Education Week - July 17, 2019 - 20

Presidential Campaign Renews Debate on K-12 Integration
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gration improved the academic and
life outcomes for black students in a
number of measures, while not affecting white students. Johnson hypothesizes that increased per-pupil
spending and reductions in class size
helped drive the differences.
Another study, this time of students in Texas and led by Stanford University professor Eric Hanushek, found that black students
attending racially segregated
schools had lower math and reading test scores than black students
in more racially mixed schools.
Having more black classmates had
an insignificant effect on white students, this study found.

There is legislation in Congress to
promote school diversity initiatives,
including busing. The Strength in
Diversity Act, introduced this year
by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and
Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, would
provide grants to districts that want
to address racial and socioeconomic
diversity, including those who want
to use a transportation plan to do so.
Harris joined the bill as a co-sponsor after Education Week asked her
office about the measure. After the
debate, she said she favors voluntary
integration efforts. Two of the other
co-sponsors of the bill are fellow

AP Photo

School Diversity Legislation
In Congress

1974
Democratic presidential candidates:
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Candidates Aren't Silent
On Desegregation
Biden included school diversity
measures in the K-12 platform he
unveiled in May, as did Sanders.

As part of his platform, Biden
says he would reinstitute Obama
administration guidance that encouraged schools to consider voluntary integration efforts. (The
Trump administration revoked
that guidance last year.)
Biden also supports grants to
help schools diversify.
Sanders also supports deseg-

Motorcycle police escort school
buses on a street in Boston, as
schools are integrated in 1974.

regation efforts, including those
mandated by court orders, in his
education agenda. He also says
he would build on the Strength in
Diversity Act.
Julián Castro, a former Housing and Urban Development secretary who is also running for
president, addresses the issue in
a somewhat different way in his
education platform.
"Although we ended sanctioned
segregation in our schools many
years ago, widespread disparities between students continue
today," Castro's plan says. "We
can't have integrated schools if
our housing and communities are
segregated."
P r e s i d e nt D o n a l d T r u mp ,
asked about the debate, vaguely
referred to a plan he said he'd release "in about four weeks" and
seemed to focus on busing as a
general mode of transportation,
rather than a means of desegregating schools.
That led some commentators to
question whether he fully understood the issue.
"Well, it has been something
that they've done for a long period
of time," Trump said. "I mean,
you know, there aren't that many
ways you're going to get people
to schools. So this is something
that's been done. In some cases,
it's been done with a hammer
instead of velvet glove. And, you
know, that's part of it."

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Garden event last week and said the administration had concluded that "there is simply
no way to litigate these issues and obtain relief
from the current injunctions in time to implement any new decision in time without jeopardizing our ability to carry out the census, which
we're not going to do."
"So, as a practical matter, the Supreme
Court's decision closed all paths to adding the
question to the 2020 census," Barr said.

School Aid, DACA Next Term
Educators were also following the case of a
94-year-old cross on public land that commemorates a Maryland county's World War I dead,
which was challenged as an unconstitutional
government establishment of religion.
In American Legion v. American Humanist
Association, the court ruled 7-2 that the cross
could remain because of its identi- cation as
a war memorial. But the court declined to
apply the three-part test from the 1971 case
of Lemon v. Kurtzman, under which courts
must examine whether government action regarding religion had a secular purpose, had
the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting
religion, or created an excessive entanglement with religion.
In fact, in multiple opinions, a majority of
justices suggested that the Lemon test, which
has been widely applied in education cases, has
little viability remaining.
Kavanaugh, the newest justice, said "the
court's decisions over the span of several decades demonstrate that the Lemon test is not

good law and does not apply to establish- mentclause cases" in several broad categories, including those involving government- sponsored
prayers in public school.
Still, the court stopped short of overruling
the 1971 decision.
"There are probably five votes to over- rule
the Lemon test in the future," Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California,
Berkeley, law school, said at a forum at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia last
week. "It just didn't hap- pen here."
The court's next term has several high-profile
cases of interest to educators.
On June 28, the day after their last day on
the bench, the justices announced they would
take up the cases on state aid to religious
schools and the Trump administration's efforts
to end the DACA program.
In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the justices will review a decision by
Montana's highest court that struck down a
tuition-tax-credit program that allowed tuition
scholarships to bene t students at private religious schools. The Montana Supreme Court
ruled that the program violates the state constitution's provision barring government aid to
"sectarian schools."
Families who want to use the scholarships
contend the state constitutional language violates their federal First Amendment right to
free exercise of religion. They rely heavily on
the U.S. Supreme Court's 2017 decision in
Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Mo. v.
Comer, in which the justices said Missouri violated the free-exercise clause when it barred
a church from participating in a neutral state
playground-improvement program.

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

Art Lien

Court Will Take Up Case on State Aid for Religious Schools

The Trinity Lutheran decision has been
the subject of much debate over how much
it bolsters those seeking to require state
school choice programs to include religious
schools, and the Montana case may answer
that question.
The DACA case is Department of Homeland
Security v. Regents of the University of California. The Trump administration argues that
the 2012 DACA program violates federal immigration law and that Trump was on solid
legal ground in rescinding it. A ruling for the
administration would end protections for the
800,000 young people in the program and likely
further roil the debate over immigration.

The Supreme Court on the final day of the
2019 term, which was relatively quiet on
K-12 issues.

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Education Week - July 17, 2019

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