Socio-economic Factors Fail in Creating a "Diverse" Student Body

A NY Times article reports that high schools are having trouble creating diverse student bodies using socioeconomic factors rather than race. The article reports when schools in San Francisco began considering other factors besides race to create a diverse student body, these plans did not work. While the premise of race correlating with income is fertile ground for creating a diverse student body in theory, in practice the experience of using such criteria has proved quite difficult.


What does this mean for the use of race in creating a diverse student body? It at the very least does not entirely foreclose the option of utilizing factors that favor certain races in designing a racially diverse student body. Justice Kennedy's opinion in the recent Seattle schools case therefore is very prescient in emphasizing the fact that in some cases race may actually be a useful means of selecting and rejecting certain applicants for high school admission. (Admissions to undergraduate and graduate education remain an entirely separate issue addressed in two other affirmative action cases).

The findings by the San Francisco schools also raise interesting questions about what exactly diversity means. What precisely constitutes a "diverse" student body? What's wrong with having an entirely black student body? For example, a high school student body could be composed entirely of black students. However, if one digs deeper, and gets to know each individual student, we find that some are children of wealthy doctors, lawyers or business men. Some come from housing projects nearby. Others are immigrants who recently came from Sudan as refugees and are learning English as a second language. Some of these students aspire to be artists, NBA basketball players, president, or the U.N. Secretary General. Would not someone say that this is a diverse group of students who could learn from each other's different experiences, talents, and backgrounds?

There are real and substantive differences between each individual student in the scenario that could provide educational benefits. Are the educational benefits even greater when these students can visually see differences in skin color? An interesting question that courts may have to confront one day (perhaps rather soon) in the future.

Race in Schools: A Move Beyond Integration to Diversity

Many journalists have categorized the recent decision regarding race-based assignments in high schools as a win for conservatives. After all the decision, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, seems to turn back the clock on progress that has been made regarding race and race relations in the United States.

Yet summing up the decision in so many words is not that simple. The 185 page decision is quite nuanced. The conservative plurality authored by CJ Roberts, and joined by Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy is quite careful in not striking down any race based means of achieving the high school's end goal of creating a diverse student body, but only goes so far as to say that purely race based means of doing so are unconstitutional. The opinion does not overturn any past precedent, but merely serves to clarify it. Kennedy's concurrence serves to emphasize this distinction.

He says:

"This Nation has a moral and ethical obligation to fulfill its historic commitment to creating an integrated societythat ensures equal opportunity for all of its children. A compelling interest exists in avoiding racial isolation, an interest that a school district, in its discretion and expertise, may choose to pursue. Likewise, a district may consider it a compelling interest to achieve a diverse student population. Race may be one component of that diversity, but other demographic factors, plus special talents and needs, should also be considered. What the government is not permitted to do, absent a showing of necessity not made here, is to classify every student on the basis of race and to assign each of them to schools based on that classification. Crude measures of this sort threaten to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school’s supply and another’s demand."

Both liberals and conservatives should agree that this crude classification of children solely on the basis of race is unconstitutional. It goes against the very meaning of the Equal Protection Clause. It would also go against the very individualized method of review that the Court in Grutter approved. The court made it explicit in the two University of Michigan affirmative action cases that the reason for approving one system of review and striking down another was the more individualized method of review where race was not equated with diversity, but one of many factors that could contribute to the meaning of diversity. Justice Kennedy should be applauded for upholding and making special note of this precedent, even though he did not join in the majority's opinion in Grutter.

The decision conforms to what much of Bakke, Grutter, and Gratz have told us over the past 30 years. The days of pure race based integration measures for simply remedying for the effects of past discrimination are over. We have moved beyond integration for the sole purposes of integration. Integration serves a new goal now. That new goal is diversity. The goal, it appears, serves a dual purpose: 1) increasing education and tolerance among members of society and 2) remedying for the effects of past discrimination.

While remedying for the effects of past discrimination may not be necessary anymore at some point (as O'Connor prophetically said in Grutter that affirmative action measures would be expected to end in 25 years), it seems that as long as there is a society that values education and tolerance, race will be an ever present factor in discussions about diversity and society will never truly be colorblind.