7 Ways to Promote School Integration After Supreme Court Limits Race-Based Plans
By Jennifer Millman. Date Posted: June 29, 2007
The Supreme Court's decision Thursday to overturn voluntary-integration plans in two public-school districts has sparked passionate debate across the nation as public discourse turns to a discussion of what to do next. Yesterday's ruling tells us that race-based student assignments are an unconstitutional means of promoting integration in K-12 public schools. We've made it a priority to provide you with alternative options.
What do you think will be the implications of the ruling? Here's what our readers are saying about how yesterday's decision will impact American schools.
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Is Your School-Integration Plan Legal? 5 Important Questions |
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Q1: Does the plan use quotas or set-asides?
A: Supreme Court precedent says that using race to fulfill prescribed "quotas" is unacceptable and Thursday's decision confirms that considering race as an isolated factor in school assignments falls under that category. Ensure a holistic approach to developing school-integration plans such that race clearly is one component that does not dominate decision making
Q2: Is the plan flexible?
A: Rather than use a methodical, rigid formula for achieving a diverse student body, the law requires that schools be flexible and offer individualized assessments based on their needs and goals and neighborhood demographics. Schools that adopt race-conscious policies that do not require strict application or processes are more likely to pass the constitutional test of "strict scrutiny"
Q3: Are there race-neutral alternatives?
A: Schools that first explore race-neutral alternatives such as class-based programs are more likely to be looked upon favorably by the courts, which wants schools to show a good-faith effort to find other options before employing race-conscious remedies to re-segregation
Q4: Who does the plan impact?
A: It's important to assess school-integration plans for any adverse impact on individuals who aren't part of underrepresented groups. For example, a university would want to assess its holistic-review plan to ensure it did not disadvantage white students at the expense of black and Latino students. Doing the research to ensure no adverse impact will protect schools in the event a lawsuit arises
Q5: Is the plan reviewed regularly?
A: Schools should re-evaluate their plans on a regular basis to demonstrate awareness of changing demographics and public policy, and whether the current plan is appropriate under these circumstances. Conducting a comprehensive review of school-integration plans regularly also helps schools identify gaps and/or areas for improvement
Read the full K-12 voluntary-integration manual.
Sources: The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University; The Center for the Study of Race and Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. |
"The decision yesterday was not a surprise, but it is nonetheless disappointing," says Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, Spelman College president and author of the recent book Can We Talk About Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria.
"Laws have changed. The reality is that black and Latino schoolchildren are still concentrated in high-poverty schools and the strategies for interrupting that are getting fewer and fewer. All of that is unfortunate and disappointing not just for those children, but for the wider society," says Dr. Tatum. "The downside for white students is they will have fewer opportunities to learn how to interact with people different from themselves, given continuing re-segregation. For black and Latinos students, it limits their access to resources commonly found in majority-white public schools."
Of paramount importance in Thursday's decision is moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion that while the two programs in question did not meet legal requirements, diversity remains a compelling interest in a student body. School districts in Louisville, Ky. and Seattle, Wash. focused too much on race as a factor in school assignments, said Kennedy, but race-conscious measures are appropriate means of advancing educational equity, which is in line with the 2003 Grutter decision upholding affirmative-action policies at the University of Michigan Law School.
"The enduring hope is that race should not matter; the reality is that too often it does ... A compelling interest exists in avoiding racial isolation, an interest that a school district, in its discretion and expertise, may choose to pursue. Likewise, a district may consider it a compelling interest to achieve a diverse student population," wrote Kennedy.
"Race may be one component of that diversity, but other demographic factors, plus special talents and needs, should also be considered," he continued. "What the government is not permitted to do, absent a showing of necessity not made here, is to classify every student on the basis of race and to assign each of them to schools based on that classification."
