Opinion ID: 145702
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: facts

Text: The historical and factual context in which these cases arise is critical. In Brown, this Court held that the government's segregation of schoolchildren by race violates the Constitution's promise of equal protection. The Court emphasized that education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. 347 U. S., at 493. And it thereby set the Nation on a path toward public school integration. In dozens of subsequent cases, this Court told school districts previously segregated by law what they must do at a minimum to comply with Brown 's constitutional holding. The measures required by those cases often included race-conscious practices, such as mandatory busing and race-based restrictions on voluntary transfers. See, e.g., Columbus Bd. of Ed. v. Penick, 443 U. S. 449, 455, n. 3 (1979); Davis v. Board of School Comm'rs of Mobile Cty., 402 U. S. 33, 37-38 (1971); Green v. School Bd. of New Kent Cty., 391 U. S. 430, 441-442 (1968). Beyond those minimum requirements, the Court left much of the determination of how to achieve integration to the judgment of local communities. Thus, in respect to race-conscious desegregation measures that the Constitution permitted, but did not require (measures similar to those at issue here), this Court unanimously stated: School authorities are traditionally charged with broad power to formulate and implement educational policy and might well conclude, for example, that in order to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society each school should have a prescribed ratio of Negro to white students reflecting the proportion for the district as a whole. To do this as an educational policy is within the broad discretionary powers of school authorities.  Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Ed., 402 U. S. 1, 16 (1971) (emphasis added). As a result, different districtssome acting under court decree, some acting in order to avoid threatened lawsuits, some seeking to comply with federal administrative orders, some acting purely voluntarily, some acting after federal courts had dissolved earlier ordersadopted, modified, and experimented with hosts of different kinds of plans, including race-conscious plans, all with a similar objective: greater racial integration of public schools. See F. Welch & A. Light, New Evidence on School Desegregation v (1987) (hereinafter Welch) (prepared for the Commission on Civil Rights) (reviewing a sample of 125 school districts, constituting 20% of national public school enrollment, that had experimented with nearly 300 different plans over 18 years). The techniques that different districts have employed range from voluntary transfer programs to mandatory reassignment. Id., at 21. And the design of particular plans has been dictated by both the law and the specific needs of the district. Ibid. Overall these efforts brought about considerable racial integration. More recently, however, progress has stalled. Between 1968 and 1980, the number of black children attending a school where minority children constituted more than half of the school fell from 77% to 63% in the Nation (from 81% to 57% in the South) but then reversed direction by the year 2000, rising from 63% to 72% in the Nation (from 57% to 69% in the South). Similarly, between 1968 and 1980, the number of black children attending schools that were more than 90% minority fell from 64% to 33% in the Nation (from 78% to 23% in the South), but that too reversed direction, rising by the year 2000 from 33% to 37% in the Nation (from 23% to 31% in the South). As of 2002, almost 2.4 million students, or over 5% of all public school enrollment, attended schools with a white population of less than 1%. Of these, 2.3 million were black and Latino students, and only 72,000 were white. Today, more than one in six black children attend a school that is 99-100% minority. See Appendix A, infra. In light of the evident risk of a return to school systems that are in fact (though not in law) resegregated, many school districts have felt a need to maintain or to extend their integration efforts. The upshot is that myriad school districts operating in myriad circumstances have devised myriad plans, often with race-conscious elements, all for the sake of eradicating earlier school segregation, bringing about integration, or preventing retrogression. Seattle and Louisville are two such districts, and the histories of their present plans set forth typical school integration stories. I describe those histories at length in order to highlight three important features of these cases. First, the school districts' plans serve compelling interests and are narrowly tailored on any reasonable definition of those terms. Second, the distinction between de jure segregation (caused by school systems) and de facto segregation (caused, e.g., by housing patterns or generalized societal discrimination) is meaningless in the present context, thereby dooming the plurality's endeavor to find support for its views in that distinction. Third, real-world efforts to substitute racially diverse for racially segregated schools (however caused) are complex, to the point where the Constitution cannot plausibly be interpreted to rule out categorically all local efforts to use means that are conscious of the race of individuals. In both Seattle and Louisville, the local school districts began with schools that were highly segregated in fact. In both cities plaintiffs filed lawsuits claiming unconstitutional segregation. In Louisville, a federal district court found that school segregation reflected pre- Brown state laws separating the races. In Seattle, the plaintiffs alleged that school segregation unconstitutionally reflected not only generalized societal discrimination and residential housing patterns, but also school board policies and actions that had helped to create, maintain, and aggravate racial segregation. In Louisville, a federal court entered a remedial decree. In Seattle, the parties settled after the school district pledged to undertake a desegregation plan. In both cities, the school boards adopted plans designed to achieve integration by bringing about more racially diverse schools. In each city the school board modified its plan several times in light of, for example, hostility to busing, the threat of resegregation, and the desirability of introducing greater student choice. And in each city, the school boards' plans have evolved over time in ways that progressively diminish the plans' use of explicit race-conscious criteria. The histories that follow set forth these basic facts. They are based upon numerous sources, which for ease of exposition I have cataloged, along with their corresponding citations, at Appendix B, infra.
