School Desegregation News Roundup, Part 2: Big diversity lawsuits at Harvard and Hartford

The Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity is pleased to feature the School Desegregation News Roundup: periodic updates and reflections on educational desegregation and related issues, provided by Peter Piazza, an education policy researcher at Penn State's Center for Education and Civil Rights. Updates are crossposted on his site, available here. 

Last week, we posted a news roundup that focused on an anti-affirmative action case at Harvard that could have major consequences. This post is about its K-12 companion case – an anti-school integration lawsuit in Hartford that could also have major consequences. If you missed that first post, here’s the main takeaway:

In the Harvard trial, there’s an understandable concern in that Asian American students are disproportionately rated lower in “personal characteristics.” But, SFFA is using this important, yet relatively small, issue to do something very big: end race-conscious admission across all publicly funded universities in the US. Again, you’ll see a similar theme in Hartford. 

So, to Hartford, where the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) has mobilized a group of Black and Latinx parents to file suit against the state because their children were not admitted to highly sought after schools in the city’s magnet program. As described in part 1, PLF has been a long-time opponent of school integration, fueling the 2007 Parents Involved case (more about this below). Like the Harvard case, this one represents a relatively new legal strategy in which opponents of race-conscious policy – like PLF and Ed Blum – mobilize non-white plaintiffs in cases that ultimately work against school diversity. 

LaShawn Robinson at the Connecticut capital building
(via the Associated Press)

Hartford School Integration: Robinson v. Wentzel

• Jurisdiction: This part can be confusing. PLF filed suit in a federal court, which puts it in the pipeline towards SCOTUS. However, the key school integration case that applies to CT schools (Sheff v. O’Neill) is a state level case. The Sheff case, decided in 1996, required Hartford to address racial isolation in city schools, leading to the very magnet program that is at stake in Robinson. So, supporters of Sheff are arguing that the Robinson case should be dismissed. There are two key parts of their argument:
  • The state of Connecticut, the defendant in Robinson, never wanted to integrate schools; so, it’s not going to put together a vigorous self-defense in a federal case.
  • There’s a state court hearing scheduled for Feb 2019 to talk about fixes to the Sheff ruling. Integration supporters claim that this is the best way to address the problems raised by Robinson plaintiffs, not a federal trial. A federal judge is currently deciding the jurisdiction for the case, and that decision is expected soon.
• Plaintiffs: A group of seven parents who are filing on behalf of themselves and their children. LaShawn Robinson is the named plaintiff (pictured above). This article has interesting background about her and about the case in general. And, this blog post – a passionate defense of the case – was written by a friend of one of the plaintiffs.
• Key claims-
  • Plaintiffs: As defined in Sheff, an “integrated school” in the magnet system has between 25% and 75% students that are not Black or Latinx (called “reduced-isolation students”). Students are assigned to schools based on a lottery, and plaintiffs are parents of Black and Latinx students who did not get their schools of choice in the lottery. As described in this very helpful article:
    • “The plaintiffs argue that the 25% “reduced-isolation student” benchmark is actually an enforceable quota, that the lottery is weighted to account for a student’s race, and that Hartford-area magnet schools are literally reserving 25% of the seats in their school exclusively for students who are not black or Hispanic, thereby creating an impermissible racial classification.” Like the Harvard case, plaintiffs are arguing there’s a kind of backdoor quota.
  • Defendants: This is a really important point – the lottery used to assign students to schools does not include race. As pointed out here, “there was no place on the 2017-2018 lottery application form for an applicant to list their race.” This is the key argument from defendants. Instead of race, the lottery is based on things like home address, school preferences, and where their siblings go to school. After the lottery, if school enrollments fall outside the 25%-75% band mentioned above, schools are at risk of losing some state funding.  
• At issue: So, the Harvard trial largely centers on the use of the “personal characteristics” score, and the Hartford trial centers on what, exactly, is in the lottery and on how the lottery is used. As described here, plaintiffs “allege that the lottery is re-run until the right percentages of student race are achieved and that the Sheff benchmarks for identifying an integrated school are actually unyielding racial quotas which leave classroom seats empty unless they can be filled by reduced-isolation students.”
• Left out: Another key part of the defendants’ argument – Connecticut has refused to fully fund the magnet schools program in recent years. As you may remember, CT faced another major court case recently – after a state judge required a complete overhaul to the state’s school funding system, the state supreme court overruled the lower court, leaving the status quo in place. As described by that lower court judge, funding in CT is inequitable and “irrational.” Of course, this affects Hartford’s magnet schools. Defendants argue that this (along with other fixes) should be the focus of any changes to Sheff.
• At stake: There are two big issues here- race as a compelling interest in K-12 school enrollment and charter school expansion.
  • This case could end up being a sort of relitigation of the 2007 Parents Involved decision. Although it’s widely believed that Parents Involved actually ended race-conscious K-12 enrollment, this is a misread of the case. Justice Kennedy actually agreed with the liberal justices that “diversity . . . is a compelling educational goal a school district may pursue,” and that includes “avoiding racial isolation.” But, he then sides with the conservative justices in striking down the Louisville and Seattle plans, not because of the fact that they used racial classifications, but because of how they used race (not narrow enough, in his opinion). This article has a great breakdown/analysis of the case. As a result, states and districts actually have a lot more legal grounds for voluntary race-conscious integration than is widely believed. PLF was behind Parents Involved, and they just narrowly missed their goal. Robinson is their second chance.
  • PLF is also a big supporter of charter schools, including those managed by for-profit groups. However, charter growth has been slower in Hartford, compared to other CT cities, largely because of the magnet schools program. By clearing the desegregation order from Sheff, PLC paves the way for charter operators that use “colorblind” approaches to school enrollment. Not coincidentally, “nearly all of the publicly-funded, privately-managed charter schools in Connecticut are racially segregated.”
• Key articles:
• I relied heavily on this article in the summary above, and I highly encourage a full read. This article is also extremely useful. These are two of the most thoughtful and detailed articles that I’ve found so far on this case.
  • This blog post also contains a useful breakdown of the case, while going into more detail about PLF’s potential interest in charter expansion.
  • Lastly, this op-ed was co-written by Elizabeth Sheff herself. Now long removed from her case, she notes the academic benefits of school integration before reflecting that:

