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October 1997
By Kevin Welner and Jeannie Oakes,
UCLA
This research paper is not a final version; please do not quote
or cite without the permission of the The Civil Rights Project or
its author.
School desegregation is grounded in values that view
equality, particularly racial equality, as a cornerstone of a just
society. However, court desegregation remedies often conflict with
other values or preferences, some of which are expressly racist
but some of which are not. For example, the concept of neighborhood
schools, while sometimes evoked to avoid racially mixed schools,
also reflects a non-racist value for communities where families
who live on the same few streets, frequent the same stores, and
have face-to-face contact also agree to educate their children together.
So, too, the argument for local control of schools sometimes masks
efforts to avoid racial integration, but it can also reflect a non-racist
aversion to federal government interference in local matters.
For many people, including judges, the foundation
for a just society lies more in a set of values other than racial
equality. Judges, like other citizens, subscribe somewhat idiosyncratically
to various commonly held social values. Two decades ago, John Coons
observed, "history discloses how narrowly the equal protection
clause guarantee could be constructed by a judiciary unconvinced
of the moral claims of human equality" (1977, p. 53). While
we can assume that most judges believe in a just society, if that
belief is not well-grounded in the importance of protecting human
equality, then desegregation litigation in front of such a judge
is likely a futile task.
To illustrate this phenomenon, this chapter presents
a short study of a desegregation case from Illinois. The case, People
Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education School District No. 205,
resulted in a powerfully-worded opinion by the trial judge, condemning
the district for "consistently and massively violat[ing] the
dictates of Brown v. Board of Education" (Rockford,
1994, p. 939). However, when the remedial order was appealed to
a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, that
panel saved its condemnations for the lower court—not the
school district—accusing that court of overstepping its remedial
bounds. The astonishing difference in approaches taken by these
two courts highlights the importance of judges’ own values.
For policy makers, this examination of both the trial-
and appellate-level opinions in Rockford offers an important
lesson about both the benefits and the pitfalls of pursuing reform
through the courts. For courts, we hope that this examination will
prompt a self-inquiry process. When ruling on an equal protection
claim, a judge's values invariably guide her analysis; therefore,
that analysis should be informed by a self-consciousness about her
beliefs about the basis of a just society and about her own conception
of the nature and conditions of social equality.
To view the COMPLETE REPORT
and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:
The Importance
of Judicial Values (in PDF Format)
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