Opinion ID: 792253
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Avoiding the Harms Resulting from Racially Concentrated or Isolated Schools

Text: 53 The District's interest in achieving the affirmative benefits of a racially diverse educational environment has a flip side: avoiding racially concentrated or isolated schools. In particular, the District is concerned with making the educational benefits of a diverse learning environment available to all its students and ensuring that no student should be required to attend a racially concentrated school. See Board Statement Reaffirming Diversity Rationale, quoted supra p. 1174. Research regarding desegregation has found that racially concentrated or isolated schools are characterized by much higher levels of poverty, lower average test scores, lower levels of student achievement, with less-qualified teachers and fewer advanced courses — [w]ith few exceptions, separate schools are still unequal schools. See Erica Frankenberg et al., A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream? 11 (The Civil Rights Project, Harvard Univ. Jan. 2003), at http://www.civilright sproject.harvard.edu /research/ reseg03/AreWeLosing theDream.pdf) (hereinafter  Civil Rights Project ) (last visited October 11, 2005) (cited in Grutter, 539 U.S. at 345, 123 S.Ct. 2325 (Ginsburg, J., concurring)). 54 In Seattle, the threat of having to attend a racially concentrated or isolated school is not a theoretical or imagined problem. 17 As the district court found, the District established that housing patterns in Seattle continue to be racially concentrated, and would result in racially concentrated or isolated schools if school assignments were based solely on a student's neighborhood or proximity to a particular high school. Parents I, 137 F.Supp.2d at 1235. Accordingly, the District's Plan strives to ensure that patterns of residential segregation are not replicated in the District's school assignments. Cf. Comfort, 418 F.3d at 29 (The problem is that in Lynn, as in many other cities, minorities and whites often live in different neighborhoods. Lynn's aim is to preserve local schools as an option without having the housing pattern of de facto segregation projected into the school system.) (Boudin, C.J., concurring). Although Parents make much of the fact that Seattle has never operated a segregated school system, and allege that this is not a school desegregation case, each court to review the matter has concluded that because of Seattle's housing patterns, high schools in Seattle would be highly segregated absent race conscious measures. See Parents I, 137 F.Supp.2d at 1237; Parents II, 285 F.3d at 1239-40; Parents III, 294 F.3d at 1088; Parents IV, 72 P.3d at 153. 55 The district court found that, [t]he circumstances that gave rise to the court-approved school assignment policies of the 1970s [e.g., Seattle's segregated housing patterns] continue to be as compelling today as they were in the days of the district's mandatory busing programs. . . . [I]t would defy logic for this court to find that the less intrusive programs of today violate the Equal Protection Clause while the more coercive programs of the 1970s did not. Parents I, 137 F.Supp.2d at 1235. Thus, it concluded that [p]reventing the re-segregation of Seattle's schools is . . . a compelling interest. Id. at 1237; see id. at 1233-35. Several other courts have also conceived of a school district's voluntary reduction or prevention of de facto segregation as a compelling interest. See Comfort, 418 F.3d at 14 (holding that the negative consequences of racial isolation that Lynn seeks to avoid and the benefits of diversity that it hopes to achieve constituted compelling interests); Brewer v. W. Irondequoit Cent. Sch. Dist., 212 F.3d 738, 752 (2d Cir.2000) (holding that a compelling interest can be found in a program that has as its object the reduction of racial isolation and what appears to be de facto segregation), superseded on other grounds as stated in Zervos v. Verizon N.Y., Inc., 252 F.3d 163, 171 n. 7 (2d Cir.2001); Parent Ass'n of Andrew Jackson High Sch. v. Ambach, 738 F.2d 574, 579 (2d Cir.1984) ([W]e held that the Board's goal of ensuring the continuation of relatively integrated schools for the maximum number of students, even at the cost of limiting freedom of choice for some minority students, survived strict scrutiny as a matter of law.) (citing Parent Ass'n of Andrew Jackson High Sch. v. Ambach, 598 F.2d 705, 717-20 (2d Cir.1979)); McFarland v. Jefferson County Pub. Sch., 330 F.Supp.2d 834, 851 (W.D.Ky.2004) (concluding that voluntary maintenance of the desegregated school system was a compelling state interest and the district could consider race in assigning students to comparable schools), aff'd 416 F.3d 513 (6th Cir.2005). 18 We join these courts in recognizing that school districts have a compelling interest in ameliorating real, identifiable de facto racial segregation. 56 The dissent, however, contends first that the District is not desegregating but rather is engaged in racial balancing. Bea, J., dissenting, infra. at 1197-1198. Further, for the dissent, segregation requires a state actor intentionally to separate the races; and in the absence of such offensive state conduct, the Supreme Court cases detailing the remedies for Fourteenth Amendment violations are of no relevance. Bea, J., dissenting, infra. at 1208, n. 17. Thus, without a court finding of de jure segregation the elected school board members of the District may not take voluntary, affirmative steps towards creating a racially diverse student body. We disagree. The fact that de jure segregation is particularly offensive to our Constitution does not diminish the real harms of separation of the races by other means. Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of law. . . . Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483, 494, 74 S.Ct. 686, 98 L.Ed. 873 (1954) (emphasis added). The benefits that flow from integration (or desegregation) exist whether or not a state actor was responsible for the earlier racial isolation. Brown's statement that in the field of public education. . . [s]eparate educational facilities are inherently unequal retains its validity today. Id. at 495, 74 S.Ct. 686. The District is entitled to seek the benefits of racial integration and avoid the harms of segregation even in the absence of a court order deeming it a violator of the U.S. Constitution. 57 Support for this conclusion comes from statements in the Supreme Court's school desegregation cases, which repeatedly refer to the voluntary integration of schools as sound educational policy within the discretion of local school officials. 19 See Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Educ., 402 U.S. 1, 16, 91 S.Ct. 1267, 28 L.Ed.2d 554 (1971) (stating that school authorities are traditionally charged with broad power to formulate and implement educational policy and might well conclude . . . 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); N.C. State Bd. of Educ. v. Swann, 402 U.S. 43, 45, 91 S.Ct. 1284, 28 L.Ed.2d 586 (1971) ([A]s a matter of educational policy school authorities may well conclude that some kind of racial balance in the schools is desirable quite apart from any constitutional requirements.); Bustop, Inc. v. Bd. of Educ. of Los Angeles, 439 U.S. 1380, 1383, 99 S.Ct. 40, 58 L.Ed.2d 88 (1978) (denying a request to stay implementation of a voluntary desegregation plan and noting that there was very little doubt that the Constitution at least permitted its implementation); Keyes v. Sch. Dist. No. 1, 413 U.S. 189, 242, 93 S.Ct. 2686, 37 L.Ed.2d 548 (1973) (Powell, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (School boards would, of course, be free to develop and initiate further plans to promote school desegregation. . . . Nothing in this opinion is meant to discourage school boards from exceeding minimal constitutional standards in promoting the values of an integrated school experience.); Washington v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 458 U.S. at 480, 487, 102 S.Ct. 3187 (holding unconstitutional the state initiative that blocked the Seattle School District's use of mandatory busing to remedy de facto segregation). 58 In sum, we hold that the District's interests in obtaining the educational and social benefits of racial diversity in secondary education and in avoiding racially concentrated or isolated schools resulting from Seattle's segregated housing pattern are clearly compelling.