The Northwestern High School Alumni Association filed a lawsuit last week in Baltimore City Circuit Court asking a judge to stop Baltimore City Public Schools from closing the school, as it expects to do in 2016 as part of its 10-year facilities plan, the Baltimore Sun reports.
School closings are traumatic, especially in communities where those schools have been the pillars of stability for decades. But now they’re making a civil rights case out of it, and courts have no room for emotions. The alumni association is asking the court to grant an injunction to freeze the closing process while they present new data about the condition of the school, data they say has changed since the school district made the decision to close the school.
Their argument hinges on two main points:
- Closure discriminates against people based on the color of their skin.
- Upgrades since the facilities plan was developed make it inaccurate.
Before I talk about civil rights, let me say a word or two about the second point in the alumni association’s argument. It’s not the place of a court to judge the wisdom of the facilities plan, the quality or timeliness of the data on which it’s based, or even whether or not it’s a good plan. The alumni association will have to make that case to lawmakers in our system of government; courts decide issues of legality.
“The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax,” Chief Justice John G Roberts Jr wrote in the majority opinion for that law’s appeal to the High Court last June. “Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.”
So if the plaintiffs plan to wait for Baltimore’s circuit court to look over the plan and say, “Oh, that information is not current,” or “This wardrobe locker doesn’t even exist in the school,” and with that, throw out the conclusions of the school district, I advise them not to hold their breaths. Even if they could persuade the court that certain data points are inaccurate or out of date, they’ll never know if those data points were even considered when the district made the decisions about which schools to close.
Title VI and discrimination against African-Americans
As we reported in our story about Oakland (Calif.) Unified School District’s closure of five elementary schools last year, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a big law. Basically, it says that
No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
The law is very specific about what agencies that receive federal funding, like Baltimore City Schools, can’t do: they can’t exclude black people from participating in school, deny them the benefits of the educational services those federal funds are intended to provide, or subject them to discrimination.
Any court should quickly dismiss claims based on exclusion or denial of benefits. The idea of “excluding” a group of people from participating in school is not the same as creating a hardship for them to get to school. That is, just because a school closure makes many black people travel two miles to school instead of one doesn’t mean the district is excluding them from participating in school or denying them the benefits of an education. It’s just harder, but they still have access.
That leaves discrimination as the only possible basis on which the alumni association could base their lawsuit. Under Title VI, discrimination comes in two flavors:
- Doing something with the intention of discriminating against black people
- Doing something that just happens to have a disparate impact on black people
Unless plaintiffs want to go on record accusing Baltimore City Schools CEO Andrés Alonso of sitting back in his chair and dreaming up ways he can discriminate against African-Americans, they’re going to have to pursue this claim based on the “disparate impact” part of Title VI.
And this is tricky—not because the law’s unclear, but because the district has so many valid defense strategies, any one of which gets them off the hook.
In a light most favorable
Since closing the school will obviously be irreversible once it happens, plaintiffs have to prove they have a reasonable chance of winning their case if the evidence is viewed in a light most favorable to them. The question before the court will probably be something like, “What evidence have plaintiffs presented to prove that closing Northwestern High will have a disparate impact on African-Americans?” A judge can grant the injunction to stop the closure, at least temporarily, if plaintiffs can show they have a good chance in court.
They will undoubtedly use student demographics in their argument. Northwestern has an enrollment of 691 students, and 653 of them, or about 94.5 percent, are black. It can be argued that closing the school will therefore affect more black students than any other racial group, hence a disparity.
In other words, if the court is considering a “disparate impact” claim, plaintiffs have to show the district’s actions affect black students more negatively than white students. That’s clearly the case, but a solid defense is that the district can’t take any other action that has a less discriminatory effect.
For example, the average for all schools in the system is 85.5 percent African-American, and there isn’t a single high school in Baltimore City that doesn’t have an African-American majority. So no matter which high school Dr Alonso chooses to close, that action affects more black students than white students.
Forest Park High School, to which Northwestern students will be sent in 2016-17, after the school closes, has an enrollment of 605 students, 593 of whom are black. That proportion, which is higher than 98 percent African-American, is even higher than the number at Northwestern. So, closing nearby Forest Park would have an even greater disparate impact on blacks than closing Northwestern will.
On second thought, maybe they shouldn’t talk about demographics in front of the judge.
Have you got anything else for the court?
And with that, we’re all out of arguments. Because even if plaintiffs could show that the district had other alternatives that would result in less discrimination against African-Americans, there’s still the “substantial legitimate justification” defense. And even with the absolute best light shining on their evidence, there’s no way the Northwestern High Alumni Association can shoot this one down.
This justification must show that the action is necessary in order to meet specific goals that are integral to the mission the federal funding supports. All the district has to do is show that it wouldn’t be able to accomplish some aspect of its mission—providing 21st-century educational services to the children of Baltimore, perhaps—unless it closed the school.
This is where the facilities plan comes in. Baltimore City Public Schools plans to upgrade 136 school buildings to 21st-century standards. We call such a mission, such a plan, both “legitimate” and “substantial,” stopping the Title VI argument cold.
Back to the exclusion part of Title VI, where we started, we believe Dr Alonso isn’t creating a situation at all where white students enjoy access to educational services but black students don’t. Rather, he’s adding access to these better educational services for black students. He can’t do it at every building, apparently, so he’s doing it at a few and plugging up the money and resource drains at the others as fast as he can.
That’s what good administrators do: Trying to create equity in terms of access to 21st-century educational opportunities, he sacrifices mere buildings in order to gain improvements to the educational mission. There’s no better way, and maybe, there’s no other way, either.