“The progress achieved through Sheff consists of far more than just high graduation rates and improved test scores. When students have a chance to learn alongside kids who come from different racial and economic backgrounds, it broadens their perspectives, making them more comfortable with a variety of people and cultures. In our democracy — where different racial groups are not always provided opportunities to interact with one another — an integrated school is a crucial experience that every child should have access to.”

Yeah – it’s a big deal. And, it’s unfortunate (to say the least) that groups like Students for Fair Admissions (the Harvard case) and PLF are exploiting fixable problems and legitimate concerns of non-white students/families as excuses for completely undermining systems put in place to balance the opportunities offered to Black and Latinx students against the enormous social/political opportunities that have been enjoyed by white families (especially wealthy white families) since forever. I’ll track each case and post updates.

Redlining in the Twin Cities in 1934: 1960's and Today

IMO has released a story map series that covers the history of housing discrimination and civil rights in the Twin Cities.  Historical persons and places are depicted on the 1934 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map, which based its categories on race and was used to justify disinvesting in segregated minority communities. Over eighty years later, the patterns on this historic government-sanctioned ‘redlining’ map closely resemble today’s concentrations of communities of color in the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, reflecting current inequality in terms of transportation, affordable housing and mortgage lending.

The series calls attention to the history of white hostility towards racial minorities in the Twin Cities. It highlights local civil rights activism, that later gained national prominence, and demonstrates how past and current policies perpetuate segregated living patterns in the Twin Cities. 

Link to story map below:

  https://z.umn.edu/TwinCitiesRedlining

School Desegregation News Roundup, Part 1: Big diversity lawsuits at Harvard and Hartford

The Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity is pleased to feature the School Desegregation News Roundup: periodic updates and reflections on educational desegregation and related issues, provided by Peter Piazza, an education policy researcher at Penn State's Center for Education and Civil Rights. Updates are crossposted on his site, available here. 

November was a busy month for school diversity and civil rights news. In the interest of space, I had to leave out stories on a failed (and bizarre) white secession attempt near Atlanta, new research/reporting on “a la carte” living (or, when neighborhoods become more diverse, but schools do not), and Cindy Hyde-Smith and segregation academies. (I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about that last issue, but Noliwe Rooks has a great piece about it in the NY Times.) Meanwhile, I wish I had more space to write about the proposed revision to sexual assault investigations from the DeVos DOE, but these articles have good overviews on implications for K-12 and higher education. This will be a topic for a future post. 

Instead, I want to focus on lawsuits that majorly threaten diversity at the K-12 and higher ed levels. Specifically:

• Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard, a federal case that could potentially end race-conscious admission policies at the higher ed level; and
• Robinson v. Wentzel, a federal case centered on Hartford, CT’s magnet school program that could potentially end race-conscious enrollment policies at the K-12 level.

