Michael A. Rebell is executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is co-author of Equality and Education and Educational Policy Making and the Courts.

Amy Stuart Wells is a professor of sociology and education and the deputy director for research of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is co-author of Stepping over the Color Line: African American Students in White Suburban Schools.

 

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March 14, 2007

Editor's note: This debate centers on a pair of Supreme Court cases, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education (Louisville, Kentucky). In these cases, the school districts enacted plans to achieve more racial balance in their oversubscribed high schools. Several factors are used to determine student placement, one of which is the student's race.

When the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the Louisville and Seattle voluntary school integration cases in the coming months, at stake will be the ability of local school boards to create the kind of educational environments that are necessary to provide more equal educational opportunities and prepare our children for work and citizenship in a society that is becoming increasingly diverse. Also at issue in both cases is the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and its promise of “equal protection” for all as it relates to race-conscious policies designed to overcome continuing patterns of racial discrimination and to promote school integration.

Brown and Its Implementation

Throughout American history the ideal of free public schools providing “common” and thus equal educational opportunities to all has conflicted with a society sharply divided by race and social class. Most notably, African-American slaves and their descendants were legally excluded in the states where most blacks lived from meaningful participation in common schools for the first 100 years of their existence. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision outlawing school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education[1] promised to address this contradiction: Its strong insistence, repeated six times in the decision, on truly extending equal educational opportunity to African-Americans constituted a “reconsecration of American ideals.”[2]

In addition to asserting the importance of equal educational opportunity, the Brown decision also led to greater centralization of the public educational system, as the federal courts, and eventually Congress and the executive branch, stepped in to circumvent local control of public schools when local officials were denying African-American students access to “common” schools. Although the Supreme Court moved slowly in the early years, the Court SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1finally confronted local political resistance to desegregation in a series of rulings from the mid-‘60s to early ‘70s. In these decisions, the Court insisted on meaningful and not merely pro forma compliance with Brown. It rejected locally implemented stratagems like publicly funded segregated academies for white students and the use of a “freedom of choice plans,” which placed the burden of dismantling racial segregation on black families and allowed white school administrators to deny black students access to their schools. Furthermore, the Supreme Court emphasized the need for a desegregation plan “that promises realistically to work and promises realistically to work now.”[3] In this regard, the Court, among other things, promulgated a series of specific standards that endorsed the use of busing, upheld reliance on numerical guidelines for racial balance in local schools, and advocated the re-drawing of attendance zones to promote desegregation.[4] These rulings in effect undermined much of the decision-making power of local school boards when it came to pupil assignments—all in the name of the Fourteenth Amendment rights of African-American students.

In the 1970s, however, as the venue of the desegregation confrontations moved to northern and western locales, the Supreme Court’s efforts to enforce meaningful educational opportunities began to wane. The geography of northern metropolitan areas meant that meaningful racial integration could not occur unless students crossed jurisdictional boundaries. One of the central legal issues in these cases, therefore, was the extent to which court-ordered remedies for Fourteenth Amendment violations could override time-honored traditions such as local control. In Milliken v. Bradley, the Court held that extensive urban segregation patterns could not be remedied by a mandatory desegregation plan in the absence of evidence that the suburban districts had, in the past, intentionally discriminated against minority students.[5] In essence, in this case, the Court held that the anti-discrimination principle value, grounded in Fourteenth Amendment rights, must yield to the imperative of local control.

Since Milliken, the Court has repeatedly re-emphasized the deference it accords local control in education. And in upholding the diversity-oriented admissions policies of the University of Michigan’s law school, the Court similarly stressed the importance it accords to the policy decisions of local college officials.[6]

The Court’s decisions to give primacy of place to values of local control have severely limited the realization of Brown’s vision of equal educational opportunity and thus the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to issues of education and race. In a country where racial and, increasingly, socio-economic segregation define housing patterns and property values,[7] these decisions also assured that our public schools would become more and not less racially segregated in the 1980s and ‘90s. In fact, in recent years there has been a marked trend toward re-segregation of the nation’s schools.[8]

