Equal Education Opportunity and the Pursuit of “Just Schools”: The Des Moines Independent Community School District Rethinks Diversity and the Meaning of “Minority Student”

• Author: Jacob E. Meusch
• Pages: 02

Jacob E. Meusch. J.D. Candidate, The University of Iowa College of Law, 2010; B.A., Creighton University, 2007. I would like to thank the following people: my parents, brothers, and grandparents, for their patience and unwavering support; Professor Mark Schantz, for giving me the opportunity to explore the issue of school diversity; Dr. Erika Kirby and the Creighton University Communications Department, for helping me discover my passions; Veronica Garza, for her insightful comments on earlier drafts; and the editors and student writers from Volumes 94 and 95, for their hard work, dedication, and attention to detail. All remaining errors and omissions are my own.

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I Introduction

[I]t is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

—Brown v. Board of Education¹

Somewhere in Iowa, among the sprawling cornfields, “broad blue skies and small, neat cities” lies a unique history of progressive school-desegregation policies.² Twenty-eight years before Plessy v. Ferguson,³ nearly a century before Brown v. Board of Education,⁴ and months before Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment,⁵ the Iowa Supreme Court struck down a state law mandating school segregation.⁶ In Clark v. Board of Directors, it held that the Muscatine School Board of Directors could not deny Susan B. Clark, a twelve-year-old African-American girl, admission to Muscatine Grammar School No. 2, “because of . . . her nationality, religion, [or] color.”⁷ Clark marks the first time in U.S. history that a state struck down a law mandating school segregation,⁸ solidifying Iowa’s place as a pioneer on the issue of equal education. Unfortunately, the Clark decision did not endPage 1344 school segregation in Iowa or elsewhere; rather it marked the beginning of the struggle for equal education in America.⁹

Arguably, the landmark desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, has failed.¹⁰ Although the U.S. Supreme Court declared its vision of a public education system “without a ‘white’ school and a [black] school, but just schools” over forty years ago,¹¹ children in America still attend schools that are becoming increasingly segregated.¹² In the fifty-five years since the Court’s historic Brown decision, states continue to fail to significantly reduce the lack of diversity in K–12 student bodies.¹³ In light of this failure, judges, attorneys, policymakers, school administrators, and concerned citizens must continue to work for equal education in public schools to fulfill the Supreme Court’s vision.¹⁴

Following Brown, many white communities initially avoided desegregation by bluntly refusing to implement a desegregation plan or simply closing the doors to the public schools.¹⁵ This tasked district-court judges with carrying out Brown’s mandate amidst fierce opposition in the ensuing decades. In some instances, they would “govern from day to day by decree, according to plans laboriously formulated by the court itself, [and] often in consultation with court-appointed experts.”¹⁶ Nevertheless, not all communities opposed desegregation, and in time many public schoolPage 1345 districts took the initiative to implement voluntary desegregation plans.¹⁷ Indeed, prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1,¹⁸ school districts throughout the United States frequently relied on voluntary, race-based desegregation plans to make the Court’s vision in Brown a reality.¹⁹ The Court in Parents Involved, however, reversed this trend by holding unconstitutional voluntary school-desegregation plans that used race as the sole or determinative factor in assigning students.²⁰ The Court’s decision has required many school districts, including the Des Moines Independent Community School District (“Des Moines school district”), to revise their desegregation plans for the plans to remain constitutional.²¹

Now, school administrators in public K–12 schools face a new challenge: providing equal education opportunities to children of all races without using race as the sole or determinative factor in their assignment plans. One possible solution is to assign students on the basis of their socioeconomic status. Assignment plans that decide among students based on their socioeconomic status (“SES plans”) address the problem of segregated education by “increasing diversity among students as far as socioeconomic . . . status is concerned”²² and, in effect, “diversifying [student bodies] on the basis of race because of the correlation between race and poverty that exists in America.”²³ In practice, school districts that use SES plans create middle-class schools that remedy the basic damage segregated education inflicts on students.²⁴Page 1346 Prior to Parents Involved, the Des Moines school district used a voluntary, race-based diversity plan. In response to Parents Involved, the Des Moines school district implemented a SES plan.²⁵ Its goal was to create public schools with diverse student bodies that “teach world-class skills . . . [without including] race as a factor for determining student assignment.”²⁶ As one of roughly seventy school districts nationwide to consider socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignments,²⁷ the Des Moines school district is at the forefront of the socioeconomic integration trend and serves as an instructive case study on the issue of equal education post-Parents Involved.

This Note considers whether the Des Moines school district’s diversity plan is a constitutional means of maintaining a racially diverse student body and whether SES plans can provide both an equal education opportunity and an enriched learning environment. Part II describes both the evolution of the constitutional doctrine regarding school desegregation from Brown to Parents Involved and the evolution of Iowa’s policy on school desegregation. Part III analyzes the constitutionality of the Des Moines school district’s diversity plan in light of Parents Involved. This Note argues that SES plans will avoid the Court’s often fatal strict-scrutiny analysis, thus making the Court more likely to find them constitutional.²⁸ Finally, Part IV discusses the desirability and limitations of SES plans as a constitutional alternative to race-based assignment plans.

II Background

Originally, the U.S. Constitution did not contain any provision ensuring that all members of society would receive “equal protection of the laws,” much less equal education opportunities.²⁹ This is not surprising given thePage 1347 fact that U.S. society “routinely discriminated against” African-Americans and women.³⁰ However, in 1868, Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, which “bestowed citizenship on the former slaves, prohibited states from denying any person equal protection [and] ensured that no person could be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”³¹ While the Amendment did not contain a specific definition of equal protection, the Court would eventually use the Equal Protection Clause to dismantle the segregated education system, expounding on its interpretation of the Amendment with each new application.

Unfortunately, the Court’s early equal-protection jurisprudence denied many U.S. citizens the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection until almost a century later.³² The Court did state in 1918, 1923, and 2000 that “‘[t]he purpose of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is to secure every person within the state’s jurisdiction against intentional and arbitrary discrimination, whether occasioned by express terms of a statute or by its improper execution through duly constituted agents.’”³³ However, in the context of school segregation, the Court did not interpret the Fourteenth Amendment in a manner consistent with its stated purpose until halfway through the twentieth century in its landmark Brown decision.³⁴

Prior to the 1950s, many states and school districts operated under the Plessy v. Ferguson “separate-but-equal” doctrine and employed a dual school system divided along racial lines.³⁵ In 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown, ordered the end of school segregation, and declared that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”³⁶

Initially, “[s]outhern states openly and aggressively resisted compliance with Brown.”³⁷ This required district courts to take an active role in the desegregation process to carry out the Court’s mandate in Brown and endPage 1348 school segregation.³⁸ The Supreme Court eventually responded to the attempts to undermine Brown in Cooper v. Aaron, stating that “the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment enunciated by this Court in the Brown case is the supreme law of the land,” and thus binds the actions of state officials.³⁹ Unfortunately, even with the Court’s strong endorsement of Brown, Cooper did not end southern resistance efforts.⁴⁰

Only after the Supreme Court heard another school-desegregation...