American Civil Rights Foundation v. Berkeley Unified School District

Racial integration of America’s public schools began with Brown v. Board, of Education (1954) 347 U.S. 483 [ 98 L.Ed. 873 , 74 S.Ct. 686 ], when the United States Supreme Court ruled that state-imposed segregation in education that intentionally discriminated against African-Americans on the basis of their race was unconstitutional. Half a century after Brown , some educators have gone beyond removing state-imposed segregation, and have implemented affirmative policies fostering social diversity in their schools. The question confronting courts today is whether these new policies go too far and themselves improperly discriminate on the basis of race.

We conclude that the particular policy challenged here—which aims to achieve social diversity by using neighborhood demographics when assigning students to schools—is not discriminatory. The challenged policy does not use racial classifications; in fact, it does not consider an individual student’s race at all when assigning the student to a school. Instead, the assignment policy looks at the student’s residential neighborhood, and considers the average household income in the neighborhood, the average education level of…