Jefferson County assigned Joshua to another elementary school in his cluster, Young Elementary. The dissent accuses me of feel[ing] confident that, to end invidious discrimination, one must end all governmental use of race-conscious criteria and chastises me for not deferring to democratically elected majorities. Grutter itself reiterated that outright racial balancing is patently unconstitutional. 539 U. S., at 330. See Brief for Respondents in No. ; race, for some students, is determinative standing alone. Unlike the dissenters, I am unwilling to delegate my constitutional responsibilities to local school boards and allow them to experiment with race-based decisionmaking on the assumption that their intentions will forever remain as good as Justice Breyers. Even if the dicta from Swann were entitled to the weight the dissent would give it, and no dicta is, it not only did not address the question presented in Swann, it also does not address the question presented in these caseswhether the school districts use of racial classifications to achieve their stated goals is permissible. [Footnote 10]. In 1999, several parents brought a lawsuit in federal court attacking the plans use of racial guidelines at one of the districts magnet schools. See, e.g., Crain & Mahard, Desegregation and Black Achievement: A Review of the Research, 42 L. & Contemp. Extending Grutter to this context would require us to cut that holding loose from its theoretical moorings. These are not affirmative action plans, and hence individualized scrutiny is simply beside the point. [Footnote 14]. 2d 834, 837845, 855862 (WD Ky. 2004). See post, at 3435. in Brown v. Board of Education, O.T. 1952, No. Yesterday, school boards had available to them a full range of means to combat segregated schools. 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. Compare Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537, 559 (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting) (Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. But that is also true of the Clarke County schools in McDaniel. Those entrusted with directing our public schools can bring to bear the creativity of experts, parents, administrators, and other concerned citizens to find a way to achieve the compelling interests they face without resorting to widespread governmental allocation of benefits and burdens on the basis of racial classifications. Other studies reach different conclusions. at 12. See Chevron U. S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837, 845 (1984). PICS did not respond to this argument in either of its reply briefs. The 50/50 hypothetical has no support in the record here; it is conjured from the imagination. It therefore reversed the lower courts original finding of no discrimination and remanded, instructing the lower court to issue an injunction to prevent the District from using this system. 05908, at 128a, 129a. Segregation, 1945 to 1956. of New Kent Cty., 391 U. S. 430, 437438 (1968), with Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U. S. 717, 745 (1974). MacFarland v. Jefferson County Public Schoolsand Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. This Nation has a moral and ethical obligation to fulfill its historic commitment to creating an integrated society that ensures equal opportunity for all of its children. 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 Kentuckys newly adopted Education Reform Act. I cannot endorse that conclusion. 6, 39 Ill. 2d 593, 237 N.E. 2d 498 (1968). The Department of Education has characterized this as a compelling interest in regulations and various other statements. Although the Supreme Court must find jurisdiction in order to give an opinion on the equal protection claims, it is uncertain whether the Court will address this question in much detail. Id., at 470. And their history reveals school district goals whose remedial, educational, and democratic elements are inextricably intertwined each with the others. ); brackets and internal quotation marks omitted). Disappointed students are not rejected from a States flagship graduate program; they simply attend a different one of the districts many public schools, which in aspiration and in fact are substantially equal. See also, e.g., Crawford v. Board of Ed. The compelling interest at issue here, then, includes an effort to eradicate the remnants, not of general societal discrimination, ante, at 23 (plurality opinion), but of primary and secondary school segregation, see supra, at 7, 14; it includes an effort to create school environments that provide better educational opportunities for all children; it includes an effort to help create citizens better prepared to know, to understand, and to work with people of all races and backgrounds, thereby furthering the kind of democratic government our Constitution foresees. The debate is not one we need to resolve, however, because it is clear that the racial classifications employed by the districts are not narrowly tailored to the goal of achieving the educational and social benefits asserted to flow from racial diversity. Observers claim that the Supreme Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. The amicus briefs in the cases before us mirror this divergence of opinion. 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 actionwhere 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. 1. 1996) (Perhaps desegregation does not have a single effect, positive or negative, on the academic achievement of African American students, but rather some strategies help, some hurt, and still others make no difference whatsoever. The first consists of the District Court determination in the Louisville case when it dissolved its desegregation order that there was overwhelming evidence of the Boards good faith compliance with the desegregation Decree and its underlying purposes, indeed that the Board had treated the ideal of an integrated system as much more than a legal obligationthey consider it a positive, desirable policy and an essential element of any well-rounded public school education. Hampton II, 102 F.Supp. If the need for the racial classifications embraced by the school districts is unclear, even on the districts own terms, the costs are undeniable. Narrow tailoring requires serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives, Grutter, supra, at 339, and yet in Seattle several alternative assignment plansmany of which would not have used express racial classificationswere rejected with little or no consideration. For Swann is predicated upon a well-established legal view of the Fourteenth Amendment. The measures required by those cases often included race-conscious practices, such as mandatory busing and race-based restrictions on voluntary transfers. 