Opinion ID: 145702
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Consequences

Text: The Founders meant the Constitution as a practical document that would transmit its basic values to future generations through principles that remained workable over time. Hence it is important to consider the potential consequences of the plurality's approach, as measured against the Constitution's objectives. To do so provides further reason to believe that the plurality's approach is legally unsound. For one thing, consider the effect of the plurality's views on the parties before us and on similar school districts throughout the Nation. Will Louisville and all similar school districts have to return to systems like Louisville's initial 1956 plan, which did not consider race at all? See supra, at 12. That initial 1956 plan proved ineffective. Sixteen years into the plan, 14 of 19 middle and high schools remained almost totally white or almost totally black. Ibid. The districts' past and current plans are not unique. They resemble other plans, promulgated by hundreds of local school boards, which have attempted a variety of desegregation methods that have evolved over time in light of experience. A 1987 Civil Rights Commission Study of 125 school districts in the Nation demonstrated the breadth and variety of desegregation plans: The [study] documents almost 300 desegregation plans that were implemented between 1961 and 1985. The degree of heterogeneity within these districts is immediately apparent. They are located in every region of the country and range in size from Las Cruces, New Mexico, with barely over 15,000 students attending 23 schools in 1968, to New York City, with more than one million students in 853 schools. The sample includes districts in urban areas of all sizes, suburbs ( e.g., Arlington County, Virginia) and rural areas ( e.g., Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, and Raleigh County, West Virginia). It contains 34 countywide districts with central cities (the 11 Florida districts fit this description, plus Clark County, Nevada and others) and a small number of consolidated districts (New Castle County, Delaware and Jefferson County, Kentucky). The districts also vary in their racial compositions and levels of segregation. Initial plans were implemented in Mobile, Alabama and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and in a number of other southern districts in the face of total racial segregation. At the other extreme, Santa Clara, California had a relatively even racial distribution prior to its 1979 desegregation plan. When the 1965 plan was designed for Harford County, Maryland, the district was 92 percent white. Compton, California, on the other hand, became over 99 percent black in the 1980s, while Buffalo, New York had a virtual 50-50 split between white and minority students prior to its 1977 plan. It is not surprising to find a large number of different desegregation strategies in a sample with this much variation. Welch 23 (footnotes omitted). A majority of these desegregation techniques explicitly considered a student's race. See id., at 24-28. Transfer plans, for example, allowed students to shift from a school in which they were in the racial majority to a school in which they would be in a racial minority. Some districts, such as Richmond, California, and Buffalo, New York, permitted only one-way transfers, in which only black students attending predominantly black schools were permitted to transfer to designated receiver schools. Id., at 25. Fifty-three of the 125 studied districts used transfers as a component of their plans. Id., at 83-91. At the state level, 46 States and Puerto Rico have adopted policies that encourage or require local school districts to enact interdistrict or intradistrict open choice plans. Eight of those States condition approval of transfers to another school or district on whether the transfer will produce increased racial integration. Eleven other States require local boards to deny transfers that are not in compliance with the local school board's desegregation plans. See Education Commission of the States, Open Enrollment: 50-State Report (2007), online at http://mb2.ecs.org/reports/Report.aspx?id=268. Arkansas, for example, provides by statute that [n]o student may transfer to a nonresident district where the percentage of enrollment for the student's race exceeds that percentage in the student's resident district. Ark. Code Ann. §6-18-206(f)(1), as amended 2007 Ark. Gen. Acts 552 (2007). An Ohio statute provides, in respect to student choice, that each school district must establish [p]rocedures to ensure that an appropriate racial balance is maintained in the district schools. Ohio Rev. Code Ann. §3313.98(B)(2)(b)(iii) (Lexis Supp. 2006). Ohio adds that a district may object to the enrollment of a native student in an adjacent or other district in order to maintain an appropriate racial balance. §3313.98 (F)(1)(a). A Connecticut statute states that its student choice program will seek to preserve racial and ethnic balance. Conn. Gen. Stat. §10-266aa(b)(2) (2007). Connecticut