1. Segregation, 1945 to 1956. During and just after World War II, significant numbers of black Americans began to make Seattle their home. Few black residents lived outside the central section of the city. Most worked at unskilled jobs. Although black students made up about 3% of the total Seattle population in the mid-1950's, nearly all black children attended schools where a majority of the population was minority. Elementary schools in central Seattle were between 60% and 80% black; Garfield, the central district high school, was more than 50% minority; schools outside the central and southeastern sections of Seattle were virtually all white. 2. Preliminary Challenges, 1956 to 1969. In 1956, a memo for the Seattle School Board reported that school segregation reflected not only segregated housing patterns but also school board policies that permitted white students to transfer out of black schools while restricting the transfer of black students into white schools. In 1958, black parents whose children attended Harrison Elementary School (with a black student population of over 75%) wrote the Seattle board, complaining that the `boundaries for the Harrison Elementary School were not set in accordance with the long-established standards of the School District . . . but were arbitrarily set with an end to excluding colored children from McGilvra School, which is adjacent to the Harrison school district.'  In 1963, at the insistence of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other community groups, the school board adopted a new racebased transfer policy. The new policy added an explicitly racial criterion: If a place exists in a school, then, irrespective of other transfer criteria, a white student may transfer to a predominantly black school, and a black student may transfer to a predominantly white school. At that time one high school, Garfield, was about two-thirds minority; eight high schools were virtually all white. In 1963, the transfer program's first year, 239 black students and 8 white students transferred. In 1969, about 2,200 (of 10,383 total) of the district's black students and about 400 of the district's white students took advantage of the plan. For the next decade, annual program transfers remained at approximately this level. 3. The NAACP's First Legal Challenge and Seattle's Response, 1969 to 1977. In 1969 the NAACP filed a federal lawsuit against the school board, claiming that the board had unlawfully and unconstitutionally establish[ed] and maintain[ed] a system of racially segregated public schools. The complaint said that 77% of black public elementary school students in Seattle attended 9 of the city's 86 elementary schools and that 23 of the remaining schools had no black students at all. Similarly, of the 1,461 black students enrolled in the 12 senior high schools in Seattle, 1,151 (or 78.8%) attended 3 senior high schools, and 900 (61.6%) attended a single school, Garfield. The complaint charged that the school board had brought about this segregated system in part by mak[ing] and enforc[ing] certain rules and regulations, in part by drawing . . . boundary lines and executing school attendance policies that would create and maintain predominantly Negro or non-white schools, and in part by building schools in such a manner as to restrict the Negro plaintiffs and the class they represent to predominantly negro or non-white schools. The complaint also charged that the board discriminated in assigning teachers. The board responded to the lawsuit by introducing a plan that required race-based transfers and mandatory busing. The plan created three new middle schools at three school buildings in the predominantly white north end. It then created a mixed student body by assigning to those schools students who would otherwise attend predominantly white, or predominantly black, schools elsewhere. It used explicitly racial criteria in making these assignments ( i.e., it deliberately assigned to the new middle schools black students, not white students, from the black schools and white students, not black students, from the white schools). And it used busing to transport the students to their new assignments. The plan provoked considerable local opposition. Opponents brought a lawsuit. But eventually a state court found that the mandatory busing was lawful. In 1976-1977, the plan involved the busing of about 500 middle school students (300 black students and 200 white students). Another 1,200 black students and 400 white students participated in the previously adopted voluntary transfer program. Thus about 2,000 students out of a total district population of about 60,000 students were involved in one or the other transfer program. At that time, about 20% or 12,000 of the district's students were black. And the board continued to describe 26 of its 112 schools as segregated. 4. The NAACP's Second Legal Challenge, 1977. In 1977, the NAACP filed another legal complaint, this time with the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The complaint alleged that the Seattle School Board had created or perpetuated unlawful racial segregation through, e.g., certain school-transfer criteria, a construction program that need-lessly built new schools in white areas, district line-drawing criteria, the maintenance of inferior facilities at black schools, the use of explicit racial criteria in the assignment of teachers and other staff, and a general pattern of delay in respect to the implementation of promised desegregation efforts. The OCR and the school board entered into a formal settlement agreement. The agreement required the board to implement what became known as the Seattle Plan. 5. The Seattle Plan: Mandatory Busing, 1978 to 1988. The board began to implement the Seattle Plan in 1978. This plan labeled racially imbalanced any school at which the percentage of black students exceeded by more than 20% the minority population of the school district as a whole. It applied that label to 26 schools, including 4 high schoolsCleveland (72.8% minority), Franklin (76.6% minority), Garfield (78.4% minority), and Rainier Beach (58.9% minority). The plan paired (or triaded) imbalanced black schools with imbalanced white schools. It then placed some grades (say, third and fourth grades) at one school building and other grades (say, fifth and sixth grades) at the other school building. And it thereby required, for example, all fourth grade students from the previously black and previously white schools first to attend together what would now be a mixed fourth grade at one of the school buildings and then the next year to attend what would now be a mixed fifth grade at the other school building. At the same time, the plan provided that a previous black school would remain about 50% black, while a previous white school would remain about two-thirds white. It was consequently necessary to decide with some care which students would attend the new mixed grade. For this purpose, administrators cataloged the racial makeup of each neighborhood housing block. The school district met its percentage goals by assigning to the new mixed school an appropriate number of black housing blocks and white housing blocks. At the same time, transport from house to school involved extensive busing, with about half of all students attending a school other than the one closest to their home. The Seattle Plan achieved the school integration that it sought. Just prior to the plan's implementation, for example, 4 of Seattle's 11 high schools were imbalanced, i.e., almost exclusively black or almost exclusively white. By 1979, only two were out of balance. By 1980 only Cleveland remained out of balance (as the board defined it) and that by a mere two students. Nonetheless, the Seattle Plan, due to its busing, provoked serious opposition within the State. See generally Washington v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, 458 U. S. 457, 461466 (1982). Thus, Washington state voters enacted an initiative that amended state law to require students to be assigned to the schools closest to their homes. Id., at 462. The Seattle School Board challenged the constitutionality of the initiative. Id., at 464. This Court then held that the initiativewhich would have prevented the Seattle Plan from taking effectviolated the Fourteenth Amendment. Id., at 470. 6. Student Choice, 1988 to 1998. By 1988, many white families had left the school district, and many Asian families had moved in. The public school population had fallen from about 100,000 to less than 50,000. The racial makeup of the school population amounted to 43% white, 24% black, and 23% Asian or Pacific Islander, with Hispanics and Native Americans making up the rest. The cost of busing, the harm that members of all racial communities feared that the Seattle Plan caused, the desire to attract white families back to the public schools, and the interest in providing greater school choice led the board to abandon busing and to substitute a new student assignment policy that resembles the plan now before us. The new plan permitted each student to choose the school he or she wished to attend, subject to race-based constraints. In respect to high schools, for example, a student was given a list of a subset of schools, carefully selected by the board to balance racial distribution in the district by including neighborhood schools and schools in racially different neighborhoods elsewhere in the city. The student could then choose among those schools, indicating a first choice, and other choices the student found acceptable. In making an assignment to a particular high school, the district would give first preference to a student with a sibling already at the school. 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). It gave third preference to students residing in the neighborhood. It gave fourth preference to students who received child care in the neighborhood. In a typical year, say, 1995, about 20,000 potential high school students participated. About 68% received their first choice. Another 16% received an acceptable choice. A further 16% were assigned to a school they had not listed. 7. The Current Plan, 1999 to the Present. In 1996, the school board adopted the present plan, which began in 1999. In doing so, it sought to deemphasize the use of racial criteria and to increase the likelihood that a student would receive an assignment at his first or second choice high school. The district retained a racial tiebreaker for oversubscribed schools, which takes effect only if the school's minority or majority enrollment falls outside of a 30% range centered on the minority/majority population ratio within the district. At the same time, all students were free subsequently to transfer from the school at which they were initially placed to a different school of their choice without regard to race. Thus, at worst, a student would have to spend one year at a high school he did not pick as a first or second choice. The new plan worked roughly as expected for the two school years during which it was in effect (1999-2000 and 2000-2001). In the 2000-2001 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. (We consider only the ninth grade since only students entering that class were subject to the tiebreaker, and because the plan was not in place long enough to change the composition of an entire school.) In the year 2005-2006, by which time the racial tiebreaker had not been used for several years, Franklin's overall minority enrollment had risen to 90%. During the period the tiebreaker applied, it typically affected about 300 students per year. Between 80% and 90% of all students received their first choice assignment; between 89% and 97% received their first or second choice assignment. Petitioner Parents Involved in Community Schools objected to Seattle's most recent plan under the State and Federal Constitutions. In due course, the Washington Supreme Court, the Federal District Court, and the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (sitting en banc) rejected the challenge and found Seattle's plan lawful.
