curious case of Missouri v. Jenkins: The end of the road for court-ordered desegregation?, The

Journal of Negro Education, The, Winter 1997 by J John Harris III, Charles J Russo, Frank Brown

THE OPINIONS OF THE COURT

Chief Justice Rehnquist's Majority Opinion

Chief Justice Rehnquist opened his substantive discussion of the Jenkins In case by considering two points. First, he asked whether or not the district court had exceeded its constitutional authority when it granted salary increases to virtually all instructional and noninstructional employees of the KCMSD. He next debated whether the court had acted properly by relying upon data which confirmed that the school district's student achievement test scores had failed to rise to some unspecified level when it declined to find that the state had achieved partial unitary status insofar as quality education programs were concerned Jenkins III, 1995).

The Chief Justice began by questioning why the Court found it necessary to address the trial court's ability to order salary increases. He maintained that the state could reasonably challenge this remedy because, even though Jenkins II was limited to the issue of funding, the Court's refusal to hear an appeal on the scope of the remedial order was neither an approval nor a disapproval of the trial court's action. As such, he argued that the Court's focus on salary increases was essential because the previous litigation focused on whether the trial court had the authority to order the pay raises. In this way, he rejected Justice Souter's argument that such a focus was unfair and imprudent.

Both Rehnquist's opinion and O'Connor's concurrence pointed out that the Court could rightly examine the scope of the district court's power because the state had raised these arguments in its earlier appeals and its brief. The Chief Justice relied primarily on the tripartite test employed in Milliken II to establish the limits of a federal district court's power to fashion remedial desegregation orders. The test maintains that:

(1) the nature of a desegregation remedy must be determined by the nature and scope of the Constitutional violation;

(2) the decree must be remedial insofar as it is designed to place the victims in the position they would have occupied but for having been discriminated against; and

(3) a court must consider the interests of state and local authorities in managing their own affairs.

Justice Rehnquist also turned to the six factors enunciated in the Green (1968) case to argue that, in evaluating whether or not the third prong of the tripartite test has been satisfied, a school system must be unitary with regard to the following: student body composition, faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities, and facilities.

Given that federal judicial intervention is supposed to be temporary, Rehnquist noted that three additional factors from Freeman should also be considered before a trial court could allow partial withdrawal of a desegregation remedy:

(1) whether or not full and satisfactory compliance with the decree has been achieved in those aspects of the system for which withdrawal of supervision is being considered;

(2) whether or not retention of judicial control is necessary or practicable in order to achieve compliance with the decree in other facets of the school system; and