Meanwhile, the school-age population has become increasingly diverse. In the 2004–2005 school year, only 57 percent of students enrolled in public schools across the country were white, down from 78 percent only three decades ago. In the same time period, the Hispanic student population grew from 6 to 19 percent.[9]

Social Science Evidence regarding Race-Conscious Policies

Perhaps most problematic is that the social science evidence, as well as common sense about the future of our democracy, points us in the opposite direction. In the last thirty years, social scientists have amassed a large body of research evidence suggesting that, as imperfect and uneven as school desegregation policy has been, it did more to further the Fourteenth Amendment “equal protection” rights of African-American students, as promised in Brown, than any other reform in U.S. history.

The preponderance of the research evidence concludes that racial integration of public schools improved cross-racial understanding and reduced racial prejudice—both in the short and the long run—and helped to shrink the achievement gap between African-American and white students by improving black students’ outcomes, particularly in reading.

In regard to the first finding, the research strongly suggests that the benefits of school-level diversity in K-12 public schools are both personal—affecting the students by preparing them to be citizens, workers and family members in the twenty-first century—and societal—easing potential tensions related to an increasingly diverse democratic society and positioning U.S. corporations more strategically within the global economy.[10]

Research examining students’ racial attitudes demonstrates that children enrolled in more racially and ethnically diverse schools and classrooms are far less likely to harbor stereotypes or prejudicial views of people of different racial backgrounds.[11] In fact, the findings are so robust that a comprehensive meta-analysis of 515 such studies involving a total of 250,000 participants concluded that more contact with members of other races reduces prejudice.[12]

In addition, the so-called “long-term effects” research on adults who attended racially diverse schools as children also shows similar and long-lasting effects. Desegregated blacks are much more likely than their segregated counterparts to make choices that place them in integrated and more advantageous environments for the rest of their lives.[13] Furthermore, these graduates, including graduates of Louisville and Seattle schools, conveyed that their educational experiences prepared them for life in an increasingly diverse society.[14]

The other major benefit of school desegregation is its impact on African-American student achievement. Evidence suggests that school desegregation boosted black students’ achievement levels (especially in reading) and that it had no discernable impact on white student achievement. First of all, it seems more than coincidental that the years in which the black-white achievement gap closed most quickly correspond with the years that students of different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds were more likely to be in the same schools and in closer proximity to the same curriculum, teachers, school resources, and status.[15] Furthermore, several recent meta-analyses demonstrate a strong positive relationship between the more racially integrated schools and higher achievement levels for African-American students.[16]

Harms of Racial Isolation and the Need for Race-Conscious Remedies

There is also a large body of evidence demonstrating the harms of racially isolated schools for all children, but especially for poor students of color. According to the Social Science Statement signed by 553 researchers submitted to the Supreme Court as part of the Louisville and Seattle cases, in most instances, highly segregated schools that serve the lowest-income students of color more have fewer certified, qualified, or experienced teachers; more teacher turnover; more limited curriculum; more student health problems; and more crime and violence in the communities surrounding the schools. As a result of these multi-layered problems, student achievement and graduation rates are far lower in such schools, and dropout rates are much higher.[17]

And finally, the social science research speaks to the need for race-conscious policies in order to achieve meaningful racial integration. In fact, several of the amicus briefs as well as the Social Science Statement cite extensive research that demonstrates that race-neutral programs fail to achieve the goal of racial integration in public schools. Relying on legal, historical, and social science evidence, these briefs argue that race-conscious policies and programs are still needed to overcome racial inequality in our society. They demonstrate why only race-conscious policies will dismantle the insidious racial segregation that is otherwise perpetuated across generations and still strongly defines neighborhoods and public schools today.[18]

A “Color-Blind” Fourteenth Amendment and Less Local Control

Despite this powerful research evidence, the plaintiffs and their supporters in the Louisville and Seattle voluntary integration cases would deny the important benefits of diversity and desegregation to thousands of students in these districts because of a claimed detrimental impact on a small number of students who did not receive their first choice enrollments under the districts’ controlled choice policies. In this way, they seek to divorce Fourteenth Amendment claims of equal protection—and indeed, equal educational opportunities—from rationales for creating more racially diverse schools, even if it entails trampling the local control of school districts officials who see otherwise.

