ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

The Court is expected to issue decisions today in two closely watched school segregation cases.  These cases, which will decide whether local school boards are permitted to voluntarily integrate public schools, were featured in ACSBlog's mid-term feature on the state of the Court's docket:

School Desegregation

Among the most closely followed of the Court’s pending cases are Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Public Schools, two cases which will decide whether or not school boards are allowed to voluntarily integrate schools on racial lines. ACSBlog guest bloggers Anurima Bhargava & Elise Boddie explain what is at stake in these cases:

At issue are voluntary school integration plans in Louisville and Seattle that apply primarily to students who elect to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods. These cases are not affirmative action cases: they involve student assignment to public schools - where every child is guaranteed a seat - rather than competitive admissions to select institutions. However, they could have a far-reaching impact on the power of school districts to pursue voluntary measures that preserve integration in elementary and secondary schools in order to avoid the harmful educational effects of racial isolation.

The battle to integrate the nation's public schools and to secure a quality education for all students has been at the epicenter of the struggle for racial equality. These cases are significant for the effect they could have on the ability of school districts to fulfill the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, particularly against the backdrop of entrenched residential segregation. Yet there is an ironic twist to these cases that bears discussion, namely the possibility that the Court might prohibit school districts from voluntarily pursuing race-conscious measures to promote integration. The Court could bar school districts from pursuing that which it has previously ordered de jure systems to do. Understood in the context of this country's long, tragic history of racial discrimination and the continuing, widespread persistence of segregation in public schools, a Court ruling to this effect would turn the command of the Equal Protection Clause on its head.

Should the Supreme Court vote to strip local school boards of their power to integrate public schools, recent research shows that this could take away an effective tool in breaking down the achievement gap between minority and white students.  According to a report by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Douglas Harris, empirical data gathered from No Child Left Behind shows that desegregation remains the most effective way of closing this gap:

The evidence that desegregation improves student outcomes is arguably stronger than evidence on other major systemic reforms recently considered. In the 1990s, school systems tried to decentralize and de-bureaucratize urban schools where a high percentage of minorities attend school. This was followed by a wave of test-based accountability and school choice programs, such as charter schools and vouchers, aimed at the same groupsof students. While there is some evidence that these reforms have some small benefits for minority students, the effects appear much smaller and less consistent than those of desegregation.47 It is worth continuing some of these new policy experiments in order to learn more about their long-term effects, but there is little evidence to date that even the broad application of accountability and school choice would have the same effects as desegregation.

The recent history of the Court’s decision has made it much more difficult for lower courts and school districts to pursue desegregation, however. Lower courts cannot require school districts to desegregate across district boundaries and they are limited in the ways they can require desegregation within districts. There is only one main option left—controlled choice implemented by school districts without court intervention. The decision before the Court is to determine whether this last remaining option will be allowed to stand. In making their ruling, the Supreme Court justices should know that racial integration is as essential to providing equal educational opportunity today as it was when Justice Warren announced the Court’s landmark Brown position in 1954.