Supreme Court takes on K-12 schools racial mix

updated 10:34 a.m. ET Dec. 4, 2006

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court is diving into a debate over school diversity that is as old as Reconstruction-era efforts to integrate blacks into the mainstream and as new as the 5:35 a.m. start time on some buses carrying students across town in Louisville, Ky.

At a time of rising de facto segregation in public schools, the high court is to hear arguments Monday on lawsuits by parents in Louisville and Seattle who are challenging policies that use race to help determine where children go to school.

The school policies are designed to keep schools from segregating along the same lines as neighborhoods.

Educators, civil rights advocates, politicians and parents — not to mention students — are watching for a potential watershed ruling on what value the nation should place on diversity in the classroom, and at what price.

The answer may hinge on the court’s newest member, Justice Samuel Alito, who replaced Sandra Day O’Connor in January.

A year ago, O’Connor and her colleagues refused to hear a similar school diversity challenge from Massachusetts. After Alito’s arrival, the court surprised many observers by agreeing to hear the appeals from Louisville and Seattle. Federal appeals courts had ruled in favor of both school systems.

The challenges could prove among the most significant K-12 desegregation cases since the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that banned racial segregation in public schools.

How far to go?
Civil rights advocates are not optimistic. The new cases “put on the table, in a very clear way, the question of how far society, how far government, should go in terms of trying to promote diversity in education in America,” said Ellis Cose, the author of a study on affirmative action.

“The core issue of whether the government should be in the business of helping to promote diversity in some way in education is at the heart of all these cases,” he said.

The Bush administration is siding with parents against the school districts, arguing the policies are an unconstitutional, albeit well-meaning, “racial balancing” without a compelling justification. “A well-intentioned quota is still a quota,” the administration said in a brief submitted on the Kentucky case.

Civil rights advocates say a ruling that bars schools from taking race into account would deal a devastating blow to the promotion of diverse schools.

Fears of reversal ...
If the court issues a sweeping ruling against using race, “we will be witnessing a reversal of historic proportions,” said Ted Shaw, president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Foundation.

“Race-neutral” alternatives such as lotteries or socioeconomic sorting often end up segregating school populations again and hurting black students, according to Shaw’s organization.

About 400 of the nation’s 15,000 school districts are under court orders to desegregate. It is believed that hundreds more voluntarily take race into account; there are no firm figures.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights says banning the voluntary consideration of race in school assignments could result in an “absurd” situation in which districts are not allowed to promote the diversity they once were under order to achieve.

... and the status quo
But to some parents, all of that is broad theory that does not compensate for denying kids the school of their choice or the one in their neighborhood.

Louisville parent Crystal Meredith, who is white, challenged a district policy that seeks to keep black enrollment between 15 percent and 50 percent of the population at most schools, while allowing some measure of school choice.

Meredith says the plan kept her son, Joshua McDonald, from attending a nearby elementary school. Instead, she says, he was bused 90 minutes away for two years, until she moved and her son got into his school of choice.

The result, says her legal brief, “denigrates a 5-year-old’s self-worth and self-esteem” by color-coding him throughout his school years.

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