Supreme Court rejects school racial diversity plans

In a major civil rights ruling, a narrow majority struck down two school-enrollment plans.

from the June 29, 2007 edition

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"What was the hope and promise of Brown?" Justice Breyer asks. "It was the promise of true racial equality – not as a matter of fine words on paper, but as a matter of everyday life in the nation's cities and schools."

Breyer warns that the majority's position will undercut the larger significance of Brown. "This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret," he writes.

Both of the challenged enrollment plans in Louisville and Seattle attempted to address de facto segregation tied in part to housing patterns. The voluntary desegregation programs were aimed at preventing the school districts from sliding into a starkly segregated environment with minority students isolated in inner-city schools and white students isolated in suburban schools.

To achieve a meaningful mix, school boards in Louisville and Seattle decided that they would sometimes have to use race as a factor to determine which students could attend the most popular schools.

In Seattle, the school board set enrollment at the district's most desired high schools within 15 percentage points of the overall racial balance of the district's students. The balance was 40 percent white and 60 percent nonwhite.

Students were permitted to attend any of the district's 10 high schools. But because some schools were more popular than others, the board created a racial tiebreaker to determine eligibility to attend the most popular schools.

If a new student would cause that particular school's white or nonwhite student population to increase above the 55 percent cutoff, the student was barred from attending that school.

Opponents of the plan said Seattle schools were already diverse and that the race tiebreaker was a form of unconstitutional racial balancing.

Lawyers for the school board argued that integration efforts are not the same as racial discrimination. There is a fundamental difference between using race to segregate students and using it to integrate them, they said.

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