Supreme Court to Hear School Segregation Cases Monday

By Rose Afriyie, Field Organizer

November 29, 2006

In the D.C. area? Join us for a march and rally on Monday, Dec. 4

On Monday, December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on the constitutionality of voluntary efforts to promote diverse student bodies and prevent segregation in public elementary and secondary schools in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington. The cases, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, challenge the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that ended legal segregation in public schools.

Like many districts around the country, the two school districts in these cases struggle with racially segregated schools resulting from sharply segregated neighborhoods.

In the Kentucky case, the district adopted a voluntary integration plan in 2000. To ensure diverse community schools, this district's plan mandates that all public schools have an African-American enrollment of no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent. To achieve this broad-brush "diversity," district officials were permitted to consider the diversity of the student body as a factor in making student assignment decisions, but only if a school was outside of this broad diversity definition. As part of the plan, surveys are routinely given to parents to assess their satisfaction; the response has been overwhelmingly positive with both black and white parents. The plaintiff claims that the school board policy constitutes reverse discrimination against white students.

In the Washington case, the district implemented a policy in 1997 in which students choose from among ten schools, adding race as a consideration for admission to racially imbalanced schools. The plaintiff in this case is the mother of a white girl who had been denied admission to a neighborhood school where applications outnumbered openings, and she sued after being assigned to her second-choice school. As in the Kentucky case, she claimed the denial of admission resulted from reverse discrimination practiced by the school.

In addition to their potential for limiting the constitutional mandate of Brown v. Board of Education, these cases will shed some light on how the new justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, regard the issue of race-conscious remedies, and whether they will apply Court precedents related to college and law school admissions to community-led decisions in public K-12 schools.