NAACP Legal Defense Fund reacts to OCR guidance letter
Last week’s Legal Clips highlighted a Chicago Daily Herald story on a lawsuit against Elgin Area School District U-46 (U-46) over de facto racial segregation resulting from the district’s race-neutral student assignments and noted that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights’ (OCR) had issued am August 28, 2008 “Dear Colleague” letter indicating how the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, 127 S.Ct. 2738 (2007), which limited school boards’ consideration of race in student assignment policies, will guide OCR’s enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That item from Legal Clips now is posted on the School Law section of the NSBA website at the first link below.
Now the OCR letter has drawn criticism from the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), which believes OCR's interpretation of PICS is inaccurate and has issued its own statement of the legal standards it believes applicable to elementary and secondary schools. The LDF statement below says that PICS indicates school boards (1) may take account of race in promoting diversity through strategic site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones in general recognition of the demographics of neighborhoods; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race; (2) may not assign individual students to schools solely on the basis of their race but should consider race along with other demographic factors; and (3) “should be able to demonstrate that they seriously considered workable race-neutral alternatives, but need not exhaust every possibility” nor limit themselves strictly to race-neutral methods. The third link below is to September 2007 guidance on PICS issued jointly by NSBA and the College Board. For a powerful account that addresses some fundamental realities facing diversity efforts in many communities, see the article at the last link.
NSBA School Pages on lawsuit U-46
LDF response to OCR letter
“Not Black and White” report
The Atlantic, 3/08, By Sarah Tsing Loh