1. Before the Lawsuit, 1954 to 1972. In 1956, two years after Brown made clear that Kentucky could no longer require racial segregation by law, the Louisville Board of Education created a geography-based student assignment plan designed to help achieve school integration. At the same time it adopted an open transfer policy under which approximately 3,000 of Louisville's 46,000 students applied for transfer. By 1972, however, the Louisville School District remained highly segregated. Approximately half the district's public school enrollment was black; about half was white. Fourteen of the district's nineteen nonvocational middle and high schools were close to totally black or totally white. Nineteen of the district's forty-six elementary schools were between 80% and 100% black. Twenty-one elementary schools were between roughly 90% and 100% white. 2. Court-Imposed Guidelines and Busing, 1972 to 1991. In 1972, civil rights groups and parents, claiming unconstitutional segregation, sued the Louisville Board of Education in federal court. The original litigation eventually became a lawsuit against the Jefferson County School System, which in April 1975 absorbed Louisville's schools and combined them with those of the surrounding suburbs. (For ease of exposition, I shall still use Louisville to refer to what is now the combined districts.) After preliminary rulings and an eventual victory for the plaintiffs in the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the District Court in July 1975 entered an order requiring desegregation. The order's requirements reflected a (newly enlarged) school district student population of about 135,000, approximately 20% of whom were black. The order required the school board to create and to maintain schools with student populations that ranged, for elementary schools, between 12% and 40% black, and for secondary schools (with one exception), between 12.5% and 35% black. The District Court also adopted a complex desegregation plan designed to achieve the order's targets. 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. The plan's initial busing requirements were extensive, involving the busing of 23,000 students and a transportation fleet that had to operate from early in the morning until late in the evening. For typical students, the plan meant busing for several years (several more years for typical black students than for typical white students). The following notice, published in a Louisville newspaper in 1976, gives a sense of how the district's race-based busing plan operated in practice: Louisville Courier Journal, June 18, 1976 (reproduced in J. Wilkinson, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration 1954-1978, p. 176 (1979)). The District Court monitored implementation of the plan. In 1978, it found that the plan had brought all of Louisville's schools within its `guidelines' for racial composition for at least a substantial portion of the [previous] three years. It removed the case from its active docket while stating that it expected the board to continue to implement those portions of the desegregation order which are by their nature of a continuing effect. By 1984, after several schools had fallen out of compliance with the order's racial percentages due to shifting demographics in the community, the school board revised its desegregation plan. In doing so, the board created a new racial guideline, namely a floating range of 10% above and 10% below the countywide average for the different grade levels. The board simultaneously redrew district boundaries so that middle school students could attend the same school for three years and high school students for four years. It added magnet programs at two high schools. And it adjusted its alphabet-based system for grouping and busing students. The board estimated that its new plan would lead to annual reassignment (with busing) of about 8,500 black students and about 8,000 white students. 3. Student Choice and Project Renaissance, 1991 to 1996. By 1991, the board had concluded that assigning elementary school students to two or more schools during their elementary school years had proved educationally unsound and, if continued, would undermine Kentucky's newly adopted Education Reform Act. It consequently conducted a nearly year-long review of its plan. In doing so, it consulted widely with parents and other members of the local community, using public presentations, public meetings, and various other methods to obtain the public's input. At the conclusion of this review, the board adopted a new plan, called Project Renaissance, that emphasized student choice. Project Renaissance again revised the board's racial guidelines. It provided that each elementary school would have a black student population of between 15% and 50%; each middle and high school would have a black population and a white population that fell within a range, the boundaries of which were set at 15% above and 15% below the general student population percentages in the county at that grade level. The plan then drew new geographical school assignment zones designed to satisfy these guide-lines; the district could reassign students if particular schools failed to meet the guidelines and was required to do so if a school repeatedly missed these targets. In respect to elementary schools, the plan first drew a neighborhood line around each elementary school, and it then drew a second line around groups of elementary schools (called clusters). It initially assigned each student to his or her neighborhood school, but it permitted each student freely to transfer between elementary schools within each cluster provided that the transferring student (a) was black if transferring from a predominantly black school to a predominantly white school, or (b) was white if transferring from a predominantly white school to a predominantly black school. Students could also apply to attend magnet elementary schools or programs. The plan required each middle school student to be assigned to his or her neighborhood school unless the student applied for, and was accepted by, a magnet middle school. The plan provided for open high school enrollment. Every 9th or 10th grader could apply to any high school in the system, and the high school would accept applicants according to set criteriaone of which consisted of the need to attain or remain in compliance with the plan's racial guidelines. Finally, the plan created two new magnet schools, one each at the elementary and middle school levels. 