United States v. Board of Educ. of City of Chicago

Decision Date06 January 1983
Docket NumberNo. 80 C 5124.,80 C 5124.
Citation554 F. Supp. 912
PartiesUNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff, v. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF the CITY OF CHICAGO, Defendant.
CourtU.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois

William Bradford Reynolds, Alexander C. Ross, Civil Rights Div., Dept. of Justice, Washington, D.C., Dan K. Webb, U.S. Atty., and Margaret C. Gordon, Asst. U.S. Atty., Chicago, Ill., for plaintiff.

Robert C. Howard, Robert M. Weissbourd, Pressman & Hartunian, C. Richard Johnson, Reynaldo P. Glover, Hugh R. McCombs, Jr., Isham, Lincoln & Beale, Chicago, Ill., for defendant.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

SHADUR, District Judge.

This lawsuit began where most lawsuits end—with the entry of a decree.1 Unfortunately this lawsuit should rather have both begun and ended many years before it was ultimately filed, for the major changes in the schools' (and the City's) racial makeup over more than a decade before 1980 have increased enormously the difficulties of developing an effective desegregation plan.2 In the words of Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, "that has made all the difference." It is against that backdrop—against today's demography and problems—that the constitutionality of the Board's desegregation plan (the "Plan") must be assayed.

This Court's Role

It was obvious to this Court from the outset that in the Decree the Board and the United States had set an unreasonably optimistic schedule for the development of a comprehensive desegregation plan. It was equally obvious that there was a serious and widespread level of public misunderstanding of just what is involved in this case. For that reason, when in April 1981 the Board delivered (under an already-extended deadline) only a part of the proposed plan, this Court issued a brief statement.

Because that early statement continues to control this case—for it aptly describes both the roles of the parties and the yardstick by which the Plan must be measured—its core bears repetition today:

Our Constitution teaches that no State can deny anyone the equal protection of the laws. Neither color nor race can justify unequal treatment. Our Supreme Court teaches us what that part of the Constitution means:
"State," as that word is used in the Fourteenth Amendment, includes every governmental subdivision—whether a school board, a city or any other.
"Equal protection" includes the right to an equal education.
Separate education for blacks, Hispanics or anyone else is not an equal education.
Busing of our schoolchildren is not the issue. Equal and non-separate education for all our children is the issue. And whatever must be done to provide that equal, non-separate education is the duty of the Board of Education as an arm of the state government. For any governmental authority to say that the Constitution will not be obeyed in that regard, whether for financial reasons or any other, is no different in principle from the Southern governor of a generation ago who stood at the steps of the state university and would not permit a black student to enter.
This statement has spoken of "government." But we must always remember that when Lincoln said we have a government of the people as well as by and for the people, he meant that in our democracy the "government" is we not they. If it is irresponsible and wrong for government and its leaders to try to frustrate the Constitution, it is just as irresponsible and wrong for any of us—the citizens, the true government in a democracy—to do so. Federal courts are called upon only when others—government in the form of public officials, and more important government in the form of people—have defaulted in their duty to honor the Constitution.
That proposition leads logically to the last point, on which perhaps the greatest misunderstanding appears to exist. This Court is neither the intended designer nor the intended czar of the Chicago school system and its plan of desegregation. Chicago is not like other cities where court-ordered desegregation was forced because school systems had refused to acknowledge their constitutional obligations. By joining the United States in signing the consent decree, the Board of Education did credit to its proper role as the responsible agency in constitutional terms.
Under that consent decree the obligation is placed squarely where it should be in a representative form of government: on the Board of Education. It is the duty of the Board to "develop and implement a system-wide plan to remedy the present effects of past segregation of black and Hispanic students." There is no single formulation that will discharge those duties and satisfy the demands of the Constitution. Instead the Board is free to adopt a plan within the "broad range of constitutionally acceptable plans." Only if the Board has strayed outside that range can this Court reject the Board's plan.
Brief History of the Litigation

Full development of the Plan required much more study and effort than the litigants had anticipated, though of course they had been keenly aware of the magnitude of the problems. Because any effective plan must exist and work in the real world and not just on paper, this Court encouraged implementation of the first year of planned desegregation at the same time the full planning process was reaching fruition.

