds of people, the question of the education of their young? Brief for Respondent at 24, 30, 33. Choice, therefore, is the predominant factor in these plans. Will Louisville and all similar school districts have to return to systems like Louisvilles initial 1956 plan, which did not consider race at all? Although some parents or children prefer some schools over others, school popularity has varied significantly over the years. 16, 18. None of these features is present in elementary and secondary schools. The Court in Grutter expressly articulated key limitations on its holdingdefining a specific type of broad-based diversity and noting the unique context of higher educationbut these limitations were largely disregarded by the lower courts in extending Grutter to uphold race-based assignments in elementary and secondary schools. Probs. See Parts IIIIV, supra, at 3757. Thus, at worst, a student would have to spend one year at a high school he did not pick as a first or second choice. 05915, at 38 (Decisions to assign students to schools within each cluster are based on available space within the [elementary] schools and the racial guidelines in the Districts current student assignment plan); id., at 82 (acknowledging that a student may not be assigned to his or her resides school if it has reached the extremes of the racial guidelines). But that is also true of the Clarke County schools in McDaniel. In briefing and argument before this Court, Seattle contends that its use of race helps to reduce racial concentration in schools and to ensure that racially concentrated housing patterns do not prevent nonwhite students from having access to the most desirable schools. Id., at 335336. To this day, misconceptions abound about whether voluntary school desegregation is constitutionally permitted in the United States. at 17. 1, 426 F.3d 1162 (9th Cir. Such a view was ascendant in this Courts jurisprudence for several decades. This view is informed by dissents in our previous cases and the concurrences of two Court of Appeals judges. "But the district vigorously defends the constitutionality of its race-based program, and nowhere suggests that if this litigation is resolved in its favor it will not resume using race to assign students. Just prior to the plans implementation, for example, 4 of Seattles 11 high schools were imbalanced, i.e., almost exclusively black or almost exclusively white. By 1979, only two were out of balance. By 1980 only Cleveland remained out of balance (as the board defined it) and that by a mere two students. Contractors of America v. Jacksonville, 508 U. S. 656, 666 (1993), an injury that the members of Parents Involved can validly claim on behalf of their children. Without attempting in these cases to set forth all the interests a school district might assert, it suffices to note that our prior cases, in evaluating the use of racial classifications in the school context, have recognized two interests that qualify as compelling. Seattle has no history of de jure segregation; therefore, the Constitution did not require Seattles plan. No. . The Constitution is not that malleable. 1314. It defines the democratic element as an interest in producing an educational environment that reflects the pluralistic society in which our children will live. Post, at 39. 2d 902 (1980) (Stevens, J., dissenting); brackets omitted). in Brown v. Board of Education, O.T. 1952, No. id., at 390 (Kennedy, J., dissenting) (expressing concern about narrow fluctuation band[s]). White Privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks. See White Privilege Conference, Questions and Answers, http://www.uccs.edu/~wpc/ One of those plans, which involved using race as a factor in assigning students to high schools, is the subject of this litigation. A compelling interest exists in avoiding racial isolation, an interest that a school district, in its discretion and expertise, may choose to pursue. This argument is unavailing. 6. See Part IB, supra. This discrepancy is not some simple and straightforward error that touches only upon the peripheries of the districts use of individual racial classifications. v. UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, et al., RESPONDENTS . And it adjusted its alphabet-based system for grouping and busing students. The Current Plan, 1999 to the Present. [I]ntegration, we are told, has three essential elements. Ibid. . Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306. Narrow tailoring requires serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives, id., at 339, and yet in Seattle several alternative assignment plansmany of which would not have used express racial classificationswere rejected with little or no consideration. What has happened to stare decisis? See App. The dissent attempts to marginalize the notion of a color-blind Constitution by consigning it to me and Members of todays plurality. 1. By contrast, Croson notes that racial classifications are permitted only "as a last resort".[30]. 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. Race-conscious objectives to achieve diverse school environment may be acceptable. Public Schools, 330 F.Supp. To that end, in 2011, the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice jointly issued Guidance on the Voluntary Use of Race to Achieve Diversity and Avoid Racial Isolation in Elementary and Secondary Schools, acknowledging the flexibility that school districts have in taking proactive steps to meet the compelling interests of promoting diversity and avoiding racial isolation within the parameters of current law.