Court rejects using race to assign schools

WASHINGTON – In a decision that may herald a new era in the long struggle over racial integration in public education, the Supreme Court declared Thursday that officials may not use race to assign children to schools, even if the goal is greater diversity.

No student may be turned away from a particular school simply because of race, the court said in a 5-4 decision.

The decision opens the door to legal challenges to integration strategies that have been adopted in school systems across the country – strategies that limit the number of white and minority students who may attend particular schools.

Thursday’s ruling did not directly address any programs other than the Seattle and Louisville, Ky., policies before the court, but the language of the majority opinion suggested others could face close scrutiny.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts said, writing for the majority. Public schools must “stop assigning students on a racial basis,” he said.

Some lawyers following the case said the ruling could spell trouble for guidelines used in as many as 1,000 school districts across the nation. But there are differences in each district’s programs, and it is unclear how sweeping the impact of Thursday’s ruling will be.

The ruling also raised questions about how the high court, with its conservative bloc strengthened by the addition of the new chief justice, will deal with the legacy of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that ignited a half-century of struggle over busing.

Roberts cited the decision in Brown in support of his opinion in the current case. Just as Brown struck down forced segregation nationwide, he said, the court is now declaring that students may not be classified “based on the color of their skin.”

But the court’s four liberal justices accused the majority of turning its back on Brown and the promise of racial integration. “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret,” said Justice Stephen G. Breyer in a long dissent delivered in the courtroom.

In a separate dissent, 87-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens noted how far the court had moved in his long tenure. “It is my firm conviction that no member of the court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision,” he wrote.

What Thursday’s decision may imply for the future was complicated by the fact that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who supplied the decisive fifth vote, wrote a separate opinion asserting that school officials could use means other than racial categories to promote integration.

He endorsed such policies as locating new schools in racially mixed neighborhoods, and shifting attendance boundaries to encourage more diverse classes.

The winning lawyer for the parents in Seattle stressed that the ruling protects both minority and white students. “This case was about protecting all children, regardless of skin color, from race discrimination,” said Harry Korrell, the Seattle lawyer for the group known as Parents Involved in Community Schools.

In the Seattle and Louisville cases, the court struck down guidelines that put limits on the percentage of white or black students who could enroll. In Louisville, they applied to all the elementary schools and required the percentage of black children to range from 15 percent to 50 percent.

Seattle used a more limited set of guidelines that determined who could transfer to another high school.

Kennedy joined with Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in ruling that officials may not use “crude measures” that “classify every student on the basis of race and assign each of them to schools based on that classification.”