As you can tell, there are important similarities here, especially that there are high stakes consequences for each trial. But there’s more:

• Historically, affirmative action/integration opponents have used cases of white people denied admission to K-12 or high education to chip away at race-conscious policymaking. The Harvard and Hartford cases represent a new legal strategy: using non-white students/families as plaintiffs in cases that work against school diversity.
• Both complaints were financed by high-profile anti-integration legal groups.
• The Harvard case is funded by Edward Blum, a wealthy white financier of anti-affirmative action efforts, most notably the recent Fischer case in Texas. He started SFFA as the vehicle for his anti-affirmative action campaign- the picture here is a screenshot from their homepage. Blum was also influential in the case that gutted the Voting Rights Act.
• Meanwhile, the Hartford plaintiffs are backed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, another long-time opponent of K-12 integration that was a major player in the 2007 Parents Involved case. Given the first point above, there’s a shared dynamic in both cases – wealthy, white folks capitalizing on understandable concerns from non-white groups to serve their larger political goals.
• Both lawsuits were filed in federal court, putting them on track for a potential SCOTUS ruling, which would likely lead to the worst for affirmative action/integration supporters. As I explain in part 2, the pipeline for the Hartford case is a little more complicated.

Since I had a lot to say about each case, this post is split into two parts, with this one focusing on the Harvard case and a post tomorrow for Hartford. In each post, I use the new coverage to highlight a few key points, and I link to useful articles/resources for those who want to learn more about each case. On to the Harvard case!

Edward Blum (from The Atlantic)

Harvard Affirmative Action: Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard

• Jurisdiction: Currently in a federal court – Hearings were held Oct 15-Nov 2, and the judge recently ordered a new round of hearings scheduled for Feb 13.
• Plaintiffs: An anonymous group of Asian American students, represented by Edward Blum/SFFA
• Key claims:
• Plaintiffs: “SFFA argues that Harvard, and ultimately all colleges, should no longer consider race in its admissions process, and that Supreme Court rulings in support of affirmative action have ‘been built on mistakes of fact and law.’”
• Defendants: “The university argues that its “holistic” admissions process is necessary to ensure a diverse student body and does not discriminate against Asian-American students.” Many students apply to Harvard with perfect GPAs and/or SAT scores; so, the university needs to use other criteria, which brings us to a core issue of the SFFA compliant.
• At issue: In addition traditional measures, Harvard uses criteria like participation in extracurriculars, volunteer work, legacy status and a “personal characteristics” rating (among other criteria). As reported in this very helpful Vox.com story, “internal data shows Asian-American applicants are rated lower on personal metrics, despite outperforming white applicants in other areas.” As a result, SFFA argues that Harvard is effectively using the personal characteristics rating as a sort of backdoor way of enforcing a racial quota.
• Left out: The same internal report from Harvard showed that “legacy” admissions offer an advantage to wealthy, white applications; however, this form of affirmative action is not part of the SFFA’s complaint and thus is not threatened by the case.
• At stake: This case could ride the appeals process up to the Supreme Court, where the results (unlikely to be positive for integration advocates) would almost definitely apply to all publicly funded universities in the US, basically ending affirmative action as we know it. This article makes an interesting point – if SFFA loses the federal case, it will definitely appeal; but, if Harvard loses, it could decide not to appeal, thereby keeping it out of an inhospitable court.
• Additional useful/interesting links:
• As cited above, this Vox.com article is great for an overview/summary of the key arguments and issues at stake in the case. And, as noted in an earlier post, this clip from Hasan Minhaj offers a detailed overview of the case while also providing much needed comic relief. 
• It isn’t just Harvard – there are similar cases at UCLA and the University of North Carolina. And, it isn’t even limited to court cases. Separate from the lawsuits, Harvard and Yale are also under investigation by the Department of Justice for their use of race in admissions policies.
• This article has a lot interesting info on the WeChat app, described as a “virtual Chinatown,” used to discuss political ideas and even fuel political campaigns. Specifically, WeChat has been used Facebook-style to intensify/polarize the debate about affirmative action and has served as an organizing platform for anti-affirmative action among Chinese Americans. While affirmative action remains popular among Asian Americans as a whole, its decline among this group may be “almost single-handedly” due to a decline in support among Chinese Americans. As the author points out: “virtually everyone I interviewed for this story agreed that this movement wouldn’t be where it is today…if it weren’t for WeChat.”
• Lastly, my organization, the Center for Education and Civil Rights recently co-hosted a panel discussion of the Harvard case, alongside the Penn State Law School and the Center for the Study of Higher Education (@PennState_CSHE). The discussion covered the history of affirmative action attacks in higher ed, the particulars of the Harvard case, and research on the importance of diversity on college campuses. I’ll post a video as soon as that is available.

In the Harvard trial, there’s an understandable concern in that Asian American students disproportionately receive lower ratings in the “personal characteristics” category. But SFFA is using this important, yet relatively limited, issue to do something with far-reaching implications: end race-conscious admission across all publicly funded universities in the US. Again, you’ll see a similar theme in Hartford.