Gibson/Papenfuse Race and the Law in Maryland Image No: 157 Enlarge and print image (67K) << PREVIOUS NEXT >> |
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Gibson/Papenfuse Race and the Law in Maryland Image No: 157 Enlarge and print image (67K) << PREVIOUS NEXT >> |
school as far as faculty is concerned and to provide every student in the system with the experience of being taught by an integrated faculty. Judge Kaufman noted that "The County school system has not today achieved unitary status, and remains under court order to eradicate all vestiges of discrimination. No party to the current action disputes that characterization or challenges its validity in the light of the current legal and factual context."202 Plaintiffs contended that the faculty had been desegregated even if all the other aspects of the system had not been, and therefore further actions with respect to the faculty could not be justified as remedial. Judge Kaufman replied that the injury was from the functioning of a dual system. To disestablish that system and vindicate the rights of school children, the Board can validly implement race-conscious faculty policies even in the absence of employment discrimination against teachers, provided that those policies serve the critical interest of reducing the racial identifiability of individual schools.203 Judge Kaufman found, however, that some of the goals had risen since 1984 in correspondence with the rise in the percentage of blacks in the county population although there had been no rise in the percentage of black teachers during those years. Thus, the school system had about 30% black faculty for the past five years, but the range for the seniority override has risen from the 21-35% range of 1978 to a 35-50% range at the time of suit. Judge Kaufman noted that this transformed the range into a numerical quota where the seniority override could be triggered whenever the staff membership is below 30% black and the total proportion of black teachers in the system was below 30%. He concluded that the mechanism was constitutional, but that the numbers used were unconstitutional because they were based on the student population rather than on faculty racial proportions. Although Judge Kaufrnan said that the Prince George's system was undertaken as a remedy for de jure discrimination and was therefore not subject to strict scrutiny, he continued in the alternative to analyze the Prince George's system as a voluntary one not compelled by the duty to integrate and found it valid (except for the specific numbers used) even under that analysis. He said that preventing individual schools from being racially identifiable was a compelling educational objective, and that with the exception noted it was narrowly tailored to serve that purpose. This decision is hardly the last word in desegregation litigation. The Supreme Court has at least one case in its 1991-92 term that deals with the power of the federal court to supervise school systems student desegregation where pupil assignment has achieved desegregated status but other indicia of unitary status have not. Thus, the continuing role of the courts in monitoring racial balance and desegregation in the schools is a current hot controversy. 155 |