Collegiate Times

On June 28, a fiercely divided Supreme Court made a very important ruling in favor of restricting the ability of public school districts to use race to increase diversity in their schools.

This court decision is likely to curtail integration attempts across the country but limiting controversial "forced integrations." A note: the term "forced" is used imperfectly here because we do not call primary education "forced" even though it is required by law. However for purposes of simplicity I will employ that terminology.

The specific programs which were deemed unconstitutional supported a program of busing children in majority black school districts to majority white schools and vice versa. This system aimed to create more equality and diversity even when the nation's socio-economic demographics hindered it.

The majority based their 5-4 ruling against the school systems of Seattle and Louisville on the principle of Brown vs. Board of Education which famously ended institutionalized school segregation in 1954. The majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts claimed that they shot down the integration program because Brown created the legacy of denying a race-based approach to schooling. However, as Justice Breyer wrote in a dissenting opinion, "The lesson of history is not that efforts to continue racial segregation are constitutionally indistinguishable from efforts to achieve racial integration. Indeed, it is a cruel distortion of history to compare Topeka, Kansas in the 1950s to Louisville and Seattle in the modern day."

What the majority and Chief Roberts chose to ignore was the very crucial fact that the goal of Brown in Brown vs. Board of Education and the goal of the public education systems in Seattle, Louisville, and across the nation are the same. The goal is the end of segregation in public schooling. While Brown vs. Board fought against "institutionalized segregation", that is segregation which is enforced by the political entities of the day which at the time supported the so-called "Jim Crow laws" of separate but equal, Seattle and Louisville fought against "socio-economic segregation" which is equally as corrosive and damaging.

Seattle and Louisville saw that while black students could attend white schools legally, they rarely did as the cities were strongly segregated along socio-economic lines. The school districts understood that in order to reap the rewards of an educational career in a diverse environment, they had to take steps to achieve it. Ultimately, reaching parity between the races on the economic ladder and bridging immense social gaps between different ethnicities is the best way to get a diverse school as the city will reflect this integrated diversity. As a result, the schools knew that what they could do was to take a small but crucial step in the right direction.

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