law requires each school district to submit racial group population figures to the State Board of Education. §10-226a. Another Connecticut regulation provides that [a]ny school in which the Proportion for the School falls outside of a range from 25 percentage points less to 25 percentage points more than the Comparable Proportion for the School District, shall be determined to be racially imbalanced. Conn. Agencies Regs. §10-226e-3(b) (1999). A racial imbalance determination requires the district to submit a plan to correct the racial imbalance, which plan may include mandatory pupil reassignment. §§10-226e-5(a) and (c)(4). Interpreting that State's Constitution, the Connecticut Supreme Court has held legally inadequate the reliance by a local school district solely upon some of the techniques JUSTICE KENNEDY today recommends ( e.g., reallocating resources, etc.). See Sheff v. O'Neill, 238 Conn. 1, 678 A. 2d 1267 (1996). The State Supreme Court wrote: Despite the initiatives undertaken by the defendants to alleviate the severe racial and ethnic disparities among school districts, and despite the fact that the defendants did not intend to create or maintain these disparities, the disparities that continue to burden the education of the plaintiffs infringe upon their fundamental state constitutional right to a substantially equal educational opportunity. Id., at 42, 678 A. 2d, at 1289. At a minimum, the plurality's views would threaten a surge of race-based litigation. Hundreds of state and federal statutes and regulations use racial classifications for educational or other purposes. See supra, at 27. In many such instances, the contentious force of legal challenges to these classifications, meritorious or not, would displace earlier calm. 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. The fact that many such plans have used explicitly racial criteria suggests that such criteria have an important, sometimes necessary, role to play. The fact that the controlling opinion would make a school district's use of such criteria often unlawful (and the plurality's colorblind view would make such use always unlawful) suggests that today's opinion will require setting aside the laws of several States and many local communities. As I have pointed out, supra, at 4, de facto resegregation is on the rise. See Appendix A, infra. It is reasonable to conclude that such resegregation can create serious educational, social, and civic problems. See supra, at 37-45. Given the conditions in which school boards work to set policy, see supra, at 20-21, they may need all of the means presently at their disposal to combat those problems. Yet the plurality would deprive them of at least one tool that some districts now consider vitalthe limited use of broad race-conscious student population ranges. I use the words may need here deliberately. The plurality, or at least those who follow JUSTICE THOMAS' `color-blind' approach, see ante, at 26-27 (THOMAS, J., concurring); Grutter, 539 U. S., at 353-354 (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part), may feel confident that, to end invidious discrimination, one must end all governmental use of race-conscious criteria including those with inclusive objectives. See ante, at 40-41 (plurality opinion); see also ante, at 26 (THOMAS, J., concurring). By way of contrast, I do not claim to know how best to stop harmful discrimination; how best to create a society that includes all Americans; how best to overcome our serious problems of increasing de facto segregation, troubled inner city schooling, and poverty correlated with race. But, as a judge, I do know that the Constitution does not authorize judges to dictate solutions to these problems. Rather, the Constitution creates a democratic political system through which the people themselves must together find answers. And it is for them to debate how best to educate the Nation's children and how best to administer America's schools to achieve that aim. The Court should leave them to their work. And it is for them to decide, to quote the plurality's slogan, whether the best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. Ante, at 40-41. See also Parents Involved VII, 426 F. 3d, at 1222 (Bea, J., dissenting) (The way to end racial discrimination is to stop discriminating by race). That is why the Equal Protection Clause outlaws invidious discrimination, but does not similarly forbid all use of race-conscious criteria. Until today, this Court understood the Constitution as affording the people, acting through their elected representatives, freedom to select the use of race-conscious criteria from among their available options. See Adarand Constructors, Inc., 515 U. S., at 237 ([S]trict scrutiny in this context is [not] `strict in theory, but fatal in fact'  (quoting Fullilove, 448 U. S., at 519 (Marshall, J., concurring in judgment))). Today, however, the Court restricts (and some Members would eliminate) that leeway. I fear the consequences of doing so for the law, for the schools, for the democratic process, and for America's efforts to create, out of its diversity, one Nation.