The Post-Parents Involved Challenge: Confronting Extralegal Obstacles
For proponents of school integration, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 is certainly an undesirable decision, but by no means a movement-ending one. Many commentators have already begun trying to make sense of the Supreme Court's latest legal framework and to ascertain what kind of student assignment policies would likely pass constitutional muster. This Article, however, takes a different tack. To advance the integration agenda from here, it suggests looking beyond merely testing the limits of the law or mounting further legal challenges to it. Using the decision as a starting point, this Article instead seeks to reexamine some of the assumptions, structures, and institutions that impact our educational system in an effort to understand how they interact to create and perpetuate inequity. Recognizing these relationships may allow us not only to shape positive and more effective integration strategies in the short run, but also, ultimately, to reimagine a system of public education that can fully realize the values of inclusion, equity, and integration. The nature of school segregation undergoes continual change, and its causes are different today than they were forty, twenty, or even ten years ago. We argue that existing patterns of segregation can be traced, in large part, to factors that are ostensibly non-racial and non- or quasi-legal, but that work together to legitimize inequality and separateness. Our analysis specifically focuses on how the decisions of certain institutions (the courts) interact with certain structures (district boundary lines) to legitimize the replication of residential segregation in public education, and establish and define discrete spaces in which disparate educational systems operate. It also considers how our collective understanding of the purposes of public education have evolved over time-now emphasizing excellence and autonomy over equality and citizenship-so as to shape and justify the actions of parents and the political bodies that represent them. These actions, too, in relation with the institutions and structures around them, serve to perpetuate inequality and undermine efforts to promote greater integration.