[7]. Section 3. In these cases, the fact that the number of students whose assignment depends on express racial classifications is small suggests that the schools could have achieved their stated ends through different means, including the facially race-neutral means set forth above or, if necessary, a more nuanced, individual evaluation of school needs and student characteristics that might include race as a component. Contrary to the dissents arguments, resegregation is not occurring in Seattle or Louisville; these school boards have no present interest in remedying past segregation; and these race-based student-assignment programs do not serve any compelling state interest. PDF Affirmative Action and Diversity in Public Education: Legal Developments See Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U. S. 339, 343344 (1960) (admonishing that, in dealing with claims under broad provisions of the Constitution, which derive content by an interpretive process of inclusion and exclusion, it is imperative that generalizations, based on and qualified by the concrete situations that gave rise to them, must not be applied out of context in disregard of variant controlling facts). 1. 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. In Seattle, for example, in more than 80% of all cases, that choice alone determines which high schools Seattles ninth graders will attend. 205, 961 F.2d 1335, 1338 (CA7 1992) (Easterbrook, J.) Racial imbalance is not segregation. Andy suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, but had made good progress with hands-on instruction, and his mother and middle school teachers thought that the smaller biotechnology program held the most promise for his continued success. Brief in Opposition in No. Accordingly, these plans are simply one more variation on the government race-based decisionmaking we have consistently held must be subjected to strict scrutiny. Justice Kennedy sets forth two additional concerns related to narrow tailoring. In respect to Louisville, he says first that officials stated (1) that kindergarten assignments are not subject to the race-conscious guidelines, and (2) that the child at issue here was denied permission to attend the kindergarten he wanted because of those guidelines. 4143 (Mar. The decision today should not prevent school districts from continuing the important work of bringing together students of different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. by it. Scholars have differing opinions as to whether educational benefits arise from racial balancing. Consequently, even though the issue was in some respect moot with respect to that petitioner, jurisdiction existed. 5. That, though, is not the case. Research J., No. For example, the dissent features Tometz v. Board of Ed., Waukegan City School Dist. That policy was necessary because of numerous incidents of racial violence. Id., at 502; id., at 532534 (Thomas, J., dissenting). 1 (2007), the Supreme Court ruled this plan unconstitutional under the 14th amendment. of Ed. We described the various types of diversity that the law school sought: [The law schools] policy makes clear there are many possible bases for diversity admissions, and provides examples of admittees who have lived or traveled widely abroad, are fluent in several languages, have overcome personal adversity and family hardship, have exceptional records of extensive community service, and have had successful careers in other fields. Id., at 338 (brackets and internal quotation marks omitted). Thomas, J., filed a concurring opinion. Again, this approach to racial classifications is fundamentally at odds with our precedent, which makes clear that the Equal Protection Clause protect[s] persons, not groups, Adarand, 515 U. S., at 227 (emphasis in original). Compton, California, on the other hand, became over 99 percent black in the 1980s, while Buffalo, New York had a virtual 5050 split between white and minority students prior to its 1977 plan. In Johnson v. California, 543 U. S. 499 (2005), this Court considered a California prison policy that separated inmates racially. Parents of school children sued the Seattle School Districts after their children were assigned to particular schools based on racial classifications to achieve integration in the school system. See supra, at 27. "[6] Justice Breyer noted, "No one here disputes that Louisville's segregation was de jure" and cites a 1956 memo where the Seattle School Board admitted its schools were de jure segregated as well. 05908, at 128a, 129a. in No. See Part I, supra, at 221. Id., at 498. Justice Thomas also rejected the view advanced by the dissent that these school districts were in danger of resegregation. Section 2. Moreover, the school districts did not consider other options that might have been more narrowly tailored. Seattle argues that Parents Involved lacks standing because its current members claimed injuries are not imminent and are too speculative in that, even if the district maintains its current plan and reinstitutes the racial tiebreaker, those members will only be affected if their children seek to enroll in a high school that is oversubscribed and integration positive. Even today, two of our wisest federal judges have rejected such a wooden reading of the Equal Protection Clause in the context of school integration. Id., at 493494. See also C. Sumner, Equality Before the Law: Unconstitutionality of Separate Colored Schools in Massachusetts, in 2 The Works of Charles Sumner 327, 371 (1849) (The law contemplates not only that all be taught, but that all shall be taught together). I write separately to address several of the contentions in Justice Breyers dissent (hereinafter the dissent).