Lawsuit challenges Illinois district’s race-neutral student assignments
In the wake of a ruling last year by the U.S. Supreme Court, large, ethnically diverse school districts are now finding themselves in uncharted waters, suburban Chicago’s Daily Herald reports. Though the ruling prohibited them from using race-conscious measures to integrate their schools, districts also must ensure academic success for all students—regardless of skin color or neighborhoods in which they live. Experts believe a federal class action suit against Elgin Area School District U-46 (U-46), one of the first major school racial bias cases since the Supreme Court decision, could have far reaching effects. The U-46 school board voted in 2004 decision to abandon its decades-old practice of busing students, saying the new race-neutral school boundary map's purpose “was to ensure neighborhood schools.” In February 2005 a group of Elgin families sued U-46 in federal court, charging that minority students were denied a fair and equal education as required by the Equal Education Opportunity Act of 1974, the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause of the Illinois Constitution. The suit claims U-46 segregated black and Latino students in older, more crowded schools and discriminates against minority students by denying them proper access to special education; providing inadequate bilingual services; busing minorities further and more often than their white peers; and closing schools in minority areas while opening new ones in white areas. U.S. District Court Judge Robert W. Gettleman's upped the district's stakes Aug. 8 by granting the case class-action status, a ruling that broadened the lawsuit to include more than 25,000 current and former minority students.
U-46 can, under the law, take a number of measures on its own to diversify its schools without specifically focusing on race: adding dual language programs and building new schools on the border of two diverse neighborhoods. Only if Judge Gettleman finds liability can race-conscious integration methods be imposed in the district. While the U-46 case may be the first Illinois class-action lawsuit to result from boundary disputes, the district is by no means alone in contending with issues of diversity while redrawing its attendance zones. Carpentersville-based Community Unit District 300 established a parent-led Attendance Boundary Committee to remap its boundaries in 2006 and 2007. Committee member Kim Calabrese said the district's main focus "was to try to get kids into their closest school, and try to keep the numbers down." When the ruling came in that race could not be a factor, "it made our job a little bit easier," she said. Instead of race, the committee factored in diversity through socioeconomic status. "We didn't want one high school that has 80 percent free lunch and the other to have an extremely low rate," Calabrese said. "As far as the racial diversity, I wish there was more," she added. "But that's not the way the neighborhoods are set up here in the suburbs."
Districts confronting these issues can expect little help from the state or even their peers. Neither the State Board of Education or the Illinois Association of School Boards (IASB) offers guidance to schools as to how to factor in race in their attendance boundaries, officials said last week. IASB general counsel Melinda Selbee called districts' boundary decisions “incredibly personal” and said her group does not have the staff to do the extensive investigation necessary to steer districts. “Hire a lawyer,” she said. “Not for a lawsuit, hopefully they wouldn't get into the Elgin situation.” Drawing attendance boundaries, said Steve Schwinn, a constitutional law professor at John Marshall Law School in Chicago, has become even more difficult since last summer's ruling. “By underscoring the idea that discrimination is discrimination, (the ruling) restricts school boards in ways they were previously not restricted,” he said. “There's a bit of irony here,” adds Michael Kaufman, Academic Dean and Director of the Child Law and Education Institute at Loyola University Chicago. “There's still this law up there that says segregation is unequal, but for the court (after last summer's ruling), when is the goal worthwhile?”
Source: Daily Herald, 9/8/08, By Kerry Lester
[Editor’s Note: The court’s opinion granting class action status in the suit is below. Information on the Supreme Court’s ruling and its aftermath, news from around the country on issues of diversity in schools, and related resources for school officials from NSBA and others are available starting from the next three links. The next link is to an August 28, 2008 guidance letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) explaining how the Supreme Court’s ruling will guide OCR’s enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin by recipients of federal funding. The letter states: “The Department of Education strongly encourages the use of race-neutral methods for assigning students to elementary and secondary schools. Unlike the assignment plans in Parents Involved, genuinely race-neutral measures—for example those truly based on socio-economic status—do not trigger strict scrutiny and are instead subject to the rationale-basis standard applicable to general social and economic legislation.”
Finally, the think tank Education Sector has issued a report on another idea for improving educational opportunities for disadvantaged students: school choice across school district lines. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping technology of school performance information in California, Texas, and Florida, the group found inter-district school choice unlikely to increase most students’ opportunities significantly, owing to factors such as long distances to higher-achieving schools and limited capacity in such schools.]
Daniel v. Board of Educ. for Ill. Sch. Dist. U-46, No. 05-760 (N.D. Ill. Aug.8, 2008)
NSBA School Law pages on Parents Involved in Cmty. Schools (PICS) v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1
NSBA School Law pages on Seattle resegregation
NSBA School Law pages on San Juan Capistrano segregation
OCR guidance on letter on PICS v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1 and Title VI
Education Sector report on inter-district choice