551 U.S. 701, 127 S. Ct. 2738, 168 L. Ed. 2d 508 (2007)
In the late 1990s the Seattle School District No. 1 adopted a student assignment plan for its ten regular public high schools.1 Incoming ninth graders ranked preferences among schools.2 The district applied a series of tiebreakers when schools were oversubscribed.3 The second tiebreaker classified students as white or nonwhite.4
It selected students whose race would bring an integration-positive school within ten percentage points of the district-wide balance of 41 percent white and 59 percent nonwhite.5 The plan affected assignments at five oversubscribed schools in the 2000-2001 school year.6 Petitioner Parents Involved in Community Schools filed suit in the Western District of Washington in July 2000 alleging violations of the Equal Protection Clause.7
Jefferson County Public Schools had been under a 1975 federal desegregation decree.8 The decree was dissolved in 2000 after a finding of unitary status.9 The district adopted a voluntary assignment plan in 2001.10 The plan required all nonmagnet schools to maintain black enrollment between 15 and 50 percent.11 The plan grouped elementary schools into clusters.12
It assigned kindergartners and new students within clusters according to space and racial guidelines.13 It denied transfer requests that would push a school outside the guidelines.14 Approximately 34 percent of the district's 97,000 students were black.15 When Crystal Meredith moved into the district in August 2002 she sought to enroll her son Joshua in kindergarten at Bloom Elementary one mile from their home.16
The district denied the intercluster transfer from Young Elementary because it would adversely affect desegregation compliance at Young which was then 46.8 percent black.17 Meredith filed suit in the Western District of Kentucky alleging an Equal Protection violation.18 The Seattle District Court granted summary judgment to the district in 2001.19 The Ninth Circuit en banc affirmed the federal constitutional ruling in 2005.20 The District Court found that Jefferson County had asserted a compelling interest in maintaining racially diverse schools, and that the assignment plan was in all relevant respects narrowly tailored to serve that compelling interest.21 The Sixth Circuit affirmed in a per curiam opinion relying upon the reasoning of the District Court.22 The Supreme Court granted certiorari in both cases in 2006.23
Whether the Court has jurisdiction in these cases?
The Court has jurisdiction only when there is a live case or controversy under Article III. Plaintiffs must demonstrate standing through an injury in fact that is concrete, particularized, and actual or imminent. The case is not moot when subsequent events have made it absolutely clear that the allegedly wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to recur.
Yes. The members of Parents Involved have children in all levels of the district's schools.24 The complaint sought declaratory and injunctive relief on behalf of members whose elementary and middle school children may be denied admission to the high schools of their choice in the future.25 The fact that those children may not be denied such admission based on their race because of undersubscription or oversubscription that benefits them does not eliminate the injury claimed.26 The group also asserted an interest in not being forced to compete in a race-based system that might prejudice its members' children, an actionable form of injury under the Equal Protection Clause.27
The fact that Seattle has ceased using the racial tiebreaker pending the outcome here is not dispositive.28 The district vigorously defends its program's constitutionality and nowhere suggests that it will not resume using race to assign students if it prevails.29 Similarly the fact that Joshua has been granted a transfer does not eliminate the Court's jurisdiction.30 Jefferson County's racial guidelines apply at all grade levels and he may again be subject to race-based assignment in middle school.31
The Court has jurisdiction to decide these cases.32
Whether the Seattle and Jefferson County school districts' voluntary student assignment plans that classify and assign students on the basis of race violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
When the government distributes burdens or benefits on the basis of individual racial classifications, that action is reviewed under strict scrutiny.33 The school districts must demonstrate that their use of such classifications is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest.34 Racial classifications are simply too pernicious to permit any but the most exact connection between justification and classification.35
Yes. The Seattle plan classifies children as white or nonwhite and uses the racial classifications as a tiebreaker to allocate slots in particular high schools.36 The Jefferson County plan classifies students as black or other in order to make certain elementary school assignments and to rule on transfer requests.37 In each case the school district relies upon an individual student's race in assigning that student to a particular school so that the racial balance at the school falls within a predetermined range based on the racial composition of the school district as a whole.38
Parents of students denied assignment to particular schools under these plans solely because of their race brought suit contending that allocating children to different public schools on the basis of race violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection.39
The plans violate the Equal Protection Clause.
