ALABAMA - Huntsville Failed Legal Mandate to Integrate

"In Desegregation Case, Judge Blasts School Officials and Justice Department" by Nikole Hannah-Jones, ProPublica 7/15/2014

A federal judge in Alabama says local school board has failed to meet legal mandate to integrate.

A federal judge in Alabama has taken the rare step of ruling against a local school board in a desegregation case, rejecting the board's claims that it had done all it could to end segregation in its schools.

In a lengthy, at times scathing ruling issued last month, U.S. District Court Judge Madeline Hughes Haikala said she could not "conclusively" determine that the Huntsville City Schools District wasn't still operating an unconstitutionally segregated system or that it had made a "good faith effort" to significantly integrate its schools.  As a result, Haikala refused to approve a student assignment plan that had been proposed by the Huntsville school board.

The Huntsville ruling is important, both because the district is racially diverse and because it is the largest in the state still under federal mandate to desegregate.

In May, ProPublica published a story showing the state of inaction and confusion surrounding scores of federal school desegregation orders, the once-powerful tool for compelling school districts across the country to provide equal educational opportunities to students of color.  Many of the orders had been allowed to sit dormant for decades, often with no one monitoring school officials to make sure they were complying with federal mandates to integrate.  And in many other instances, judges had routinely lifted existing orders even when those districts remained highly segregated.

For some parents and civil rights lawyers, the inaction and allegedly one-sided decisions amounted to an abdication of responsibility by the country's federal bench.

In Alabama, however, two federal judges, Judges Myron Thompson and William Harold Albritton III, had bucked the trend, refusing to see the decades-old orders as relics that should simply be brought to a close.  And now, it looks like those two judges may have company.

"Until the board achieves the goal" of eliminating "segregation to the extent practicable," Haikala wrote.  "The Court must continue to supervise the Board's efforts."

In April, ProPublica chronicled the fortunes of the school district in Tuscaloosa, Ala.  There, the city's schools, after years of successful integration, had effectively been re-segregated after the district had won its freedom from a longstanding court order.  ProPublica's reporting showed that the re-segregation that had happened in Tuscaloosa was happening in school districts throughout the nation.

Huntsville's schools had been under court order since 1965.  Though the district itself is racially balanced, most of the district's schools are either heavily white or heavily black.  A new zoning plan proposed by the board in 2013 would have increased segregation for many black students.

The U.S. Department of Justice, a party to the case, objected to the assignment plan and in February the dispute landed before Haikala, who'd been appointed to the bench by President Obama in 2012.

In the judge's 107-page ruling, she blasted school officials for failing to provide required reports on the district's integration progress for two decades.  She also criticized the Justice Department for failing to be "proactive" and to "keep an eye on" the marked disparities in schools serving mostly white children and those serving mostly black ones.

Huntsville officials, in response to an interview request, released a statement to ProPublica, stating, that as a result of the order, the district intended to work with the U.S. Department of Justice "to create a roadmap" to satisfy the judge's demands and ultimately gain "the return of control of Huntsville City Schools to local officials."

Justice Department officials did not respond to an interview request before publication.

Huntsville officials, as is common in these cases, argued that their schools had been fully desegregated for years.  Any enduring segregation or other inequities, they argued, had to do with housing patterns and other forces outside of their control.

These arguments, ProPublica's reporting shows, have often proved successful before federal judges.

But Haikala wasn't persuaded.

"The record in this case is not as clear as the Board suggests, and the fact that the district integrated the student bodies of many of its schools in the early 1970s does not automatically lead to the conclusion that the district does not currently operate a dual system," she wrote.  She pointed out that not only were many schools still segregated, but the opportunity to take advanced classes also appeared linked to race.

She noted testimony from a white mother who withdrew her child from a predominantly black high school because it offered fewer advanced academic courses than other schools.

"While private choices seem to have precipitated the existing racial polarization of the district's schools, it is not clear...that the district has not contributed to the situation," she wrote.  "There is a significant disparity between the educational programs in the district's predominately African-American secondary schools and the educational programs in the district's predominately white schools."

That disparity, she said, could even be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Huntsville schools had taken several steps to improve educational outcomes for black students, including adopting universal school breakfast programs and increasing pre-kindergarten classrooms.  But the judge's ruling seemed skeptical of whether the district would continue these efforts once court oversight ended.

"The Board submits that the district's conduct over the past 50 years demonstrates good faith.  Recent events, though, have hurt the board's record," she wrote.  She cataloged Huntsville's 20-year failure to file required reports, its track record of missing data and incomplete information, and its public criticism of a requirement in the order that the district allow students to transfer into schools where they are a racial minority.

