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Affirmative Action News: Why Race Still Counts in School Desegregation
By Jennifer Millman
November 12, 2007
Many anticipated significant fallout after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned voluntary school-integration plans in Seattle, Wash., and Louisville, Ky., in June, ruling them unconstitutional because they weighed race heavily in determining student assignments.
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Now, public-school districts across the country under federal court mandate to desegregate--there are at least 253 of them, reports The Associated Press (AP)--are confused because they're being told to use race to ensure a balanced student body. Don't the recent Supreme Court rulings contradict these federal orders?
No. The Supreme Court rulings apply only to voluntary school-desegregation plans. Schools under consent decree to desegregate can use race to achieve their objectives. Once the mandate is lifted, however, they can't.
In other words, schools can use race to remedy historic discrimination and ensure equal opportunity for students, but once they've corrected past wrongs, they've got to come up with new ways to sustain progress in light of the Supreme Court rulings.
The paradox perplexed many, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at the time. "What's constitutionally required one day gets prohibited the next day," Ginsburg said. "That's very odd."
Many districts also are confused, reports AP, including:
- Shelby County, Tenn., which argues it'll have to spend an extra $1.6 million-plus annually to comply with a federal court order that would require busing about 9,000 black students up to an hour away and hiring new black teachers.
The Stats: Forty-four percent of black students in Tennessee attend schools where 90 percent or more of the student body is non-white, making the state the ninth most segregated in the nation on this measure.
- Huntsville, Ala., which has a plan that allows students to transfer schools only if they are in the racial/ethnic majority of that district.
The Stats: The district's student population is 43 percent black, yet despite 44 years of court-ordered desegregation, more than half of the districts' nearly 50 schools remain majority-minority and nine are 90 percent black or more. Forty-five percent of black students in Alabama attend schools where 90 percent or more of the student body is non-white, making the state the seventh most segregated in the nation and the most segregated of 11 southern states on this measure.
- Tucson, Ariz., permits students to transfer only if it would improve the racial/ethnic balance of the school district to which they would transfer and not disrupt the racial/ethnic balance of the district they would leave.
The Stats: Forty-six percent of students in the state of Arizona are classified as low-income. Influxes of immigration have drastically increased the enrollment of students of color, particularly Latino students, in state public-school districts, leading to increased segregation based on income and race/ethnicity.
How Does Court-Mandated Desegregation Work?
Many of these mandates, which are issued by federal judges, have multiple contingencies that must be met before they can be lifted related to school staffing, transportation, extracurricular activities and transportation and student-body and faculty makeup. Some have been in existence for four decades or longer.
Once the school achieves its goals, a judge lifts the mandate, granting the school district "full unitary status."
"I think that when you become unitary, the expectation is that you still will uphold the spirit of the law or the integration and that you'll work to end any discriminatory practices," Huntsville Superintendent Anne Roy Moore told AP. "Because, in reality, a group that had brought suit, say, 30 years ago could still step up and do that again."
But the school doesn't have the same resources and tools to further its agenda as it did under court supervision. Don't forget that Jefferson County Public Schools district in Kentucky, which was one of the public-school districts involved in the recent Supreme Court decisions, had been under court order to desegregate until 2000, when it adopted a voluntary-integration plan to continue its efforts.
Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, told AP that a grant of unitary status "ends the rights of the minorities in your community to ever have the court intervene on the basis of a history of discrimination."
"What you get from it isn't freedom," Orfield said. "School districts without court orders don't have freedom to do what they are doing" to prevent racial/ethnic isolation.
A recent report by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA finds that black students' exposure to white students has declined in all of 38 public-school districts that have been granted unitary status between 1991 and 2005. Click here to download the full report on school segregation.
In the private sector, companies can launch diversity task forces, executive committees and other programs designed to maintain progress. The Coca-Cola Co., which shelled out $192.5 million in one of the highest-profile racial-discrimination lawsuits in history, for example, was under a court-supervised task force headed up by former Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman for five years ending in December 2006. CEO Neville Isdell then asked the supervision be extended for an extra year to keep the task force's efforts and the company on track--a highly unusual move. The Coca-Cola Co. is No. 3 in The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity®. Read DiversityInc's exclusive coverage of Coke's story, featuring interviews with Isdell and Herman, in the Jan./Feb. 2007 issue of DiversityInc magazine, available online.
Segregation in the States
More than 43 percent of U.S. students are non-white while public-school segregation along racial/ethnic lines is at 40-year high, reports the Civil Rights Project. This provides a clear, dangerous path for current trends to continue. School integration has enormous benefits for all students involved.
Most of the court-ordered desegregation is in the South, which for the first time in more than 40 years has mostly poor students (54 percent) in its public-school districts, up from 37 percent in 1989, according to a recent report by the Southern Education Foundation. Nationally, 46 percent of students are low-income.
The South spends less on education per student than other regions, which compounds the problem. In 2000, Mississippi, for example, spent a high of $5,631 per student, compared with Connecticut's $8,030 per student at minimum. Connecticut is one of several states to employ magnet schools as a means to improve student-body diversity, but superintendents fear that state support for them, which traditionally has been high, is declining, reports The New York Times.
At the same time, Northeast public-school districts are the most segregated in the country, with 51 percent of black students attending schools where students of color are 90 percent or more of the student body, which supports a slew of empirical data that shows schools populated mostly by black and Latino students get fewer resources. Thus the students get less opportunity.
Where to Go From Here?
Although Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the majority in the 5-4 ruling, he made clear that only the use of race in the specific plans in question was unconstitutional, not the use of race in and of itself. He also made clear his dissent with the positions taken by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito on the value of a diverse student body and the acceptable measures by which to pursue it.
"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 population," Kennedy wrote in a separate opinion. "The decision today should not prevent school districts from continuing the important work of bringing together students of different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds."
(See also: 7 Ways to Promote School Integration After Supreme Court Limits Race-Based Plans)
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