1, p.5 (The Fourteenth Amendment precludes a state from imposing distinctions or classifications based upon race and color alone);[Footnote 20] see also In Memoriam: Honorable Thurgood Marshall, Proceedings of the Bar and Officers of the Supreme Court of the United States, X (1993) (remarks of Judge Motley) (Marshall had a Bible to which he turned during his most depressed moments. 2429, and at oral argument, counsel for Louisville disavowed any claim that Louisvilles argument depend[ed] in any way on the prior de jure segregation, Tr. This interest was critically dependent upon features unique to higher education: the expansive freedoms of speech and thought associated with the university environment, the special niche in our constitutional tradition occupied by universities, and [t]he freedom of a university to make its own judgments as to education[,] includ[ing] the selection of its student body. Id., at 329 (internal quotation marks omitted). Nineteen of the districts forty-six elementary schools were between 80% and 100% black. of Ed etal., on certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Since Grutter explicitly stated that seeking to maintain a specific percentage of minority students in the student body was patently unconstitutional, PICS contends that the Districts plan is also ipso facto unconstitutional. 05915, at 4, and it fails to explain the discrepancy. Consequently, the demographics of a neighborhood school would also be the consequence of those individual choices. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court expressly stated: The racial imbalance act requires the school committee of every municipality annually to submit statistics showing the percentage of nonwhite pupils in all public schools and in each school. App. Third, the plans before us, subjected to rigorous judicial review, are supported by compelling state interests and are narrowly tailored to accomplish those goals. And it ordered the board not to control access to those scarce programs through the use of racial targets. L.Rev. at 116669. Connecticut law requires each school district to submit racial group population figures to the State Board of Education. This working backward to achieve a particular type of racial balance, rather than working forward from some demonstration of the level of diversity that provides the purported benefits, is a fatal flaw under our existing precedent. It is clear to us that focusing simply on demographic issues detracts from focusing on improving schools). 1, 551 U.S. 701 (U.S. 2007). PICS counters that, far from accomplishing these lofty goals, the Districts plan is simply making trivial changes in pigmentation diversity in just a few of the schools that are actually imbalanced. Though Brown decisively rejected those arguments, todays dissent replicates them to a distressing extent. Subsequent to the District Courts dissolution of the desegregation order (in 2000) the board simply continued to implement its 1996 plan as modified to reflect the courts magnet school determination. In 1973 a federal court found that Jefferson County had maintained a segregated school system, Newburg Area Council, Inc. v. Board of Ed. Id. Instead, what was upheld in Grutter was consideration of a far broader array of qualifications and characteristics of which racial or ethnic origin is but a single though important element. 539 U. S., at 325 (quoting Bakke, supra, Next, the dissent argues that the interest in integration has an educational element. The principle that racial balancing is not permitted is one of substance, not semantics. Indeed in Louisville itself the achievement gap between black and white elementary school students grew substantially smaller (by seven percentage points) after the integration plan was implemented in 1975. The government bears the burden of justifying its use of individual racial classifications. Accord, post, at 68 (Today, almost 50 years later, attitudes toward race in this Nation have changed dramatically. As to tracking enrollments, performance and other statistics by race, tracking reveals the problem; it does not cure it. As the panel majority in Parents Involved VI concluded: [T]he tiebreakers annual effect is thus merely to shuffle a few handfuls of different minority students between a few schoolsabout a dozen additional Latinos into Ballard, a dozen black students into Nathan Hale, perhaps two dozen Asians into Roosevelt, and so on. of Oral Arg. To be forced to live under a state-mandated racial label is inconsistent with the dignity of individuals in our society. Under Supreme Court jurisprudence, to prove there was no jurisdiction under Article III 2, the School District had to prove that they would not reinstate the policy. 1, supra, at 461; Seattle Public Schools Desegregation Planning Office, Proposed Alternative Desegregation Plans: Options for Eliminating Racial Imbalance by the 1979-80 School Year (Sept. 1977) (filed with the Court as Exh. 2. They do not seek to award a scarce commodity on the basis of merit, for they are not magnet schools; rather, by design and in practice, they offer substantially equivalent academic programs and electives. No. I cannot rely upon Swanns statement that the use of race-conscious limits is permissible without showing, rather than simply asserting, that the statement represents a constitutional principle firmly rooted in federal and state law. 6704 (WD Wash., 1969), pp. Id. 1 Hampton v. Jefferson Cty., Bd. [Footnote 5] Rejecting arguments comparable to those that the plurality accepts today,[Footnote 6] that court noted: It would be the height of irony if the racial imbalance act, enacted as it was with the laudable purpose of achieving equal educational opportunities, should, by prescribing school pupil allocations based on race, founder on unsuspected shoals in the Fourteenth Amendment. Id., at 698, 227 N.E. 2d, at 733 (footnote omitted). Yet, as explained, each has failed to provide the support necessary for that proposition. But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. To School Committee of Boston? In fact, in each case the extreme measure of relying on race in assignments is unnecessary to achieve the stated goals, even as defined by the districts. 