Education Week - July 17, 2019 - 18

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS

By Evie Blad & Andrew Ujifusa
A confrontation over busing between two Democratic presidential
candidates in recent weeks has exposed just how little the public understands about the issue and how much
the nation is still wrestling with competing narratives about the success of
school desegregation efforts.
California Sen. Kamala Harris
challenged former Vice President Joe
Biden in the first round of primary
debates, asking him if he regretted
his support of bills in the 1970s that
aimed to restrict the federal government's ability to force and fund busing plans as a means of desegregating schools. Those positions were in
the spotlight after Biden, speaking
at a fundraiser a week and a half before the debates, recalled the "civility" of working with segregationist
colleagues to accomplish his goals as
a young senator.
For Harris, the issue was personal.
"There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class
to integrate her public schools," she
said, "and she was bused to school
every day. And that little girl was
me. So I will tell you that, on this
subject, it cannot be an intellectual
debate among Democrats. We have
to take it seriously."
Biden maintained that he favored

busing when it was adopted voluntarily, as it was by schools in Berkeley, Calif., when Harris was a child, or
when it was court-ordered to remedy
legally enforced school segregation.
But Harris insisted that federal mandates were sometimes necessary in
other cases when states and districts
wouldn't take action on their own.
Biden later apologized for his remarks about segregationist senators.
"Was I wrong a few weeks ago to
somehow give the impression to people
that I was praising those men who I
successfully opposed time and again?
Yes, I was. I regret it," Biden said at a
South Carolina event on July 6. But he
defended his civil rights record, including the reauthorization of the Voting
Rights Act, and did not apologize for
his school integration record.
"I'm going to let my record stand
for itself and not be distorted or
smeared," Biden said.
Busing as a solution to the segregation of American schools has a long
and complicated history. Here's what
you need to know.

Voluntary School Integration
Has Changed Since the 1970s
Today, it's more difficult for schools to
adopt race-based integration plans-in
which students' school assignments are
set to help balance the racial makeup

Wilfredo Lee/AP

In Campaign Season,
A New Look at Busing

2019
Democratic presidential candidates, former vice president Joe Biden, left, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Kamala
Harris, D-Calif., debate education issues during the Democratic primary debate in Miami last month.

between schools-without a court
order in a desegregation case.
In its 2007 decision in Parents
Involved in Community Schools v.
Seattle School District No. 1, the
U.S. Supreme Court sharply curtailed the permissible uses of race
by school districts in assigning students to schools. In a 5-4 ruling,
the court found that assignment
plans in the Seattle and Jefferson
County, Ky., districts that classified
all students by race violated the

equal-protection clause of the 14th
Amendment.
In the wake of that decision, some
districts have looked to other factors
viewed as less constitutionally problematic, like family-income levels, to
help achieve diversity in their schools.

Public Support for School
Integration Is Mixed
Historians say the term "busing"
is problematic. Transportation is

just one means of accomplishing
school integration, but it became a
toxic label some parents used to dismiss those efforts altogether, those
experts said.
In a 2017 poll issued by PDK International, about three-quarters
of parents said it was "somewhat"
or "very important" to have racially
diverse public schools. But black
parents were far more likely than
white and Hispanic parents to say
they would accept a longer commute

Trump Drops Fight to Add Citizenship Question to Census
Supreme Court Blocks Question, Takes Up DACA
By Mark Walsh
President Donald Trump last week ended
his administration's efforts to add a citizenship
question to the 2020 census, an issue that was
keenly watched by the education community.
Trump's decision appeared to put an end to
two weeks of swirling controversy over whether
the citizenship question could be added after
the U.S. Supreme Court held that the administration's stated reason for the question, to enforce voting rights, was a pretext.
Education groups argued that a citizenship question would depress response rates
among Hispanic and immigrant households,
which would affect the allocation of billions of
dollars in federal education aid to states and
school districts.
In Department of Commerce v. New York, the
justices ruled 5-4 on June 27 that U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur L. Ross Jr.'s stated
rationale for adding the question-to better
enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965-was a
pretext and that the government would have
to do more to provide a valid reason to add the
question to the census.
At a Rose Garden event on July 11, the president said the Supreme Court decision "would

have produced even more litigation and considerable time delays."
"It's deeply regrettable, but it will not stop us
from collecting the needed information, and I
think in even greater detail and more accurately," Trump said.
He was referring to an executive order he
intended to sign to ease the use of administrative records to determine the number of U.S.
citizens in the country. But the gathering of
such information-from Social Security and
tax records, for example-would not appear to
affect the ways that data from the decennial
census are used for political apportionment and
the allocation of federal aid.
Thomas A. Saenz, the president and general
counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which pressed
one challenge to the citizenship question, said
in a statement, "This is a great victory for all
who believe in the importance of accuracy in
the census and in the necessity of fairness in
government policymaking."

Federal School Funding at Stake
The court's decision in the census case was
one of several that came in late June that were

18 | EDUCATION WEEK | July 17, 2019 | www.edweek.org

of interest to educators in a Supreme Court
term that was otherwise lacking in cases specifically involving K-12 schools. The justices
also upheld a World War I memorial cross on
public property in a case that prompted strong
opinions on the court's long-standing legal test
for evaluating government interaction with religion, including in the public schools.
Meanwhile, the high court set the table
for a more interesting term for education
beginning next fall by announcing it would
take up a potentially landmark decision
on whether state constitutional provisions
barring aid to religion and religious schools
run afoul of the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of free exercise of religion. And it said it
will decide whether the Trump administration may end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which offers relief
from deportation for as many as 800,000
undocumented immigrants. The program
begun by President Barack Obama allows
recipients to legally pursue education and
work opportunities.
Until the president pulled the plug on efforts
to add the citizenship question, the high court's
census ruling reverberated for two weeks.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the
majority in its decision that the administration's rationale for adding the citizenship question "seems to have been contrived."

Roberts was joined by the court's more liberal members for that outcome-Justices Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. But the chief justice also wrote, for a different majority, that neither the "enumeration clause" in Article I of the
Constitution nor the Administrative Procedure
Act barred Ross from adding the citizenship
question. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A.
Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, and Brett M. Kavanaugh agreed with those conclusions.
The decision left open the possibility that
Ross could come back with a valid rationale.
But with the administration having insisted
that June 30 was the deadline to begin printing census forms, it seemed that the high-court
ruling settled the matter.
U.S. Department of Justice lawyers said as
much on July 2 to a federal district judge in
Maryland overseeing a separate lawsuit challenging the citizenship question, and the Commerce Department confirmed that it had given
up the fight. On the morning of July 3, however,
President Trump had something to say about it.
"The News Reports about the Department
of Commerce dropping its quest to put the
Citizenship Question on the Census is in- correct or, to state it differently, FAKE!," Trump
tweeted. "We are absolutely moving forward,
as we must, because of the importance of the
answer to this question."

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Education Week - July 17, 2019

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