Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling represents a chokehold for public school districts committed to maintaining racial integration among students in grades kindergarten through high school. It was always clear from the volley of questions that peppered attorneys for the school districts in
Louisville,
Ky. and
Seattle,
Wash. on December 4, 2006, that race-based student assignment plans were threatened by the leanings of the new conservative majority on the Court (and the absence of Justice O’Connor’s moderate views). Last Thursday, the Court essentially eliminated any practical (if not legal) approach to reducing racial isolation in schools by asserting that such efforts equated to “racial discrimination,” in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts. The Chief Justice was neither narrow nor nuanced in a 5-4 majority. Justice Kennedy, in a concurring opinion that underscored that a district may consider it a “compelling interest to achieve a diverse student population,” offered race neutral mechanisms designed to achieve the aims of racial diversity. The NAACP and other groups optimistically assert that Kennedy’s controlling opinion keeps racial diversity aims viable for districts nationwide. I respectfully dissent. Kennedy’s “remedies” point to the problem of practicality and the probable demise of the use of race in school policies designed to promote racial diversity – a critical irony in the aftermath of this decision.
What is perhaps most paramount in this discussion is what occurs in the absence of racial diversity plans. This is the problem – and reality – of inequity that sits at the center of school desegregation policies. Segregated African American schools tend to reflect the concentrated poverty of the urban (or some rural) neighborhoods in which these students live. In other words, racially isolated schools for African Americans students usually translate into isolated, high poverty schools in which there is a higher proportion of inexperienced teachers, a higher turnover among teachers and students, more limited curriculum and educational resources, lower average achievement and higher dropout rates.
No one can know now what is the most efficacious approach to achieving the aim of diversity in schooling under these newly drawn Constitutional constraints. Only one thing is certain on this summer morning after the most important Supreme Court rulings on race and education in over 50 years: the “color-blind” Constitution that the majority forcefully foisted on the
Louisville and
Seattle school districts will shape the lives of all school children well beyond their classrooms and corridors they occupy this fall.
Claire Smrekar is as associate professor of education and public policy at
Vanderbilt
University. She is the author of The Impact of School Choice and Community: In the Interest of Families and Schools (SUNY, 1996); co-author (with Ellen Goldring); School Choice in Urban America: Magnet Schools and the Pursuit of Equity (Teachers College Press, 1999); Does Race Matter? The Shifting Landscape of School Desegregation in American Cities (forthcoming). Professor Smrekar’s research on magnet schools and on Dept. of Defense schools was included in two separate amicus briefs filed in the
Louisville and
Seattle cases.