in No. Far from being narrowly tailored to its purposes, this system threatens to defeat its own ends, and the school district has provided no convincing explanation for its design. 2. Fourteen of the districts nineteen non-vocational middle and high schools were close to totally black or totally white. Many school districts in the South adopted segregation remedies (to which Swann clearly applies) without any such federal order, see supra, at 1920. The en banc panel came to the opposite conclusion and upheld the tiebreaker. (For ease of exposition, I shall still use Louisville to refer to what is now the combined districts.) to achieve its own ends; and thus it fails to pass strict scrutiny. 1, pp. Section 5. As we have held, one form of injury under the Equal Protection Clause is being forced to compete in a race-based system that may prejudice the plaintiff, Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peńa, 515 U. S. 200, 211 (1995); Northeastern Fla. Chapter, Associated Gen. 1, supra); Hanawalt 3638, 40; Siqueland 3, 184, Table 4. v. Goose Creek Consol. 7231. Accord, post, at 48 ([L]ocal school boards better understand their own communities and have a better knowledge of what in practice will best meet the educational needs of their pupils); post, at 66 ([W]hat of respect for democratic local decisionmaking by States and school boards?); ibid. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court expressly stated: The racial imbalance act requires the school committee of every municipality annually to submit statistics showing the percentage of nonwhite pupils in all public schools and in each school. The Seattle case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. The Court has changed significantly since it decided School Comm. The NAACPs First Legal Challenge and Seattles Response, 1969 to 1977. While extensive jurisprudence has developed over what is an actual case or controversy, in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife the Court specified three elements that must be satisfied: (1) a party must be facing an actual or imminent injury rather than a hypothetical injury (injury in fact); (2) the complained of conduct must have caused the alleged injury (causal connection); and (3) it must still be possible to provide some remedy to that injury by a favorable court decision. Under the Supreme Court's precedents on racial classification in higher education, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, race-based classifications must be directed toward a "compelling government interest" and must be "narrowly tailored" to that interest. See also, e.g., Offerman v. Nitkowski, 378 F.2d 22, 24 (CA2 1967); Deal v. Cincinnati Bd. For this reason, among others, I do not join Parts IIIB and IV. This, in turn, has consequences of its own. Perhaps recognizing that reliance on Grutter cannot sustain their plans, both school districts assert additional interests, distinct from the interest upheld in Grutter, to justify their race-based assignments. The latter approach would be informed by Grutter, though of course the criteria relevant to student placement would differ based on the age of the students, the needs of the parents, and the role of the schools. One will search Grutter in vain for similarly persuasive evidence of narrow tailoring as the school districts have presented here. Any use of race to distinguish one person from another threatens to stigmatize individuals and incite hostility. There is every reason to think that, if the dissents rationale were accepted, Congress, assuming an otherwise proper exercise of its spending authority or commerce power, could mandate either the Seattle or the Jefferson County plans nationwide. Hundreds of state and federal statutes and regulations use racial classifications for educational or other purposes. See Wygant v. Jackson Bd. Yet neither of those briefs contains specific details like the magnitude of the claimed positive effects or the precise demographic mix at which those positive effects begin to be realized. Each locality is free to tailor local programs to local needs. Yet the school district does not explain how, in the context of its diverse student population, a blunt distinction between white and non-white furthers these goals. Each plan is the product of a process that has sought to enhance student choice, while diminishing the need for mandatory busing. The plan consequently redrew the racial guidelines, setting the boundaries at 15% to 50% black for all schools. The distinctions between de jure and de facto segregation extended to the remedies available to governmental units in addition to the courts. For one thing, consider the effect of the pluralitys views on the parties before us and on similar school districts throughout the Nation. faqs.htm; see generally Westneat, School Districts Obsessed with Race, Seattle Times, Apr. No case of this Court has ever relied upon the de jure/de facto distinction in order to limit what a school district is voluntarily allowed to do. The Courts holding in Grutter demonstrates that the Court meant what it said, for the Court upheld an elite law schools race-conscious admissions program. 06AppsChoicesBoardApril2005final.pdf. Therefore, the school districts attempts to further integrate are properly thought of as little more than attempts to achieve a particular racial balance. ); internal quotation marks omitted). of Los Angeles City Unified School Dist., 610 F.2d 661, 662664 (1979), the Ninth Circuit rejected a federal constitutional challenge to a school districts use of mandatory faculty transfers to ensure that each schools faculty makeup would fall within 10% of the districtwide racial composition. Justice Stevenss reliance on School Comm. Considering the precedent of Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which is only partly applicable because it concerns higher education, it is apparent that educational institutions must use diversity as one of several admissions criteria rather than setting strict quotas. The plan required redrawing school attendance zones, closing 12 schools, and busing groups of students, selected by race and the first letter of their last names, to schools outside their immediate neighborhoods. Although black students made up about 3% of the total Seattle population in the mid-1950s, nearly all black children attended schools where a majority of the population was minority. Public Schools, 416 F.3d 513, 514 (2005) (McFarland II). In both cities, the school boards adopted plans designed to achieve integration by bringing about more racially diverse schools. The Western District of Washington dismissed the suit, upholding the tiebreaker. See, e.g., S. Carter, No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools 4950, 5356, 7173, 8184, 8788 (2001); A. Thernstrom & S. Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning 4364 (2003); see also L. Izumi, They Have Overcome: High-Poverty, High-Performing Schools in California (2002) (chronicling exemplary achievement in predominantly Hispanic schools in California). Is Seattle free on remand to say that its schools were de jure segregated, just as in 1956 a memo for the School Board admitted? This Court has carved out a narrow exception to that general rule for cases in which a school district has a history of maintaining two sets of schools in a single school system deliberately operated to carry out a governmental policy to separate pupils in schools solely on the basis of race.[Footnote 4] See Swann, 402 U. S., at 56. See, e.g., App. These arguments are inimical to the Constitution and to this Courts precedents. of Boston in 1968. At most, those statistics show a national trend toward classroom racial imbalance. In reaching this conclusion, the Court did not directly address the constitutional merits of the underlying Seattle plan. These districts have followed this Courts holdings and advice in tailoring their plans. The Court in Grutter expressly articulated key limitations on its holdingdefining a specific type of broad-based diversity and noting the unique context of higher educationbut these limitations were largely disregarded by the lower courts in extending Grutter to uphold race-based assignments in elementary and secondary schools. Fifty-three of the 125 studied districts used transfers as a component of their plans. Several factors, taken together, nonetheless lead me to conclude that the boards use of race-conscious criteria in these plans passes even the strictest tailoring test. First, Seattle claimed that none of the current members of Parents Involved can claim an imminent injury. The new plan permitted each student to choose the school he or she wished to attend, subject to race-based constraints. 16, 18. says nothing about the ultimate validity of any particular law. Id., at 229230 (internal quotation marks omitted). The District also contends that the racial tiebreaker was necessary because other race-neutral activities were inadequate to achieve their compelling interests. [D]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. Adarand, 515 U. S., at 214 (internal quotation marks omitted). It gave second preference to a student whose race differed from a race that was over-represented at the school (i.e., a race that accounted for a higher percentage of the school population than of the total district population). The way Seattle classifies its students bears this out. The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. The reasons for rejecting a motives test for racial classifications are clear enough. Their decision leaves thousands Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) (plaintiff) were parents of students denied assignment to particular schools under these plans solely because of their race. Consequently, even though the issue was in some respect moot with respect to that petitioner, jurisdiction existed. In the 20002001 school year, for example, with the racial tiebreaker, the entering ninth grade class at Franklin High School had a 60% minority population; without the racial tiebreaker that same class at Franklin would have had an almost 80% minority population. See supra, at 4648. Who exactly is white and who is nonwhite? And it thereby set the Nation on a path toward pub-lic school integration. In both cities plaintiffs filed lawsuits claiming unconstitutional segregation. (PDF) Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District Identify the clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that is most relevant In these cases, the fact that the number of students whose assignment depends on express racial classifications is small suggests that the schools could have achieved their stated ends through different means, including the facially race-neutral means set forth above or, if necessary, a more nuanced, individual evaluation of school needs and student characteristics that might include race as a component. Diversity, depending on its meaning and definition, is a compelling educational goal a school district may pursue. ); internal quotation marks omitted). Ed. Brief in Opposition in No. Justices Limit the Use of Race in School Plans for Integration Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 125 (1973). Grutter emphasized that admitting minority students for the purpose of achieving racial balance, i.e., using a quota for this purpose, is unlawful. To McDaniel? In order for its plan to be constitutional under strict scrutiny, the School District must show its use of race in the admission process was furthering a compelling government interest (compelling interest) and that the School District plan was the narrowest possible use of race that could achieve this interest (narrowly tailored). A further 16% were assigned to a school they had not listed. The wide variety of different integration plans that school districts use throughout the Nation suggests that the problem of racial segregation in schools, including de facto segregation, is difficult to solve. It defines the democratic element as an interest in producing an educational environment that reflects the pluralistic society in which our children will live. Post, at 39. The Ninth Circuit affirmed. McFarland I, 330 F.Supp. Nowhere is this more profoundly true than in the field of education); Tr. 1995). . The plurality is wrong to do so. See Hallinan 741742. The dissent half-heartedly attacks the historical underpinnings of the color-blind Constitution. At the time, however, Young Elementary was 46.8 percent black. In its briefing it fails to make cleareven in the limited respects implicated by Joshuas initial assignment and transfer denialwhether in fact it relies on racial classifications in a manner narrowly tailored to the interest in question, rather than in the far-reaching, inconsistent, and adhoc manner that a less forgiving reading of the record would suggest. See, e.g., Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peńa, 515 U. S. 200, 243, 248, n.6 (1995) (Stevens, J., dissenting); Wygant v. Jackson Bd. of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell, 498 U. S. 237, 249250 (1991); Green v. School Bd. The citations do not carry the significance the districts would ascribe to them. It was then more faithful to Brown and more respectful of our precedent than it is today. In Brown V. Board of Education, the court ruled that 'separate but equal' was an unconstitutional provision and that the practice of segregation was 'inherently unequal'. Ibid. As well, the District points out that it is no longer using the admission system that serves as the basis of this suit, and has not for several years, further demonstrating that any future injury is far from imminent. Parents Involved in Cmty. in No. I use the words may need here deliberately. Rather, race-based government decisionmaking is categorically prohibited unless narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest. See, e.g., Regents of Univ. It contends that these values which the Court recognized as important to the Michigan Law School are even more important at the high school level because not all students will go to college, meaning high school is the last chance for the educational system to instill in them these civic virtues. See also Hanawalt 31; Pub. JCPS is the 26th largest school district in the United States. The dissent elides this distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, casually intimates that Seattles school attendance patterns reflect illegal segregation, post, at 5, 18, 23,[Footnote 15] and fails to credit the judicial determinationunder the most rigorous standardthat Jefferson County had eliminated the vestiges of prior segregation.