Indeed, the petitioners argue that the Fourteenth Amendment rights of this small group of white children have been denied as a result of these locally devised, voluntary desegregation plans. The plaintiffs’ arguments must be understood, however, in the context of a broader political movement to shift the legal interpretation the Fourteenth Amendment toward a “color-blind” stance that would forbid the use of any race-conscious efforts to promote racial equity in school assignments—or quite possibly any other policies, including affirmative action in higher education or employment, scholarships, or contracts.

Ironically, it was only a few years ago, in Grutter v. Bollinger,[19] that the Supreme Court upheld a university admission plan that promoted racial diversity. If diversity in higher education has value, supporters of the Louisville and Seattle school districts argue, then these concerns operate even more strongly in the context of K-12 integration, since, as the Court recognized in Brown, the K-12 years are the critical formative period in the development of young minds and future citizens.[20]

Furthermore, in contrast to the would-be law students who were denied entrance to the Michigan law school in Grutter, those who were negatively impacted by the K-12 racial diversity cases were in most instances accommodated in their second choice school and were often able to transfer to the first choice school a year or two later. Moreover, there has never been an individual right to choose the public school one wishes to attend. Public schools have long had a history of compulsory assignment, depending on attendance zones and other factors determined by the local school boards.

The current argument that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids the use of any race-conscious efforts to promote racial equity in schools is also totally inconsistent with the long history of desegregation law. As Judge John Wisdom Minor of the Fifth Circuit noted in a prior case involving the Louisville schools, “the Constitution is color-conscious to prevent discrimination from being perpetuated and to undo to the effect of past discrimination. The criterion is the relevancy of color to a legitimate governmental purpose.”[21] The Supreme Court has also explicitly recognized the need for race-conscious policies to eliminate racial segregation.[22]

Furthermore, the irony of the plaintiffs’ stance is that they also seek to undermine the values of local control, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly said were so important that they had to trump other constitutional concerns. It is one thing for the Court to weigh Fourteenth Amendment claims related to ongoing segregation against the importance of local control. It is quite another thing to deny the value of either.

In Louisville, the district’s goal of having all schools maintain between 15 and 50 percent black students is achieved through a comprehensive plan that emphasizes cluster groupings, adjustment of school attendance areas, and “managed choice”; the vast majority of students attend their “resides” school or are accommodated with their choice of magnet programs. In assigning students to a few over-subscribed schools, the district uses distance from home, presence of siblings, and other factors in addition to race to make its decisions. The vast majority of students obtain their first or second choice schools without race being taken into consideration. Both of these plans are exemplary examples of sound local planning and are fully in line with the Supreme Court’s past holding that “as a matter of educational policy school authorities may well conclude that some kind of racial balance in the schools is desirable quite apart from any constitutional requirements.”[23]

No Race Left Behind

Despite the Court’s faltering steps in actively promoting school desegregation in recent years, Brown’s vision of equal educational opportunity has remained at the center of our national educational policy. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has restated the ideals of eliminating achievement gaps and promoting proficiency for all and, in fact, has turned them into national goals that schools are required to meet by 2014.

The social science evidence submitted in these cases strongly suggests that in order to achieve such goals, more, not less, racial integration in our schools will be required.[24] Indeed, NCLB itself is highly race conscious, since it requires school districts to disaggregate student achievement data by the race, disability or disadvantage, and poverty rates of students. If the careful examination of student outcome data by race and opportunity are central to NCLB’s worthwhile goal of equal educational outcomes, it is hard to image how we can simultaneously argue that we should ignore race completely when assigning children to non-failing schools.[25] If we acknowledge, as we should, that the vast majority of failing schools under NCLB are those serving racially segregated poor students of color, we also need to admit that we have yet to evolve into a truly color-blind society in which race is no longer a factor assuring educational opportunities.