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

(3) whether or not the school system has demonstrated, to the public and to the parents and students of the once-disfavored race, its good-faith commitment to the whole of the court's decree and to those provisions of the law and the Constitution that were the predicate for judicial intervention in the first place (Jenkins III, 1995; Freeman, 1992).

Rehnquist found further guidance in the Dowell decision, adding that the ultimate question was not only whether a school system has achieved compliance with an order of the court, but also whether the vestiges of discrimination have been eradicated to the extent practicable.

Satisfied that he had established the framework for a discussion of the propriety of the trial court's order as a means of redressing discrimination in the KCMSD-and mindful of the importance of returning the system to local control-the Chief Justice turned next to his discussion of the pay raise issue. He began by agreeing with the state's claim that the raises were inappropriate because they served as an interdistrict remedy for an intradistrict violation. The more suitable response, he asserted, would have been to focus on eliminating the vestiges of de jure discrimination to the extent practicable. He further claimed that because more than two-thirds of the students in the KCMSD were African American, the lower courts had apparently ignored the findings of Milliken I and II, believing an intradistrict remedy insufficient. Thus, rather than attempting to ignore the racial composition of the KCMSD, Rehnquist concluded that the district court inappropriately tried to create a system that was equal to or better than surrounding districts by highlighting the extent to which it had been desegregated and focusing on how it compared with its suburban counterparts.

In Rehnquist's view, the goal of reversing decreases in student achievement by attracting non-minority pupils to Kansas City's public schools through the creation of a systemwide network of magnet schools had transformed the KCMSD into a virtual "magnet district." Parenthetically, he acknowledged that the Court had approved the use of magnet schools in intradistrict remedies, relying on a definition of magnet schools set forth in the Court's ruling in Jenkins II, which states that they are "generally understood, [to be] public schools of voluntary enrollment designed to promote integration by drawing students away from their neighborhoods and private schools through distinctive curricula and high quality" (p. 1657). He went on to note two advantages of magnet schools: first, the benefits they conferred to students, and to the desegregation process itself, by encouraging voluntary interdistrict transfers without extensive busing or redrawing district boundaries; second, their ability to stem the White flight that often results when mandatory student transfers are ordered. Notwithstanding, he maintained that the district court's plan was not intended merely to redistribute students within the KCMSD. Rather, the trial court had exceeded the limits of its remedial authority by trying to do indirectly what it could not do directly-namely, create an interdistrict program to attract students.