4. The Current Plan: Project Renaissance Modified, 1996 to 2003. In 1995 and 1996, the Louisville School Board, with the help of a special Planning Team, community meetings, and other official and unofficial study groups, monitored the effects of Project Renaissance and considered proposals for improvement. Consequently, in 1996, the board modified Project Renaissance, thereby creating the present plan. At the time, the district's public school population was approximately 30% black. The plan consequently redrew the racial guidelines, setting the boundaries at 15% to 50% black for all schools. It again redrew school assignment boundaries. And it expanded the transfer opportunities available to elementary and middle school pupils. The plan forbade transfers, however, if the transfer would lead to a school population outside the guideline range, i.e., if it would create a school where fewer than 15% or more than 50% of the students were black. The plan also established Parent Assistance Centers to help parents and students navigate the school selection and assignment process. It pledged the use of other resources in order to encourage all schools to achieve an African-American enrollment equivalent to the average district-wide African-American enrollment at the school's respective elementary, middle or high school level. And the plan continued use of magnet schools. In 1999, several parents brought a lawsuit in federal court attacking the plan's use of racial guidelines at one of the district's magnet schools. They asked the court to dissolve the desegregation order and to hold the use of magnet school racial guidelines unconstitutional. The board opposed dissolution, arguing that the old dual system had left a demographic imbalance that prevent[ed] dissolution. In 2000, after reviewing the present plan, the District Court dissolved the 1975 order. It wrote that there was overwhelming evidence of the Board's good faith compliance with the desegregation Decree and its underlying purposes. It added that the Louisville School Board had treated the ideal of an integrated system as much more than a legal obligationthey consider it a positive, desirable policy and an essential element of any well-rounded public school education. The Court also found that the magnet programs available at the high school in question were not available at other high schools in the school district. It consequently held unconstitutional the use of race-based targets to govern admission to magnet schools. And it ordered the board not to control access to those scarce programs through the use of racial targets. 5. The Current Lawsuit, 2003 to the Present. Subsequent to the District Court's dissolution of the desegregation order (in 2000) the board simply continued to implement its 1996 plan as modified to reflect the court's magnet school determination. In 2003, the petitioner now before us, Crystal Meredith, brought this lawsuit challenging the plan's unmodified portions, i.e., those portions that dealt with ordinary, not magnet, schools. Both the District Court and the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected Meredith's challenge and held the unmodified aspects of the plan constitutional.
The histories I have set forth describe the extensive and ongoing efforts of two school districts to bring about greater racial integration of their public schools. In both cases the efforts were in part remedial. Louisville began its integration efforts in earnest when a federal court in 1975 entered a school desegregation order. Seattle undertook its integration efforts in response to the filing of a federal lawsuit and as a result of its settlement of a segregation complaint filed with the federal OCR. The plans in both Louisville and Seattle grow out of these earlier remedial efforts. Both districts faced problems that reflected initial periods of severe racial segregation, followed by such remedial efforts as busing, followed by evidence of resegregation, followed by a need to end busing and encourage the return of, e.g., suburban students through increased student choice. When formulating the plans under review, both districts drew upon their considerable experience with earlier plans, having revised their policies periodically in light of that experience. Both districts rethought their methods over time and explored a wide range of other means, including non-race-conscious policies. Both districts also considered elaborate studies and consulted widely within their communities. Both districts sought greater racial integration for educational and democratic, as well as for remedial, reasons. Both sought to achieve these objectives while preserving their commitment to other educational goals, e.g., districtwide commitment to high quality public schools, increased pupil assignment to neighborhood schools, diminished use of busing, greater student choice, reduced risk of white flight, and so forth. Consequently, the present plans expand student