Haikala set two magistrate judges to the task of gathering information and to work with the district and the Justice Department to come up with a plan to address any other issues needed to get the district in compliance with the order, and ultimately, to end it.

Huntsville's children, she wrote, "have no control over where they live now, but giving them a strong education is the surest way to ensure that they will have choices about where they will live in the future and what they will do when they become adults."

You can read Judge Haikala's entire order here (PDF).  You can search ProPublica's database to see whether your district is, or has ever been, under a school desegregation order and check school segregation in your hometown.

AMERICA - Better Idea on Collage Campus Integration and Affirmative Action

"Class Action:  A Challenge to the Idea that Income Can Integrate America’s Campuses" by Nikole Hannah-Jones, ProPublica 4/24/2014

Excerpt

Update April 23, 2014:  The Supreme Court upheld Michigan’s voter-approved ban on affirmative action for women and racial minorities at public universities.  While the Court did not prohibit affirmative action altogether, it’s likely that other states may follow Michigan’s lead in eliminating the consideration of race in higher education and other areas.

Affirmative action occupies a telling place in a nation painfully aware of its racial inequities yet painfully divided over how to solve them.

Great numbers of Americans support the overarching goals of assuring equal access to educational opportunity and maintaining racial diversity in the country's institutions of higher learning.  At the same time, polls show Americans are deeply conflicted – often along racial lines – about policies that achieve those goals by allowing colleges to use race as a factor in their admissions decisions.

The latest chapter in this national struggle was supposed to come with the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of an affirmative action case involving a white student and the University of Texas.  But the ruling – announced Monday amid much anticipation – merely sent the case back to the lower courts for reconsideration.

Affirmative action, in its threadbare form, lives for now.  But there was enough in Monday's opinion to suspect it will be diminished further in time.

All of which makes it an opportune moment to think again about what some people think could be a fairer and more palatable way of ensuring diversity on America's campuses – affirmative action based on class.  The idea seems simple enough:  This approach would give poor students of any race a helping hand into college, and any policy that gives an admissions boost to lower-income students would naturally benefit significant numbers of black and Latino students.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the progressive think-tank The Century Foundation, is one of the principal proponents of what has come to be called "the economic integration movement."

"My primary interest is in ensuring that we have a fair process that looks at the biggest disadvantages that people face today, which I see as class-based," Kahlenberg said in a recent interview.  "That will end up helping low-income and working-class students of all races."

Kahlenberg knows that many dispute this belief.  But he says skepticism directed at the class-based solution has to be weighed against its dim alternative:  If race-based affirmative action disappears with no program to replace it, African Americans and Latinos on college campuses will disappear too.  Studies show that African-American and Latino enrollment at the nation's top 200 colleges would plummet by two-thirds if colleges stopped considering race when deciding whom to accept.

Yet ignoring race does not wipe its effects away.  A formula that uses class while disregarding race may be politically popular, but many scholars say race remains so powerful a factor that a class-based system would seriously reduce black and Latino representation at American colleges from their current levels.

At the heart of their argument:  Poor white Americans are still privileged when compared to poor African Americans and Latinos.  Use class as the basis for admissions preference, studies show, and the nation's colleges will be flush with poor white students.  "There are disadvantages that accrue to African Americans and Latinos that are not explained by class," said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.  "You simply cannot get race by using class."

The idea of abandoning race for an admissions system targeting those clinging to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder holds powerful sway for many who believe that in modern America race is no longer much of an obstacle to success.

There is no doubt that the greatest imbalance in American colleges is not white versus black or male versus female.  It is the wealthy versus everybody else.

Kahlenberg asserts that affluent students – those whose families earn at least $123,000 a year – outnumber poor students by 25-1 on the campuses of the nation's most select schools.  He said that while white Americans are twice as likely to earn a college degree as black Americans, the affluent are seven times as likely to earn one as the poor.

According to the most recent data available, about three-quarters of students at the nation's top 146 universities come from families in the upper quarter of the nation's economic scale.  Just 3 percent come from the bottom quarter.  A study released this year by The Brookings Institution documented how selective colleges enroll nearly all of the high-achieving high school seniors from families in the highest income quartile, but just one-third of the top low-income students.

"How should colleges ensure diversity?" PBS NewsHour 4/23/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The Supreme Court upheld a ban on affirmative action in Michigan; at least seven other states have enacted similar laws.  A New York Times study looking at five states found that African-American and Latino enrollment fell immediately at flagship schools.  Gwen Ifill gets views from Dennis Parker of the American Civil Liberties Union and Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity.