In a recent case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et. al., the U.S. Supreme Court said it was wrong for the school authorities to assign students to high schools based on race.
Some viewed this judicial opinion as a step backward. Some, especially President Bush’s critics, viewed it as overturning the precedent set by Brown v. The Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that ended legal segregation in our public schools.
When you look at judicial opinion carefully, though, you can see that rather then overturning the Brown precedent, this decision strengthened it. In this most recent Seattle Schools case, the Court, in fact, cites the Brown opinion that required school districts across the country “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis.”
Still, the decision leaves Seattle and many other urban school districts trying to figure out ways to keep their schools from becoming segregated. What is challenging is that the new school segregation is not driven by laws but by economics and other social forces. The old solutions no longer work.
The link between economics and school desegregation has a long history. The Brown case originated in an economic issue and was filed against the school board of Topeka, Kansas, because the lion’s share of the money was going to the schools where the white kids went. The black kids attended schools that were, by any honest measurement system, a disgrace.
Instead of the “separate but equal” facilities promised under the legal segregation embedded in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision over half a century earlier, what resulted was “separate, but not equal.”
The plaintiff’s attorney in the Brown case was Thurgood Marshall, who was later to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice himself. In presenting his case, he argued that the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution “prevents states from according differential treatment to American children on the basis of their color or race.” And his argument won the day.
But while the Brown case was a momentous decision, and set America on a different, and better, course, it did not foresee, let alone resolve, the educational issues that would emerge from the new and different kinds of segregation we have been experiencing. And it certainly did not foresee that the forces behind this, economics in particular, could sustain segregation just as tightly as the law had done previously.
Educational system failures at the K-12 level severely restrict the economic opportunities of students. Lowered educational expectations translate directly into lowered income expectations. When we add in two more factors – that kids of lower income families tend to fail at higher rates, and that minority incomes tend to be lower – we have the ingredients for a self-sustaining cycle.
Still, it would be a mistake and a distraction to view this recent decision against the Seattle School District as a backward step. Certainly, the door remains open for school districts to use racial characteristics as a factor in school assignments if there were a compelling need to do so, as earlier court decisions had made clear. What the court said this time was that Seattle’s goal of diversity was “amorphous” and did not justify the use of simplistic “white-nonwhite or black-other” racial characteristics in assigning students to schools. More pointedly, it said that unless Seattle could come up with a better reason for what it was doing and a better method for doing it, its program was actually unconstitutional racial balancing.
This Supreme Court decision did not address the economic and other forces underlying the racial distributions in the schools. And it did not address the educational value of diversity as such. These remain open issues, for us to resolve.
It is important for the school district, and for all of us, to remember that the Supreme Court is not the reason why Seattle’s public schools are failing. More diversity would be a good thing and it is even possible that it would help educationally, a little. It is difficult to believe, though, that even if the school district bused kids around to its heart’s content it would make much of a dent in the system’s abysmal performance.
As a legal reality, we have a compelling interest in making public education work in America and there is no constitutional barrier holding us back. What is really holding us back is the shortage of focused management, undistracted and undiluted by rituals of blame-placing.
The era of legal segregation is over; that war has been fought and won. Empty and futile re-enactments will not prepare our kids for the world and its economic challenges they must face. For that they need education.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes “Business 101” monthly for the Snohomish County Business Journal.
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