choice; they limit the burdens (including busing) that earlier plans had imposed upon students and their families; and they use race-conscious criteria in limited and gradually diminishing ways. In particular, they use race-conscious criteria only to mark the outer bounds of broad population-related ranges. The histories also make clear the futility of looking simply to whether earlier school segregation was de jure or de facto in order to draw firm lines separating the constitutionally permissible from the constitutionally forbidden use of race-conscious criteria. JUSTICE THOMAS suggests that it will be easy to identify de jure segregation because [i]n most cases, there either will or will not have been a state constitutional amendment, state statute, local ordinance, or local administrative policy explicitly requiring separation of the races. Ante, at 6, n. 4 (concurring opinion). But our precedent has recognized that de jure discrimination can be present even in the absence of racially explicit laws. See Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356, 373-374 (1886). No one here disputes that Louisville's segregation was de jure. But what about Seattle's? Was it de facto? De jure? A mixture? Opinions differed. Or is it that a prior federal court had not adjudicated the matter? Does that make a difference? 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? The plurality does not seem confident as to the answer. Compare ante, at 12 (opinion of the Court) ([T]he Seattle public schools have never shown that they were ever segregated by law (emphasis added)), with ante at 29-30 (plurality opinion) (assuming the Seattle school district was never segregated by law, but seeming to concede that a school district with de jure segregation need not be subject to a court order to be allowed to engage in race-based remedial measures). A court finding of de jure segregation cannot be the crucial variable. After all, a number of school districts in the South that the Government or private plaintiffs challenged as segregated by law voluntarily desegregated their schools without a court order just as Seattle did. See, e.g., Coleman, Desegregation of the Public Schools in KentuckyThe Second Year After the Supreme Court's Decision, 25 J. Negro Educ. 254, 256, 261 (1956) (40 of Kentucky's 180 school districts began desegregation without court orders); Branton, Little Rock Revisited: Desegregation to Resegregation, 52 J. Negro Educ. 250, 251 (1983) (similar in Arkansas); Bullock & Rodgers, Coercion to Compliance: Southern School Districts and School Desegregation Guidelines, 38 J. Politics 987, 991 (1976) (similar in Georgia); McDaniel v. Barresi, 402 U. S. 39, 40, n. 1 (1971) (Clarke County, Georgia). See also Letter from Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General, to John F. Kennedy, President (Jan. 24, 1963) (hereinafter Kennedy Report), available at http://www.gilderlehrman.org/search/collection_pdfs/05/63/ 0/05630.pdf (all Internet materials as visited June 26, 2007, and available in Clerk of Court's case file) (reporting successful efforts by the Government to induce voluntary desegregation). Moreover, Louisville's history makes clear that a community under a court order to desegregate might submit a race-conscious remedial plan before the court dissolved the order, but with every intention of following that plan even after dissolution. How could such a plan be lawful the day before dissolution but then become unlawful the very next day? On what legal ground can the majority rest its contrary view? But see ante, at 12-13, 17, n. 12. Are courts really to treat as merely de facto segregated those school districts that avoided a federal order by voluntarily complying with Brown 's requirements? See id., at 12, 29-30. This Court has previously done just the opposite, permitting a race-conscious remedy without any kind of court decree. See McDaniel, supra, at 41. Because the Constitution emphatically does not forbid the use of race-conscious measures by districts in the South that voluntarily desegregated their schools, on what basis does the plurality claim that the law forbids Seattle to do the same? But see ante, at 29. The histories also indicate the complexity of the tasks and the practical difficulties that local school boards face when they seek to achieve greater racial integration. The boards work in communities where demographic patterns change, where they must meet traditional learning goals, where they must attract and retain effective teachers, where they should (and will) take account of parents' views and maintain their commitment to public school education, where they must adapt to court intervention, where they must encourage voluntary student and parent actionwhere they will find that their own good faith, their knowledge, and their understanding of local circumstances are always necessary but often insufficient to solve the problems at hand. These facts and circumstances help explain why in this context, as to means, the law often leaves legislatures, city councils, school boards, and voters with a broad range of choice, thereby giving different communities the opportunity to try different solutions to common problems and gravitate toward those that prove most successful or seem to them best to suit their individual needs. Comfort v. Lynn School Comm., 418 F. 3d 1, 28 (CA1 2005) (Boudin, C. J., concurring) (citing United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S. 549, 581 (1995) (KENNEDY, J., concurring)), cert. denied, 546 U. S. 1061 (2005). With this factual background in mind, I turn to the legal question: Does the United States Constitution prohibit these school boards from using race-conscious criteria in the limited ways at issue here?