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Home > Blog > All > Education

Education

  • March 25, 2013

    Justices to Consider Michigan Ban on Race-Conscious Admissions Policy

    by Jeremy Leaming

    The U.S. Supreme Court may rule soon on the constitutionality of a race-conscious admissions policy employed by the University of Texas at Austin, but as the AP’s Mark Sherman reports that justices are ready to consider another case involving a race-conscious admissions – this time a state ban on the use of such policies.

    The justices have already heard oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, regarding a white woman’s challenge to the university’s admissions policy, which takes an array of factors, including race, into account when building its student body. SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston notes that while the justices in Fisher could potentially produce a broad ruling, they could as easily craft a narrow one that may “not go much beyond that plan.”

    The Michigan case, Schuette v. Michigan Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, however could prove to be a platform for a more sweeping announcement on race-conscious admissions policies. Denniston writes that the Michigan case “involves a move by a state to deny its public colleges and universities any right to use race as a factor in choosing the incoming class of students. It thus has the potential to produce a far more sweeping decision.”

    As Sherman notes, the Michigan movement to pass a law outlawing race-conscious admissions policy “has its roots” in the high court’s 2003 opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger. In Grutter, a majority of the Court led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor upheld the University of Michigan law school’s race-conscious admissions policy. The majority concluded that the school’s use of race it its admission policy supported a compelling educational interest and did not violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

    After the Grutter opinion, opponents of race-conscious admissions policies formed to advocate for a ballot initiative, Proposal 2, banning the state’s universities and colleges from using such policies. After voters approved the initiative, a group of civil liberties groups, including the NAACP LDF, formed to lodge a lawsuit against Proposal 2. Eventually the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled against Proposal 2, saying it subverted equal protection rights.

    LDF’s President and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill said today that Michigan’s Proposal 2 “unconstitutionally gerrymanders Michigan’s political process and relegates the critical topics of racial diversity and access to educational opportunity to a separate, distant, and far more cumbersome playing field – one that is unplayable for all practicable purposes.”

    LDF notes Proposal 2 has already led to a decline of minority enrollment, citing a University of Michigan study that shows African-American “undergraduate enrollment fell from 6.7 percent in 2006 to 4.5 percent in 2010.”

    The justices heard oral argument in Fisher last fall.

    Tags:
    Civil rights, Education, Supreme Court, Racial justice, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Equality and Liberty, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Grutter v. Bollinger, Lyle Denniston, Mark Sherman, race-conscious admissions policy, Schuette v. Michigan Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action
  • February 7, 2013

    The Formula for Successful School Reform: One part Legislative Humility Mixed with Three Parts Hard Work at the Grass Roots

    BookTalk
    Renewal
    Remaking America's Schools for the Twenty-First Century
    By: 
    Harold Kwalwasser
    Available here

    by Harold Kwalwasser, the former General Counsel of the Los Angeles Unified School District. He currently writes and consults on education policy from Washington, DC.

    I wrote my new book on education reform, Renewal, Remaking America’s Schools for the 21st Century, to address two concerns. One was that the legislative solutions being proposed when I decided to write the book (back in 2009), many of which have now been adopted, are not likely to bring about the reforms intended. 

    The second concern was that parents and community leaders needed to be encouraged to get more involved in school and school district governance. But encouraging them without giving them a handbook about what to do is a waste – or worse. It may create activists, but of the “bull-in-the-china-shop” variety, who are likely to do as much harm as good.

    The research for the book centered on my visits to forty high performing and transforming school districts, charters, private and parochial schools. After almost two hundred interviews with administrators, teachers, school board members, and others, the case for heightened parental and community involvement is clear and compelling. These people’s stories also re-affirmed my belief that legislative fixes from Washington or some state capital, no matter how well crafted, are likely to have only a limited impact in building the kind of schools we want to see.

     

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    Tags:
    Education, BookTalk, Harold Kwalwasser, Renewal: Remaking America's Schools for the 21st Century
  • October 10, 2012

    Parsing ‘Myths’ and ‘Facts’ of Race-Conscious Admissions Policies

    by Jeremy Leaming

    In 2003 a much different U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of universities to shape their student bodies, in part, by relying on race-conscious admissions policies. Today, a more conservative court examined the constitutionality of the University of Texas at Austin’s admissions policy, which considers race among many other factors.

    The university’s admissions policy is being challenged by a white woman, Abigail Fisher, who says her constitutional rights were subverted by the school’s admissions policy. An array of groups has lodged friend-of-the court briefs both for and against the policy. Conservatives have long hoped to end race-conscious admissions policies arguing they violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. But in its 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger opinion, the high court led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor upheld the University of Michigan law school’s race-conscious admissions policy, finding that the school’s compelling interest in creating a vibrant educational experience was not an affront to the equal protection clause. The Grutter majority “recognized that racial and ethnic diversity is a compelling state interest of public colleges and universities,” and that the Court’s precedent supported giving deference to schools’ decisions on their educational missions.

    But that opinion failed to dissuade rightwing pundits, activists and outfits from continuing to claim that it is long past time for universities to stop taking race into account when creating student bodies.

    In an extensive piece for Media Matters, Sergio Muñoz describes the “Myths and Facts” about race-conscious admissions policies.

