By Chris Levister

Clarence Thomas

Riverside and San Bernardino school officials cite passage of Proposition 209 which forbids the use of race as a factor in determining which schools a student can attend.

"We don't use race as a criteria. This ruling will have little effect," said Maria Garcia, communications officer for the San Bernardino City Unified School District.  

On November 6, 1999, California voters became the first in the nation to approve a measure outlawing the use of race in the public sector - including the state's popular magnet school program.

Still the debate is mixed over the effect of the schools decision.  The nation's civil rights leaders and supporters of integrated schools condemned the Supreme Court decision to limit the use of race in school assignments, saying it violates the spirit of the landmark 1954 decision outlawing racial segregation.

"At a time when school segregation is increasing, in the half century since Brown vs. Board of Education decision, a plurality of the current court has condemned minority children to a back seat in the race for life's chances," said NAACP Chairman of the Board Julian Bond. "There are no non-racial remedies for racial discrimination."

But affirmative action opponents, including Ward Connerly, (chief architect of Prop 209) who also successfully led campaigns in Washington and Michigan to ban race and sex from consideration in public hiring, contracting and school admissions, applauded the decision, saying it shows the country is headed in the right direction.

"This keeps the ball rolling the way I want it to go," said Connerly.

The decision does not eliminate using race as a factor in assigning K-12 students to schools but forces districts to review their desegregation plans and use other factors in their efforts to diversify. Yet opponents fear the ruling will make it harder and more expensive to keep schools diverse.

"It creates needless additional barriers to school districts that are trying to promote the goals of Brown," said Gary Orfield, a professor of education at UCLA and co-director of the Civil Rights Project. "We have been going backward to resegregation since 1990 and this is yet another push back."

Orfield co-authored a study on the subject that was published in 2006. The study said that in California, a majority of Black students attended schools with less than one quarter white students, and the state has one of the nation's highest segregation levels for Latinos.

Sharon Browne, of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which sued over Seattle's integration plan, countered: "Schools across our country must get the message loud and clear: our young people should not be assigned to a school based on the color of their skin." 

While school districts across the nation have promised to find ways to work around the new rules, many are quietly lamenting the Supreme Court's right tilt in key cases due to picks by President George W. Bush.

The justices' intense divisions over the use of race in schools were echoed in reactions from an array of advocates. Overall, the opinions and response suggest that however the nation's schools go forward, it will not be against a backdrop of consensus or legal clarity.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, emphasized that the notion of diversity should be broadly considered and not focused on a student's race.

Justice Paul Steven, the most senior member of the liberal wing, stressed the difference between government politics that use race to exclude people - widespread before passage of civil rights laws and those that use race to include people.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African-American on the court, questioned whether racially mixed schools help Black children.

"What was wrong in 1954 can not be right today." He said referring to the 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine. Thomas joined the majority in ruling Brown forbids the kind of steps taken in Louisville and Seattle for racial balance through school assignment percentages for whites and Blacks.

"This ruling clouds the picture, further polarizes the nation and opens the door for a barrage of new litigation," said Dennis Hayes, interim president of the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization. - That said - "we remain committed to finding ways to stop the onward march of resegregation."