Related opinions on this issue
Justice Thomas concurred that the plans are unconstitutional because they classify students by race without a compelling interest and without narrow tailoring.40 The Constitution requires a color-blind approach that forbids government race-based decisionmaking.41 Resegregation is not occurring in Seattle or Louisville.42
These school boards have no present interest in remedying past segregation.43 These race-based student-assignment programs do not serve any compelling state interest.44 The Constitution abhors classifications based on race because every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits it demeans us all.45
The plans are subject to the general rule that government race-based decisionmaking is unconstitutional.46
Justice Kennedy concurred in the judgment that the plans violate the Equal Protection Clause because they are not narrowly tailored. He noted that some parts of the plurality opinion imply an unyielding insistence that race cannot be a factor in instances when it may be taken into account. The government has a legitimate interest in ensuring equal opportunity and in achieving a diverse student body.
The plans here rely on systematic individual typing by race. The Jefferson County Board of Education fails to meet the threshold mandate of establishing in detail how decisions based on an individual student's race are made. The Seattle district has failed to explain why in a district composed of a diversity of races it has employed the crude racial categories of white and non-white as the basis for its assignment decisions.
Each respondent has failed to provide the necessary support for the proposition that there is no other way than individual racial classifications to avoid racial isolation.
Justice Stevens dissented that the plans do not violate the Equal Protection Clause because they are efforts to achieve integration rather than to impose segregation. The plurality's reliance on Brown is a cruel irony given the history of excluding black children.47 The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of the plurality opinion states that before Brown schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.
This sentence reminds one of Anatole France's observation that the majestic equality of the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges to beg in the streets and to steal their bread. The Chief Justice fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered. The distinction between de jure and de facto segregation is not germane to what a school district may voluntarily do.48
The Court's misuse of the three-tiered approach to Equal Protection analysis merely reconfirms the view that there is only one such Clause in the Constitution.49
Joined by Justices Stevens Souter And Ginsburg
Justice Breyer dissented that the plans do not violate the Equal Protection Clause because they serve compelling interests in integration educational benefits and democratic values.50 The plans are narrowly tailored in light of the districts' histories and the minimal use of race.51 The plurality's approach risks serious harm to the law and the Nation by depriving school boards of tools to combat resegregation.52
These cases consider the longstanding efforts of two local school boards to integrate their public schools.53 The school board plans before us resemble many others adopted in the last 50 years by primary and secondary schools throughout the Nation.54 All of those plans represent local efforts to bring about the kind of racially integrated education that Brown v. Board of Education long ago promised.55
The histories of Louisville and Seattle reveal complex circumstances and a long tradition of conscientious efforts by local school boards to resist racial segregation in public schools.56 The plans under review which are less burdensome more egalitarian and more effective than prior plans continue in that tradition.57
Whether the districts have demonstrated that their use of individual racial classifications is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest?
Narrow tailoring requires serious good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives. The minimal effect these classifications have on student assignments suggests that other means would be effective. Classifying and assigning schoolchildren according to a binary conception of race is an extreme approach that requires more than an amorphous end to justify it.
No. Seattle's racial tiebreaker results in the end only in shifting a small number of students between schools with approximately 307 student assignments affected by the racial tiebreaker in 2000-2001.58 In over one-third of the assignments affected by the racial tiebreaker the use of race in the end made no difference.59 Similarly Jefferson County's use of racial classifications has only a minimal effect on the assignment of students with the district estimating that the racial guidelines account for only 3 percent of assignments.60 The districts have also failed to show that they considered methods other than explicit racial classifications to achieve their stated goals.61
The districts have not demonstrated that their use of individual racial classifications is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest.
Whether the districts' asserted interests in racial diversity or avoiding racial isolation justify the use of racial classifications in elementary and secondary school assignments?
Although remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination is a compelling interest that interest is not involved here because the Seattle schools were never segregated by law nor subject to court-ordered desegregation and the desegregation decree to which the Jefferson County schools were previously subject has been dissolved.62 The interest in diversity upheld in Grutter was in the context of higher education with a broad array of qualifications and characteristics of which racial or ethnic origin is but a single though important element not an interest in simple ethnic diversity or racial balancing.
No. The plans are tied to each district's specific racial demographics rather than to any pedagogic concept of the level of diversity needed to obtain the asserted educational benefits.63 The districts offer no evidence that the level of racial diversity necessary to achieve the asserted educational benefits happens to coincide with the racial demographics of the respective districts.64 Accepting racial balancing as a compelling state interest would justify imposing racial proportionality throughout American society contrary to the Court's repeated admonitions that this is unconstitutional.65 The plans employ only a limited notion of diversity viewing race exclusively in white/nonwhite terms in Seattle and black/other terms in Jefferson County with race for some students being determinative standing alone rather than one factor weighed with others.
The districts' asserted interests do not justify the use of racial classifications in elementary and secondary school assignments.