Justices Limit School Diversity Programs

Attorney Teddy Gordon and his client Crystal Meredith listen to a question during a news conference in Louisville, Ky., Thursday, June 28, 2007, after the Supreme Court ruled on the city's public school integration plan. Gordon had argued on Meredith's behalf that the Louisville system's plan was discriminatory. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke) (Ed Reinke - AP)

Breyer was more expressive than usual in the elegant courtroom, grimacing a time or two, shaking his head and rolling his eyes as Roberts read from his opinion.

Joined by the other liberals on the court, Breyer said Roberts' opinion undermined the promise of integrated schools that the court laid out 53 years ago in the Brown decision. "To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown," he said.

On the other side, Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's only black member, wrote a separate opinion endorsing the ruling and taking issue with the dissenters' view of the Brown case.

"What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today," he said. "The plans before us base school assignment decisions on students' race. Because 'our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,' such race-based decisionmaking is unconstitutional."

Civil rights leaders, trying to make the best of the decision, said Kennedy's opinion, when combined with the four dissenters, showed that a majority of the justices support the continuing use of race-conscious measures to integrate public schools.

"We got rained on today, but there's a silver lining," said Theodore Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Racial Justice Program, said, "Even so, the rejection of the Seattle and Louisville school plans represents a significant step backwards in a nation where schools are becoming increasingly segregated by race and ethnicity."

School districts that have plans that resemble the ones struck down by the court are expected to look for other ways to make their schools racially balanced without specifically relying on race. One possibility is using family income since blacks are more likely than whites to be poor.

The ruling also could unsettle the more than 2,000 magnet schools that educate 2 million children since many were created under desegregation plans, said UCLA education expert Gary Orfield.

"These are some of the only integrated things in a lot of our inner cities," Orfield said. "It's one of the only ways to keep middle-class kids involved in big-city school systems."

The Jefferson County and Seattle school systems, whose integration plans were the subjects of Thursday's decisions, employ slightly different methods of taking students' race into account when determining which schools they will attend.

Federal appeals courts had upheld both plans after some parents sued. The Bush administration took the parents' side, arguing that racial diversity is a noble goal but can be sought only through race-neutral means.