Jefferson County Race-Based Assignment Plan Redux
A few years ago, white parents in Seattle and Jefferson County, Kentucky, sued the school districts for assigning students based on race, a policy they said violated their rights to equal protection of the laws. The schools claimed they used race only as a “tie-breaker.” The cases made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the race-based school assignment programs unconstitutional.
The court contended that “remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination is a compelling interest under the strict scrutiny test,” but because Seattle was never court-ordered to desegregate, and Jefferson County’s desegregation order had been dissolved, remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination wasn’t involved in the case.
“The school districts have not carried their heavy burden of showing that the interest they seek to achieve justifies the extreme means they have chosen–discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments.”
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, Jefferson County still relies too heavily on race when assigning students, so says Ted Gordon, the lawyer who challenged Jefferson County’s assignment plan. “They cannot use race as a factor. Here we are again.” (Source)
A family of Indian descent wanted their daughter to attend Stopher Elementary, their neighborhood school. The district assigned her to Shelby Elementary, a school 20 miles away. Gordon said the district likely assigned a certain number of black students from the Shelby neighborhood to Stopher through a race-based assignment plan, which Gordon says violated the Supreme Court’s ruling, and assigned the child of Indian descent to Shelby for racial balance.
Jefferson County School Superintendent Sheldon Berman insists sending children to certain schools based on the color of their skin is necessary to preserve “diversity in our community.”
Why do school districts classify and assign students by race, although Brown v. The Board of Education was supposed to end this practice? One reason is that some schools will become heavily black. Why is that a problem, you ask?
If you know the answer, please share it with me. I’m dying to know.
