Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1
1. Parents Involved in Community
Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1
Civil Rights, 2010
Moritz College of Law,
The Ohio State University
Guest Lecturer:
Stephen Menendian, J.D.
4. In the sciences, therefore, if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes,
we may not expect scientists to attest to these changes directly. Looking at the
moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say,“I used to see a planet, but
now I see a satellite. That locution would imply a sense in which the
’
Ptolemaic system had once been correct. Instead, a convert to the new
astronomy says,“I once took the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but
I was mistaken.” That sort of statement does recur in the aftermath of scientific
revolutions. If it ordinarily disguises a shift of scientific vision or some other
mental transformation with the same effect, we may not expect direct testimony
about the shift. Rather we must look for indirect and behavioral evidence
that the scientist with a new paradigm sees differently from the way he had
seen before.
--Thomas Kuhn, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 115.
5. Takeaway:
There is no way to persuade someone of one paradigm over
another. There is nothing to appeal to, no facts to
controvert, no statistics to cite.
Paradigms are only changed through radical subversion: a
gestalt shift.
6. Gestalt Shifts: Which way is the dancing girl spinning? (click link
below)
http://www.bigsoft.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/0
4/25/dancing-girl-optical-illusion
7. Cross-Paradigm Example: How do you
Define Racism?
Is voting for someone because of their race racist?
What if that person grew up under Jim Crow?
Is affirmative action racist?
Is dating only people of a certain race racist?
8. Definitions of Racism
Colorblind Definition: any action or differential treatment
based on any racial characteristic under any circumstance
Discrimination:
(1)( a): the act of discriminating (b): the process by which two stimuli
differing in some aspect are responded to differently
(2): the quality or power of finely distinguishing
(1) and (2) would seem to confirm the colorblind definition
of racism. Discrimination is simply distinguishing between
two stimuli. Racial discrimination, it would seem, would be
distinguishing between things on the basis of race.
9. How do you Define Racism?
As far as my understanding of racism, it’s usually a belief that one’s own race
is superior, and responding to other races with
domination/fear/hatred/subjugation. So, how is attraction to a
particular race, well, racism? This idea of attraction is not laced with
domination, subjugation, fear and hatred of other races.
As a bi-racial female, I’m attracted to Caucasian males, but this attraction to
white males does not make me hate, fear or want to dominate other races,
they just don’t do it for me most of the time…? I’ve dated Hispanics,
Asians, and African Americas, but my base attraction is towards white
males. So again I ask, where does racism step in? I don’t hate black men,
and if I were single and a black guy showed interest in me and there was
chemistry, hell yeah I’d have no problem dating him. But because my
preference is towards white guys that’s…racist? How?
- Online Comment, Newsweek Forums
10. Thinking Like a Lawyer
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the
ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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11. Parents Involved In Community Schools v.
Seattle School Dist. No 1 (PICS) (2007)
Seattle assigned students to oversubscribed schools on the basis of a
series of tiebreakers.
1. sibling attendance.
2. Racial imbalance – 15% plus/minus from racial makeup of
school system as a whole.
3. School distance.
Louisville/Jefferson County: racial guideline required each school to
seek black enrollment of at least 15% and no more than 50%.
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12. Parents Involved In Community Schools v.
Seattle School Dist. No 1 (2007)
Parents of non-minority students sued the Seattle and
Jefferson County school districts, claiming that the student
assignment plans denied their children the equal protection
of law under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Standard of Review?
13. Levels of Scrutiny
Rational basis test - rationally related to legitimate interest
everything else
Intermediate scrutiny- substantially related to important interest
gender & illegitimacy
Strict scrutiny - narrowly tailored to compelling interest
race & national origin
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14. Racial Classifications
All racial classifications are analyzed by a
reviewing court under strict scrutiny.
Such classifications are constitutional only if
narrowly tailored
further compelling governmental interests.
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15. “Benign” Classifications --
Affirmative Action
There was much dispute about the level of review that
should apply to instances in which a classification was
made to help minorities.
This debate ended in 1995 when a majority of the court
decided that “benign” or “remedial” classifications raise
strict scrutiny review.
“Absent searching judicial inquiry into the justification for such
race-based measures, there is simply no way of determining
what classifications are ‘benign’ or ‘remedial.’” Croson
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16. Under Strict Scrutiny, What Interests
are Compelling?