    For example rightwing or libertarian activists have long argued that a “correct” reading of the Constitution forbids race-conscious policies. Muñoz notes that frequent National Review writer Roger Clegg says that race-conscious “government actions are ‘untenable’ with the Constitution.” But Muñoz, citing an amicus brief filed by the Constitutional Accountability Center, notes that for decades the high court has recognized that such policies are permissible pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment. “As our brief explains, not only does the Amendment’s text permit government to enact race-conscious policies to fulfill the Constitution’s promise of equality, but the Framers of the Amendment themselves enacted such measures.”

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    Tags:
    Education, Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Equality and Liberty, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Grutter v. Bollinger, Media Matters, race-conscious admissions policy, Sergio Munoz
  • August 20, 2012

    Promoting Equal Opportunity, Union and Liberties Groups Urge High Court to Leave Univ. of Texas Admissions Policy Alone

    by Jeremy Leaming

    Our Society continues to be adversely impacted because of racial stereotypes and divisions, regardless of the rhetoric from opponents of education admissions policies that seek to create a diverse student body. The opponents of such policies are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate the University of Texas at Austin’s admissions policy that takes race into account.

    But in a friend-of-the-court brief recently filed with the Supreme Court by some of the nation’s largest unions representing education associations, national unions and civil liberties advocates, detail why the nation’s educational institutions must be allowed to combat racial divisions and stereotypes by promoting and advancing diverse student bodies.

    “In sum, ours is not a color-blind society, and race still matters,” the groups state in their 38-page brief. “When it comes to public elementary and secondary education, minority and nonminority students of equal ability do not, in the aggregate, have equal opportunities. In light of this inescapable fact, the mission of public elementary, secondary, and higher education cannot be fulfilled without affirmative efforts to achieve racially diverse classrooms. Such racial diversity in classrooms, as we now show, contributes significantly to the fulfillment of the public educational mission.”

    Recently the Constitutional Accountability Center, along with some of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars, lodged a friend-of-the-court brief with the high court in Fisher v. University of Texas to be heard in the high court’s next term showing why the admission’s policy  is supported by the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which is supposed to foster equal protection. CAC’s David H. Gans says, “Both in writing the text and in enacting race-conscious measures to foster equality, the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment resoundingly rejected the notion that the government could not take race into account in order to ensure equality of opportunity for all persons regardless of race.”

    The brief written and filed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and People For the American Way Foundation focuses more on Supreme Court precedent that has held education institutions have great leeway to direct their educational experiences.

    For instance high court precedent has found that school officials are allowed to “fulfill their dual missions of instilling in all students ‘the values on which our society rests,’ and providing them with the skills and knowledge necessary to realize their full potential.”

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    Tags:
    Education, Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Equality and Liberty, admissions policies, AFL-CIO, AFSCME, AFT, Diversity, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, People For the American Way Foundation, SEIU
  • August 16, 2012

    A History of Race-Conscious Measures and the U.S. Constitution

    Guest Post

    By David H. Gans, Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights and Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability Center. This is a cross-post from CAC's Text & History Blog.

    On Monday, Constitutional Accountability Center filed an amici curiae brief in the Supreme Court in Fisher v. University of Texas, urging the Court to reaffirm that the Fourteenth Amendment permits the sensitive use of race to foster equality in education and to uphold the University of Texas’ use of race as one factor in its holistic admissions policy. The brief is available here. Our brief, filed on behalf of CAC and six of the nation’s most prominent constitutional scholars – Bruce Ackerman, Vikram Amar, Jack Balkin, Burt Neuborne, James Ryan, and Adam Winkler – demonstrates that the text and history of the Fourteenth Amendment permit government to take race into account in certain circumstances in order to ensure equality of opportunity for all persons regardless of race.

    For the last four decades, the fight over the constitutionality of race-conscious measures to foster equality has been reduced to a sound-bite – whether the Fourteenth Amendment is “color-blind” – with conservatives claiming the mantle of Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits virtually all use of race by the government. Progressives, all too often, have missed their most powerful rejoinder: the Fourteenth Amendment’s text and history. As our brief explains, not only does the Amendment’s text permit government to enact race-conscious policies to fulfill the Constitution’s promise of equality, but the Framers of the Amendment themselves enacted many such measures.

    The Constitution is certainly color-blind to a certain extent. In writing the broadest textual guarantee of equality in our Constitution, the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment very deliberately rejected limitations on the scope of the Equal Protection Clause, sweeping men and women of all races and classes into its coverage. As the text of the Equal Protection Clause makes clear, every person can invoke its universal guarantee of equality. It was precisely for this reason that Justice Harlan declared in Plessy that the “Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” But color-blind does not mean blind to reality.  Both in writing the text and in enacting race-conscious measures to foster equality, the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment resoundingly rejected the notion that the government could not take race into account in order to ensure equality of opportunity for all persons regardless of race. Faced with the task of fulfilling President Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” and integrating African Americans into the civic life of the nation, the Framers recognized that the Constitution could not be simplistically colorblind. 

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    Tags:
    Civil rights, Education, Supreme Court, Other courts, Racial justice, Equality and Liberty, Affirmative Action, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Guest Post
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