Very depressing. In the flurry of litigation that will ensue (as Justice Breyer predicts) as schools attempt to align their pupil assignment plans with the new requirements, the Court will move even closer to abolishing consideration of race for remedial purposes altogether, cementing residential segregation in place, and involving bad implications for affirmative action in other contexts.
http://www.nytimes. com/2007/ 06/28/us/ 28cnd-scotus. html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Use of Race in School Placement Curbed By DAVID STOUT Published: June 28, 2007 WASHINGTON, June 28 — In a decision of sweeping importance to educators, parents and schoolchildren across the country, the Supreme Court today sharply limited the ability of school districts to manage the racial makeup of the student bodies in their schools.
Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote the majority's decision. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the dissent.
The court voted, 5 to 4, to reject diversity plans from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., declaring that the districts had failed to meet "their heavy burden" of justifying "the extreme means they have chosen — discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments. "
Today's decision, one of the most important in years on the issue of race and education, may not entirely eliminate race as a factor in assigning students to different schools. But it will surely prompt many districts to revise programs they already have in place, or go back to the drawing boards in designing plans.
The majority's rationale relied in part on the historic 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools — a factor that the dissenters on the court found to be a cruel irony, and which they objected to in emotional terms.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the officials in Seattle and Louisville had failed to show that their plans considered race in the context of a larger educational concept, and therefore did not pass muster.
"Classifying and assigning schoolchildren according to a binary conception of race is an extreme approach in light of this court's precedents and the nation's history of using race in public schools, and requires more than such an amorphous end to justify it," the chief justice wrote.
In the now familiar lineup, Justices Antonin Scalia , Anthony M. Kennedy , Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. sided with the chief justice on most points.
"When it comes to using race to assign children to schools, history will be heard," the majority said.
The four dissenters wrote, in effect, that the majority was standing history on its head. Justice Stephen G. Breyer said that today's result "threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation, and it undermines Brown's promise of integrated primary and secondary education that local communities have sought to make a reality."
"This cannot be justified in the name of the Equal Protection Clause," Justice Breyer went on, alluding to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which bars states from denying people "the equal protection of the laws."
Justice Breyer's dissent was joined by Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens , the tribunal's longest-serving member, who wrote a separate dissent that was remarkable for its feeling.
"While I join Justice Breyer's eloquent and unanswerable dissent in its entirety, it is appropriate to add these words," Justice Stevens wrote. "There is a cruel irony in the chief justice's reliance on our decision in Brown vs. Board of Education."
Today's ruling breaks faith with the 1954 ruling, Justice Stevens asserted. "It is my firm conviction that no member of the court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today's decision," he wrote.
The decision today runs to 185 pages, including the dissents. It was eagerly awaited by the National School Boards Association and by the Council of the Great City Schools, representing 66 urban districts, which had filed briefs on behalf of Seattle and Louisville and had warned of disruption if the justices overturned lower court rulings upholding the diversity plans.
The Bush administration participated as a "friend of the court" on behalf of the plaintiffs who challenged the diversity plans.
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