1, 458 U. S. 457, 460 (1982). Diversity, depending on its meaning and definition, is a compelling educational goal a school district may pursue. And it expanded the transfer opportunities available to elementary and middle school pupils. This is a fatal flaw under the Courts existing precedent. The plurality would decline their modest request. To use race in this way is not to set a forbidden quota. See id., at 335 (Properly understood, a quota is a program in which a certain fixed number or proportion of opportunities are reserved exclusively for certain minority groups (quoting Croson, 488 U. S., at 496)). The distinction between government and private action, furthermore, can be amorphous both as a historical matter and as a matter of present-day finding of fact. says nothing about the ultimate validity of any particular law. Id., at 229230 (internal quotation marks omitted). Three years after that decision was handed down, the Governor of Arkansas ordered state militia to block the doors of a white schoolhouse so that black children could not enter. 1, 458 U. S. 457, 472, n. 15 (1982). 05915, p. 77. Is it not the height of wisdom that the manner in which that shall be conducted should be left to those most immediately affected by it, and that the wishes of the parents, both white and colored, should be ascertained before their children are forced into what may be an unwelcome contact?). Post, at 5862. The Seattle district, which has never operated legally segregated schools or Read More(2007) Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School . Statements after the decision 05915, at 46. See id., at 12, 2930. Even today, two of our wisest federal judges have rejected such a wooden reading of the Equal Protection Clause in the context of school integration. 1, 458 U. S. 457); see generally Siqueland 2324. That principle has been accepted by every branch of government and is rooted in the history of the Equal Protection Clause itself. 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. No. of Ed., 72 F.Supp. The Jefferson County Board of Education fails to meet this threshold mandate. The plans here are not tailored to achieving a degree of diversity necessary to realize the asserted educational benefits; instead the plans are tailored, in the words of Seattles Manager of Enrollment Planning, Technical Support, and Demographics, to the goal established by the school board of attain-ing a level of diversity within the schools that approximates the districts overall demographics. App. ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI v. Seattle Sch. 7276 (Feb. 1989); see also Clotfelter, Interracial Contact in High School Extracurricular Activities, 34 Urban Rev., No. Swann, evaluating a school district engaged in court-ordered desegregation, had no occasion to consider whether a districts voluntary adoption of race-based assignments in the absence of a finding of prior de jure segregation was constitutionally permissible, an issue that was again expressly reserved in Washington v. Seattle School Dist. App. Regardless of the outcome, this decision will surely have an effect on public schools, be it in the composition of their student body, their admissions policies, or their educational approach generally. See Hampton v. Jefferson Cty. School Dist. Today, they are not. . The districts here invoke the ultimate goal of those who filed Brown and subsequent cases to support their argument, but the argument of the plaintiff in Brown was that the Equal Protection Clause prevents states from according differential treatment to American children on the basis of their color or race, and that view prevailedthis Court ruled in its remedial opinion that Brown required school districts to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis. Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294, 300301 (emphasis added). See ante, at 9 (Executive and legislative branches, which for generations now have considered these types of policies and procedures, should be permitted to employ them with candor and with confidence that a constitutional violation does not occur whenever a decisionmaker considers the impact a given approach might have on students of different races). But under the Seattle plan, a school with 50 percent Asian-American students and 50 percent white students but no African-American, Native-American, or Latino students would qualify as balanced, while a school with 30 percent Asian-American, 25 percent African-American, 25 percent Latino, and 20 percent white students would not. The District contends that its plan used the narrowest possible means to achieve is educational goals. The District tried to give students their first choice, but when a school had more students applying for it than spots available, it used a series of tiebreakers to determine who received the spots. And as I explained above, the school districts have no remedial interest in pursuing these programs. See Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 244, 275. 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 publics input. [D]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. Adarand, 515 U. S., at 214 (internal quotation marks omitted). See, e.g., n.1, supra. Despite the dissents repeated intimation of a remedial purpose, neither of the programs in question qualifies as a permissible race-based remedial measure. Garfield was the only oversubscribed school whose composition during the 19992000 school year was within the racial guidelines, although in previous years Garfields enrollment had been predominantly nonwhite, and the racial tiebreaker had been used to give preference to white students. The Seattle Plan: Mandatory Busing, 1978 to 1988. Here, the context is one in which school districts seek to advance or to maintain racial integration in primary and secondary schools. See Brief for Petitioner at 4647. of Ed., 402 U. S. 1, 810 (1971); see also Croson, 488 U. S., at 519 (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment) (noting that racial classifications may be the only adequate remedy after a judicial determination that a State or its instrumentality has violated the Equal Protection Clause). Public Schools, 197 F.3d 123, 133 (CA4 1999); Tuttle v. Arlington Cty. Brief for Petitioner at 38. denied, 546 U. S. 1061 (2005). The Ninth Circuit asked whether the Seattle school districts particular use of race in its admission process violated the state constitution. Id., at 43. The Chief Justice twice cites my dissent in Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U. S. 448 (1980). Id. Wygant, 476 U. S., at 275276 (plurality opinion); id., at 295 (White, J., concurring in judgment). See post, at 79, 23. 1.