Despite what many perceive to be a disappointing ruling for K-12 education, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the importance of diversity as a foundation for learning. Kennedy offered some alternatives, including strategic site selection of new schools; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty members in a targeted fashion; tracking enrollment, performance and other statistics by race; and more nuanced evaluation of individual schools' needs and student characteristics that may include race as a component.
"These mechanisms are race-conscious but do not lead to different treatment based on a classification that tells each student he or she is to be defined by race, so it is unlikely any of them would demand strict scrutiny to be found permissible," wrote Kennedy.
Although diversity remains a compelling interest in a student body under the law, programs to achieve integration must subscribe to carefully defined legal limits.
Here we provide seven alternative options to race-based school assignments.
1. Renew focus on income. Factoring socioeconomics into student assignments is one way to address re-segregation and is an important consideration in its own right. That said, many are concerned that the effects of race and socioeconomic status combined overwhelm the effects of either one. A holistic assessment of student demographics that includes race as a factor but also considers socioeconomic disparities and other components will likely pass the constitutional test of "strict scrutiny."
"It's an unfortunate decision and I think it's a retreat from commitment to racial equity in this society. Having said that, the real issue is what do we do now," says Steve Diner, five-year provost of Rutgers University-Newark, which U.S. News and World Report has named the most diverse university in the nation for the last 10 years. "School integration plans insofar as possible are going to have to take family income into account. That is an extremely important kind of diversity. You could argue that it could be at least equally important to racial diversity in that, educationally, students ought to be exposed to people who see the world in very different ways because they grow up with very different levels of material privilege. That is highly important as a social value for our society if we believe in a society of equity."
"One of the things we'll have to do now is look at developing programs that are more explicitly income-based rather than just race-based," Diner says. "It's much less objectionable to many people. It's hard to argue with diversifying a school on the basis of income. It doesn't have the same stigma people attach to diversifying a school on the basis of race."
In 2000, Wake County Public School District in North Carolina successfully implemented a class-conscious plan that limited the low-income population of any one school to 40 percent so no schools would have majority low-income students, who are defined by their eligibility for free lunch, says Dr. Tatum. To limit the concentration of low-achieving students, the school district capped representation of students scoring below their grade level over a two-year period at 25 percent. Results have been positive, with achievement of low-income students improving by state testing standards.
The plan initially faced legal challenges, however. "There were some people who said they were just suing socioeconomic status as a proxy for race," says Tatum, but the school ultimately was able to prove that allegation unfounded.
Are there downsides to using class-conscious programs? "Race and poverty overlap but they are not correlated one to one, so there are issues of discrimination that might impact students of color who are not low-income and issues of poverty that impact white students," says Dr. Tatum. "There are more poor white students in the country than there are poor people of color ... in terms of absolute numbers."
2. Leverage technology. In the aftermath of Michigan voters' decision to ban affirmative action in public education, employment and contracting in November, the University of Michigan began to evaluate computerized options to ensuring a diverse candidate pool. Similar options may be applied to K-12 education. An Auburn University professor recently developed a software package called Applications Quest that uses mathematical algorithms to ensure race/ethnicity doesn't dominate an admissions, employment or secondary-school assignment and enables schools to make decisions based on their individual needs, missions and goals. The software is consistent with yesterday's ruling and has been proven to achieve desired diverse outcomes.
3. Draw new attendance zones and think strategically about sites for new schools. School officials can design attendance zones that consider neighborhood demographics to promote integrated student bodies. Schools typically are called to redesign their attendance zones every few years, which provides ample opportunity to reevaluate decisions and consider race in the process. Local educators can also work with community leaders and members to select sites for new schools that might ward off racial segregation in these areas. Housing availability, school planning and community developments could sustain these efforts.
4. Encourage student transfers. Some school districts offer transfer opportunities that enable underrepresented students to transfer to a school with the intent of improving racial balance. This does not impact the school choice of students who opt not to transfer. Schools can increase the likelihood of student transfers by encouraging the option and pointing out the educational benefits of diversity. Exposing students to people of all kinds of diverse backgrounds and encouraging interaction will move this process forward. Some schools also offer inter-district transfer options when the population of one district is too segregated to make intra-district transfer a viable means of promoting diversity.
