State educators rush to fight Supreme ruling

Howard Manly

Local reaction to last month’s U.S. Supreme Court decision on public school desegregation was emphatic.
Kathy A. Reddick, president of the Cambridge branch of the NAACP, said she is still in shock that 53 years after the Supreme Court outlawed public segregation in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, it has now “declared that race does not matter and racial equality is a non-issue.”

“It is a very sad day for this country,” Reddick continued, “but one that I pray will wake up this nation again to take up the fight and move to make right this injustice. We will not go back to the days of separate and unequal.”

Jean M. McGuire, longtime executive director of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) was more pessimistic. In a published interview, McGuire described the court’s decision “as the worst decision that we’ve had in 50 years.”

Worse, she explained: “Nobody knows anything. We know that it’s bad. We know it’s very bad.”

To at least close the legal knowledge gap, civil rights activists and state school officials met at Wheelock College on Tuesday and held a strategy session to learn the possible impacts of the decision on about 20 different school districts throughout the state with voluntary desegregation programs that consider race. The ruling is already under review by lawyers for the state Department of Education and attorney general’s office.

But the strategy sessions may be too late, and the METCO program may be vulnerable.

Founded in 1966, METCO buses 3,289 minority students from Boston and Springfield to 38 suburban school systems. About 400 to 460 new students from Boston enroll in the program annually. Of those students, about 72 percent are black, 17 percent are Latino and 7 percent are Asian, METCO officials told reporters. In Boston, there are between 12,000 and 15,000 children on the waiting list.

In Lynn, lawyers representing parents who challenged that city’s school desegregation plan have already asked a federal court to end the practice, citing last month’s Supreme Court ruling that prohibits schools from considering race when assigning students.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling last month rejected integration plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, though it did not say race could never be used when considering school assignments.

Lynn’s system allows race to be considered when children request transfers to schools outside their neighborhoods.

Attorney Chester Darling, who called Lynn’s policy unconstitutional, filed a motion in U.S. District Court last week. He’s asking that the case be reopened and that the Lynn policy be thrown out.

“The court has now found assignment plans that use racial restrictions on student assignments as a tool to maintain racial diversity to be in violation of the Equal Protection Clause,” Darling wrote in the court brief.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Darling said it’s a “slam dunk” that the Lynn policy and others in Massachusetts will be eliminated.

No date has been set for a hearing.

Last week, state Department of Education Commissioner David Driscoll and Attorney General Martha Coakley said they would determine which desegregation programs were affected by the ruling and work with local officials to make any changes.

Also last week, Nicholas Kostan, superintendent of schools in Lynn, said it appears to him the city will have to abandon the 20-year-old policy, which he said has worked to promote good relations between races.

The Lynn case appeared dead in 2006 after the Supreme Court refused to reconsider its rejection of the Darling’s appeal in 2005. A federal district and appeals court had ruled the Lynn policies were legal, and that the city had a compelling educational interest in influencing the racial composition of its schools.

But that was before the conservative majority appeared on the Supreme Court. Of particular concern to civil rights activists was the opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s lone African American.

Thomas joined the 5-4 majority ruling that integration plans put in place by officials in Seattle and Louisville violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. In writing a separate concurrence, he dismissed the notion of the court’s minority that “racially balanced schools improve educational outcomes for black children.”

“In reality, it is far from apparent that coerced racial mixing has any educational benefits, much less that integration is necessary to black achievement,” he wrote.

Thomas’ conservative views are well known and longstanding.

“We are not beggars or objects of charity,” he told an interviewer in 1991. “We don’t get smarter just because we sit next to white people in class, and we don’t progress just because society is ready with handouts.”

As he had in the past, Thomas last month argued that black children had achieved great success in what he called “racially isolated” schools before the landmark ruling Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

In the context of higher education, Thomas said earlier that affirmative action programs cruelly deceived black students admitted to elite law schools under special programs who then found that they could not compete.

“These overmatched students take the bait,” he wrote in 2003, “only to find they cannot succeed in the cauldron of competition.”

Thomas was himself admitted to Yale Law School under a set-aside program for minority applicants, although his limited public comments on the subject suggest he has resisted accepting that he was given special treatment.

In the Louisville and Seattle cases, Thomas said that though the programs had been designed to maintain racial balances in schools, they meant that white families had to suffer disappointment, receiving letters blocking them from sending their kindergarten-age children to schools of their choice because of their race.

“This type of exclusion, solely on the basis of race, is precisely the sort of government action that pits races against one another,” he wrote.

He also cited his own words in a 1995 case involving the awarding of state contracts on the basis of race, in which he said “racial paternalism and its unintended consequences can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of racial discrimination.”

Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, said no one had seriously argued that just putting black children alongside white children made them learn better.

“The central claim for integration today is aspirational,” Edley said. “How do we build a society that is free of the poisons of color?”

Edley, who served in the Clinton and Carter administrations and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, argued that “public education is the single best opportunity to promote understanding across our most dangerous divisions.” He said Thomas’s views provided “shelter” for his fellow conservative justices who wanted to end all efforts at maintaining diversified schools.

Material from the Associated Press and International Herald Tribune contributed to this report.