Rationing Justice by Kris Shepard

Author:Kris Shepard [Shepard, Kris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, Social Science, Discrimination, Political Science, Public Policy, Law, Legal History
ISBN: 9780807134160
Google: wxg0g4EobjAC
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2009-04-01T00:23:12+00:00

Courts are ill-equipped to make such fundamental, legislative and administrative policy decisions as how much local supplement to teachers’ salaries should be paid in order to attract qualified teachers, how many levels of English or math should be taught, whether a system of pupil ability grouping shall or shall not be used, whether buildings shall be constructed and, if so, where, and the myriad other matters involved in the everyday administration of a public school system which the courts would face were they to embark upon the course of judicial activism desired by the school patrons [GLSP’s clients]. Resolutions of these discretionary policy determinations best can be made by other branches of government.169

Other GLSP cases attacked educational practices that seemed rife with racial discrimination, especially the tracking of students into ability groupings. Such policies, which many Deep South school boards adopted when they were forced to desegregate in the late 1960s and early 1970s, resulted in the re-segregation of black and white students within schools that were technically integrated. While the legal services clients received some relief on a smaller scale in Tattnall County,170 a statewide case fell short of dismantling this ubiquitous practice. In the latter litigation the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals found that neither tracking nor the classification of students into special education programs was sufficiently “racial” to amount to any constitutional violation but, rather, was based on sound pedagogical theory that students learned most effectively when placed among students of similar intellectual abilities.171 As GLSP attorney Jonathan Zimring recalled, the state’s “defense to the race claims [was] that it was class. Anything but race.” In other words, rather than race being the determinative factor in tracking students, the state argued that it was discriminating on the basis of “ability,” which Zimring saw as closely linked to socioeconomic status.172

The potential for change and the limits of litigation were powerfully displayed in North Mississippi’s most notable case, Ayers v. Fordice, which sought to equalize the state’s institutions of higher learning. Like its elementary and secondary schools, Mississippi had maintained segregated colleges and universities: five predominantly white and three predominantly black. In Ayers the plaintiffs, represented by North Mississippi’s Alvin Chambliss, sought to erase that tradition of separateness and inequality. Chambliss had become involved in the case during the mid-1970s, along with other NMRLS attorneys including Jesse Pennington and Solomon Osborne. They had joined other African-American attorneys to form a group known as the Mississippi Council on Higher Education. At the initial stages civil rights attorney Isaiah Madison was the primary lawyer on the case, but he soon left Chambliss in charge. Chambliss was to remain involved in the Ayers case far longer than he anticipated: the case was not settled until 2001.173 In the meantime Chambliss and his colleagues were able to win several major victories, the most salient being the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Fordice (1992), which Chambliss argued against the federal government’s solicitor general, Kenneth Starr. The decision acknowledged that Mississippi’s colleges were

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