Although self-serving, the Board's summary at the conclusion of its Reply Memorandum filed in April 1982 telescopes the efforts it had made beginning with the filing of this suit and the contemporaneous entry of the Decree:

In the past 18 months the Board has:

Entered voluntarily into a desegregation consent decree, an unprecedented act for a large-city school system;
Retained a leading national desegregation expert, Dr. Robert Green, long associated with the NAACP, to design a comprehensive set of Educational Components, and adopted every one of his recommendations;
Successfully implemented the first year of a desegregation plan, without major community disruption, which increased the index of desegregation in the system by 50%;
Completed a long and careful planning process in which a full range of desegregation strategies was exhaustively evaluated for all 600 schools in the system; Adopted a student assignment plan that in every major aspect is plainly within the range of plans approved by the courts in comparable cities, a plan which promises to achieve levels of desegregation that compare favorably to plans in other urban, predominantly minority school districts;
Elicited the concurrence of the United States Department of Justice, based on its careful study of the Plan, that the Plan is in compliance with the Constitution and the Consent Decree and that the Plan will maximize desegregation in Chicago compared to other possible strategies;
Created a special department within the school system to coordinate implementation of the Plan, and appointed a nationally recognized desegregation expert to head that department.

After the Board's initial adoption of Student Assignment Principles (the "Principles") at the end of April 1981, the United States as well as private parties had voiced criticisms and concerns about its various aspects. It was not until late January 1982 that the detailed Student Assignment Plan was produced, substantially reshaped from the Board's initial statement of the Principles. Then further comment by the United States and the public,3 all as invited by this Court, followed in turn by the Board's Reply Memorandum, carried us to April 1982.

This Court's preliminary analysis of the ultimate Plan, and the various submissions by all interested parties, confirmed once again that some further testing in the crucible of reality—carrying the Plan and its implementation past the commencement of the current school year—would be an important plus for the constitutional evaluation that is the Court's responsibility. Were the paper promise of the Plan to be broken in its performance, it would not pass constitutional muster despite its nominal adherence to the standards of the law.

It should be emphasized that this course of deferral to the present time would not have been followed had the Plan not satisfied the Constitution in threshold terms. Had the Plan been obviously unconstitutional in any respect, this Court would have acted swiftly to reject it. But no such obvious flaw was involved. And because any interim statement by this Court to explain the reasons for deferral would have carried the serious possibility of being misunderstood as final approval at that time, the Court has perforce bided its time in silence.

Now the second school year of implementation has begun. Nothing in the execution of the Plan has been shown to disprove the premises on which it was designed. In the Court's view the optimum time for ruling has been reached.

Student Assignment Plan

There is far more to the Plan than its student assignment provisions. Its Educational Components, crafted under the supervision of the distinguished Dr. Green, have been in place much longer than the final version of the student assignment proposal.4 This Court's function is to judge constitutionality, not educational quality as such (more precisely, its role in dealing with the quality of education is limited to assuring that the constitutional mandate of equal protection has been met). For that reason, and not because the Educational Components are less important (they are surely not), this opinion will focus almost entirely on the Student Assignment Plan.

No one can understand, let alone constitutionally appraise, the Plan without a realization of the demographic facts with which the Board must deal. Just two decades ago more than half the school population of the City of Chicago was white and less than half was black (because of differences in categorization since then, the "white" classification of that era included a small percentage—well under 5%—now counted separately in the Hispanic group). There has been a steady...

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16 cases
  • United States v. Board of Educ. of City of Chicago, 80 C 5124.
    • United States
    • United States District Courts. 7th Circuit. United States District Court (Northern District of Illinois)
    • July 17, 1984
    ...further on the Educational Components. (Stipulations 119, 133) 124. On January 6, 1983 this Court issued its opinion ("Opinion I," 554 F.Supp. 912) approving Board's Plan as being clearly within the broad range of constitutionally acceptable plans. With respect to the Educational Components......
  • United States v. Bd. of Educ. of City of Chicago
    • United States
    • United States District Courts. 7th Circuit. United States District Court (Northern District of Illinois)
    • October 15, 1985
    ...ultimately developed by the Board, endorsed by the United States and approved by the District Court, see United States v. Bd. of Education of Chicago, 554 F.Supp. 912 (N.D. Ill.1983), created a broad range of costly educational programs designed to remedy the effects of past segregation on ......
  • Jenkins v. State of Mo., 77-0420-CV-W-4.
    • United States
    • United States District Courts. 8th Circuit. Western District of Missouri
    • June 16, 1986
    ...that there is a difference between "catering to bias" and seeking to minimize patron resistance. United States v. Board of Education, 554 F.Supp. 912, 924-25 (N.D.Ill. 1983). This difference has been recognized by the Eighth Circuit in Clark v. Board of Education, 705 F.2d 265, 269-72 (8th ......
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    • United States
    • United States District Courts. 7th Circuit. United States District Court (Northern District of Illinois)
    • January 11, 1994
    ...approved by Judge Shadur in 1980 and the resulting desegregation plan withstood constitutional challenge. See United States v. Board of Educ., 554 F.Supp. 912 (N.D.Ill.1983). After examining the transcript of the proceedings before Judge Shadur, of which we can take judicial notice, and the......
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