5. Share best practices, educate the public. Progressive school districts should join leaders in higher education and the law to devise and share best practices. Universities and colleges made a compelling case for the value of diversity in higher education, which is why the Supreme Court upheld diversity as an important component of a student body in the 2003 Grutter decision. That said, higher education could do more to take a leadership role in communicating this to the public.
"The argument that the leaders of American higher education made was that diversity is essential to academic quality and therefore race is one of a number of factors we took into account in deciding who to admit," says Diner. "People in higher ed mouth it when they talk about retaining affirmative action, but I'm not sure we as higher educators have taken the offensive in making the country aware of the educational value of diversity."
"We talk about it to ourselves only when it's convenient," adds Diner. "We should insist that ranking colleges and universities include diversity if we're serious about diversity as an educational experience. If we're going to have to now transform K-12 education, let's open up that dialogue and higher education can lead the way by being much more concrete, much more specific about the educational values of diversity."
If not, diversity in higher education could once again be at risk. "The process that we've seen with public education, the gradual chipping away of Brown v. Board of Education, which has taken place over the last 30 years or so, is a process that's likely to be repeated at the higher-education level," says Tatum. "Michigan was an example of that. The law school case was successful in favor of Michigan but only by one vote, Sandra Day O'Connor, and she's no longer on the court."
Kennedy's opinion implies he left the Grutter decision intact, but that doesn't mean that upon further interpretation, anti-affirmative-action lawyers will attempt to apply some of his logic to K-12 public education. The Grutter decision could be at stake, given the conservative makeup of the Supreme Court and the successful legal challenges to affirmative action as of late.
"We're all obviously concerned about ensuring that schools are integrated especially at the higher-education level," says Jonathan Alger, vice president and general counsel at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. "We need to look carefully at the overlap in terms of the things that he would allow some K-12 schools."
6. Improve the standards. A more proactive approach to school integration would be to focus on improving the standards of schools, rather than accommodating disparities that happen as a result of inadequate resources and teacher quality in schools in segregated areas. New requirements under No Child Left Behind have stepped up the consequences for schools that fail to meet basic standards, but emphasis on closing black/white achievement gaps may be somewhat distracting from the core issue: improving education for all, not just closing gaps.
"It has to have an educational basis, not just racial balancing that drives compelling interest. We continue to make that case in higher education," says Alger. "The court's decision shows the importance of doing your homework. The concept of diversity and merit diversity does enhance the education environment."
7. Take Action. The debate over school integration and affirmative action is far from over. Community leaders, local educators and public policymakers would do well to engage their neighborhoods in discussion about these issues and band together to improve educational opportunity for all students.
"Regardless of the court's decision, there's still a very serious challenge. We don't have a true equality of opportunity," says Alger. "We have a serious role to play as many of us feel it is an imperative to operate within a legal perspective."
Think-tanks and civil-rights organizations around the country are partnering to provide a more comprehensive body of research to support the educational benefits of diversity and provide leadership on new options.
"We clearly have to put more attention, and this is important no matter what we do, we have to put attention on ensuring that all of our schools are high-quality schools," says Dr. Tatum. "If I were a principal of a high-density racially homogeneous high-poverty school, I would be working really hard to figure out how I can create a learning environment that is supportive of my students, affirms their identities, creates a sense of community, and cultivates their leadership despite the odds against them."
"We can all point to schools with lots of challenges but also to schools that overcome those challenges, and typically, leadership makes a difference," says Dr. Tatum. "We all have to work harder to help [the public] understand the benefits of a diverse learning environment. We will regret it if we don't. "
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund compiled a voluntary-integration manual to assist schools in these endeavors. For more resources, click here.
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