Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation

Abstract

In the name of equity, we. .. seek dramatic improvement in the quality of the education available to our children. Any steps to achieve desegregation must be reviewed in light of the black community's interest in improved pupil performance as the primary characteristic of educational equity. TVe define educational equity as the absence of discriminatory pupil placement and improved performance for all children who have been the objects of discrimination. We think it neither necessary, nor proper to endure the dislocations of desegregation without reasonable assurances that our children will instructionally profit. Coalition of black community groups in Boston' * This paper is a part of a larger study on the Roles of Courts in Desegregation of Education Litigation sponsored by the Institute of Judicial Administration through a grant from the Ford Foundation. The results of this research will be published in a forthcoming book on this subject. t Professor of Law, Harvard University. Pamela Federman, Susan Mentser, and Margaret Stark Roberts assisted in researching and preparing this article. 1. Freedom House Institute on Schools and Education, Critique of the Boston School Committee Plan, 1975, at 2 (emphasis added) (on file with Yale Law Journal). This 15 page document was prepared, signed, and submitted in February, 1975, directly to federal judge IV. Arthur Garrity by almost two dozen of Boston's black community leaders. The statement was a critique of a desegregation plan filed by the Boston School Committee in the Boston school case:

Conceptualizing color-evasiveness: using dis/ability critical race theory to expand a color-blind racial ideology in education and society

“…The formal creation of CRT stemmed from Critical Legal Studies where legal scholars applied a class analysis to the law but did not substantially engage with race (Crenshaw et al 1995). After extensive development of CRT in the law (Bell 1976;Crenshaw 1989;Delgado 1987;Matsuda 1987), CRT was applied to education (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995). CRT was a tool for addressing: (a) the centrality of race and racism in education (Dixson 2006;Lynn 1999;Parker 1998;Stovall 2004); (b) specifically addressing the issues particular racial groups faced through branches including LatCrit (Solorzano and Bernal 2001;Villalpando 2003); and (c) interrogating whiteness within the system of white supremacy (Gillborn 2005;Leonardo 2004;Matias 2013).…”

Law as an Instrument of Social Change

“…Furthermore, the law's ability to attract resources may support lawyers as movement leaders and make litigation strategies dominant, moving more confrontational strategies such as protest to the margin (see Haines, 1984). In turn, lawyers as elite actors can reshape movement messages and goals even when the broader movement's participants have different goals (Bell, 1976;Levitsky, 2006).…”

Desegregation and Multicultural Education: Teachers Embracing and Manipulating Reforms

“…Derrick Bell (1995) states that in order for desegregation to ''work,'' so that the whites do not flee that system, there are compromises made on both sides of the issue. Thus, the district was able to say that it abolished forms of tracking, while keeping the curriculum split into two distinct levels.…”

“…The district provided transportation, city or yellow bus, for all students outside a 1.5-mile radius of their assigned school. The 15% variation quoted by the judge was also the designated percentage for racially balancing school in earlier desegregation legislation such as Detroit Public Schools (Bell 1995).…”