Education Week - September 30, 2020 - 8

From left: In this Oct. 3, 2019, file
photo, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg gestures to
students before speaking at

Jessica Hill/AP

Amherst College in Amherst, Mass.
A mother and daughter read an
illustrated children's book about
Ginsburg's life, as people gather at
the Supreme Court to honor the
justice, who died Sept 18.

By Mark Walsh
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneer in
the women's rights movement and the second
woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court,
died Friday, Sept. 18, at age 87 due to complications of pancreatic cancer. On education issues
arising during her 27 years on the court, Ginsburg
was a stalwart vote for gender equity in schools,
expansive desegregation remedies, strict separation of church and state, and, in a memorable
dissent, against broader drug testing of students.
"A prime part of the history of our Constitution ... is the story of the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once
ignored or excluded," Ginsburg wrote for the
court in United States v. Virginia, the 1996 case
that struck down the state's exclusion of women
from the Virginia Military Institute, perhaps her
most important opinion in an education case
and a sentiment that also reflected her votes
in cases involving students of color, LGBTQ
Americans, and students in special education.
"There is no reason to believe that the admission of women capable of all the activities
required of VMI cadets would destroy the Institute rather than enhance its capacity to serve
the 'more perfect Union,'" Ginsburg wrote in
the Virginia case, quoting from the preamble to
the U.S. Constitution.
Ginsburg was surrounded by her family at her
home in Washington when she died, the court
announced. She had been treated for several
forms of cancer and other ailments in recent
years. Her death prompted glowing tributes but
also immediate speculation about the Trump
administration's prospects for filling her seat
less than two months before the presidential
election.
"Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature," Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in
a statement. "We at the Supreme Court have
lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but
with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a
tireless and resolute champion of justice."

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

What Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Meant to Education
Nina Totenberg, the longtime Supreme Court
correspondent for NPR and a personal friend of
Ginsburg, reported that the justice dictated a note
to her granddaughter Clara Spera in recent days
that said: "My most fervent wish is that I will not
be replaced until a new president is installed."

Shop Class v. Sewing
Ginsburg was born March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, N.Y., as Joan Ruth Bader, the daughter of
Celia and Nathan Bader. Her father ran small
shops, including a fur shop, and her mother
worked in the garment industry. At her neighborhood elementary school, P.S. 238, there were
several Joans in Ginsburg's kindergarten class,
so her mother suggested to the teacher that she
be referred to as Ruth.
In 8th grade, she was uncomfortable in home
economics class, where the graduation dress
she was assigned to create was "a mess," she
once recalled.
"I remember envying the boys long before I
even knew the word 'feminism,' because I liked
shop better than cooking or sewing," she said in
My Own Words, a collection of her writings and
speeches published in 2016.
Also as an 8th grader, Ginsburg wrote an editorial as editor of the school newspaper about
four "great documents"-the Ten Commandments, Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the United Nations Charter.
The essay was of a far more serious tone than
the typical offerings.
"My mother was very strong about my doing
well in school and living up to my potential,"
Ginsburg told an interviewer in 2004.
Ginsburg's mother died of cancer in 1950, one
day before Ginsburg's graduation from James
Madison High School in Brooklyn.
Ginsburg attended Cornell University, where
she met her husband, Martin D. Ginsburg, in
1954. Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School,
where the dean once asked her and eight other
female members of the class to justify why they
were taking the place of a man.

8 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 30, 2020 | www.edweek.org

When Martin Ginsburg graduated from Harvard Law, where he was a year ahead of his wife,
he took a job in New York City, and Ginsburg
went with him, finishing her law school education at Columbia University.
Ginsburg could not get a job with a law firm
and became a law professor, first at Rutgers
University and later at Columbia. In 1971, she
helped launch the Women's Rights Project of
the American Civil Liberties Union, where
Ginsburg led the legal fight for gender equity,
sometimes by picking cases in which men had
suffered reverse discrimination in benefits or
other matters. She argued six cases before the
Supreme Court, winning five of them.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter nominated Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia Circuit, where
she served for six years with the conservative
judge Antonin Scalia before he took a seat on
the high court. It was the beginning of their
deep friendship despite their ideological differences.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated
Ginsburg to succeed Justice Byron R. White.
She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate 96-3.
Ginsburg wrote her first opinion in an education case toward the end of her second
term. In Missouri v. Jenkins, Ginsburg joined
the principal dissent in a 5-4 decision that
overturned a sweeping desegregation plan
for the Kansas City, Mo., school district.
She wrote a short, separate dissent that expressed disappointment that the majority
thought seven years of remedial programs
for the district was too long when race discrimination in what would become Missouri
had begun in 1724 under the Code Noir of
King Louis XV of France and only grew with

state laws requiring separate schools for
Black students and resistance to the court's
landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of 1954.
"Today, the court declares illegitimate the
goal of attracting nonminority students to
the Kansas City, Missouri, School District,
and thus stops the District Court's efforts
to integrate a school district that was, in the
1984/1985 school year, sorely in need and
68.3 percent black," Ginsburg wrote. "Given
the deep, inglorious history of segregation
in Missouri, to curtail desegregation at this
time and in this manner is an action at once
too swift and too soon."
Ginsburg was among the dissenters in the
2007 decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, which
sharply curtailed the ways school districts
could voluntarily consider race in assigning
students to schools. She voted for allowing
race to be considered in college admissions
in landmark cases involving the University
of Michigan law school in 2003 and the University of Texas at Austin in 2016.

Broad View of Title IX
On gender equity, Ginsburg's opinion in
the 1996 VMI case was one she worked on
carefully, and she was grateful when Scalia
gave her a draft of his solo dissent before
circulating it to the full court. Scalia was the
only vote after the justices' private conference in favor of upholding a male-only VMI.
The dissent was a "zinger," Ginsburg said at
a memorial after Scalia died in 2016. Scalia
took her draft majority opinion to task for,
among other things, referring to the flagship

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Education Week - September 30, 2020

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