The Court has found only two interests compelling:
1) Remediating De Jure Segregation (i.e. Brown)
2) Viewpoint Diversity in Higher Education (Bakke,
Grutter)
The Court rejected remedying societal discrimination as a
compelling interest.
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17. Narrow Tailoring
The tailoring that is required will depend upon the
interest asserted. In Grutter, the following were
elements of narrow tailoring:
1. Individualized, Holistic Consideration of Applicants
2. Absence of Quotas
3. Consideration of Race-Neutral Alternatives
4. Undue Harm
5. Limited in Time
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20. Parents Involved in Community Schools v.
Seattle School Dist. No. 1 (2007)
Court held that the plans at issue were not narrowly tailored.
The use of the racial tiebreaker within a particular +/- range
was unconstitutional.
Court affirmed that
1. maintaining racially diverse schools and
2. preventing the harm racially isolation are compelling
government interests
21. Conservative Paradigm
Neutrality
Objectivity
Formalist
“Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them.
The role of an umpire and a judge is critical.They make sure
everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever
went to a ball game to see the umpire.”
-John Roberts (2005)
22. “The purpose of the Equal Protection Clause is to ensure that people are treated as
individuals rather than on the color of their skin. So saying that this doesn’t involve
individualized determinations simply highlights the fact that the decision to distribute,
as you put it, was based on skin color.”
“I thought that was one of the absolute restrictions, that you cannot
judge and classify people on the basis of race. You can pursue
objectives that your school board is pursuing, but at some point you
come against an absolute, and aren’t you just denying that?”
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23. Natural
Racial imbalance (in schools) can result from any
number of innocent private decisions, including
voluntary housing choices.
Individuals schools fall in and out of balance in the
natural course, and the appropriate balance will shift
with a school district’s changing demographics.
Justice Thomas, Concurring, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1
(2007)
24. J. Kennedy, Concurring
That the school districts consider these plans to be necessary
should remind us that our highest aspirations are yet unfulfilled.
School districts can seek to reach Brown’s objective of equal
educational opportunity. But the solutions mandated by these
school districts must themselves be lawful.
In my view, the state-mandated racial classifications at issue, official labels
proclaiming the race of all persons in a broad class of citizens – elementary
school students in one case, high school students in another – are
unconstitutional as the cases now come to us.
25. Justice Kennedy, Concurring
“If school authorities are concerned that the student-body compositions of
certain schools interfere with the objective of offering an equal educational
opportunity to all of their students, they are free to devise race-
conscious measures to address the problem in a general way
without treating each student in a different fashion soley on the basis of
systematic, individual typing by race.
School boards may pursue the goal of bringing together students of diverse backgrounds and races
through other means, including strategic site selection of new schools; drawing
attendance zones with general recognition of the demographics of the
neighborhoods; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and
faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other
statistics by race. These mechanisms are race-conscious but do not lead to different treatment
based on a classifications that tells each student he or she is to be defined by race.
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26. Two Views of
Equal Protection Clause
Atomistic Systemic
The problem: bad apples The problem: poisonous tree
Anti-subordination as the goal
Colorblindness as the goal
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28. “It seems to me that there is a terrible problem in the
country. The problem is that there are lots and lots of
school districts that are becoming more and more
segregated in fact, and that school boards all over are
struggling with this problem.”
“It seems to me you’re saying you can’t make an omelet
without breaking eggs. Can you think of an area of the
law in which we say whatever it takes, so long as there is a
real need?” Justice Scalia
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29. The Constitution wanted, as they said in the
Slaughterhouse cases, to take people who had formerly
been slaves and their children and make them full
members of American society. And part of that was that
the State couldn’t insist that they go to separate schools.
Justice
Breyer
How could the Constitution which says that this is intolerable,
that segregated school, and insist that school boards take the
black and white children and integrate them…How could the
Constitution the day that that decree is removed tell the school
board it cannot make that effort anymore, it can’t do what its
been doing, and we’ll send the children back to their black
schools and their white schools?
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30. Massive Resistance and Neutral
Princples
Wechler’s Neutral Principles
Brown was concerned with the harm of group subordination:
condemned segregation as a practice by which a group with
political power denied equality to a group lacking it
Under this view, Wechsler argued that Brown could not be
grounded in neutral principles.
“If the freedom of association is denied by segregation, integration forces
an association upon those for whom it is unpleasant or repugant”
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