Harvard Law hosts forum on school desegregation

Howard Manly

One of the nation’s largest gatherings of civil rights lawyers, educators and activists is being held this week at Harvard Law School to discuss the legal and educational impact of a recent federal desegregation case and to devise strategies to combat what many perceive as a return to a “separate but equal” standard for American public schools.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in June rejected school integration plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle. The decision has prompted re-examination of the voluntary desegregation plan within the Lynn school system and of the 41-year-old Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) program here in Boston.

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

Hosted by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, the daylong conference convenes on Thursday with closed-door strategy sessions before opening to the public for a question and answer session at 5 p.m. at the Ames Courtroom.

Following opening remarks by Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan, Houston Institute founder and Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. will moderate a panel discussion that includes Anurima Bhargava of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; Dennis Parker, director of the Racial Justice Program of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau; and Cynthia Valenzuela, director of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Ogletree said the conference is extremely timely.

“The legal principles established by the [sitting] Supreme Court are sending local school officials scrambling as they attempt to craft permissible desegregation plans,” Ogletree said. “More than ever, educators and civil rights organizations will be continuously challenged to convincingly articulate the relevance of diversity and harm of segregation in our multiracial yet still separate, still unequal nation.”

The goal of the conference, Ogletree explained, is to devise long- and short-term collaborative strategies that support efforts in the interrelated areas of litigation, political advocacy, technical assistance to school districts, community education and public communication.

Participants in the conference include officials from a wide-ranging group of national civil rights, legal and education institutions, including the Asian American Legal Defense and Education fund, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, the Ford Foundation, the National School Boards Association, New York Lawyers for Public Interest, the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, the National Council of La Raza, the U.S. Office of the Attorney General/Civil Rights Division, and the American Association of School Administrators.

Thursday’s strategy session is not the first to be organized in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Shortly after the verdict, civil rights activists and state school officials met at Wheelock College in July 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 under review by lawyers for the state Department of Education and attorney general’s office.

Of particular concern is one of the nation’s longest standing integration programs. 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.

METCO Executive Director Jean M. McGuire has called the court’s ruling “the worst decision that we’ve had in 50 years.”

More troublesome for civil rights activist is the case in Lynn. As it stands, 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 in July asking that the city’s 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.

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.

Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.