By Chris Powell
As the first woman to get tenure as a professor at Yale Law School, the first woman appointed to Connecticut’s Supreme Court, and the state’s first woman chief justice, Ellen Ash Peters must have had something going for her.
But the tributes offered for her last week after her death at age 94 credited her most for the Supreme Court decision she wrote in the school integration case of Sheff v. O’Neill in 1996 — a decision that has been heavily discredited by its consequences.
The decision, which divided the court 4-3, arose from the concentration of minority students in Hartford’s schools. The court held that Connecticut’s Constitution establishes the right of every public school student to a racially integrated education and that the state’s school districting by municipal boundaries is unconstitutional.
Desirable as racial integration is, nobody took the Sheff decision seriously — not the plaintiffs who brought the underlying lawsuit nor even the court itself. The decision was an empty gesture. Its logic was that all students had to be assigned to school by their race, that municipal school districts had to be dissolved and redrawn to balance their populations racially, and that many students had to be bused long distances to integrate the white student bodies in rural towns.
Of course all that would have been impossible politically and educationally, and none of it ever happened. Indeed, despite its proclamation of a constitutional right and a new era of social justice and better education, the Sheff decision produced little integration at all.
Instead the decision produced 25 more years of subsidiary litigation about enforcement, during which the lawyers for the plaintiffs — nominally some students in Hartford — quickly acknowledged that they really didn’t care about the right of every student in the state to a racially integrated education and wanted only more opportunity for Hartford students to escape the city’s poorly performing schools. The supposed constitutional right of every student in the state to a racially integrated education was a ruse.
Prompted by the Sheff decision, state government gradually appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate regional “magnet” schools to mix minority students from Hartford and white students from the suburbs. But the regional schools still left Hartford’s schools with overwhelmingly minority and disadvantaged populations. Worse, the regional schools began to deprive the city’s neighborhood schools of their better and most-parented students, damaging city school performance even more.
Today Hartford’s schools are barely more integrated than they were when the Sheff decision was rendered. While the rest of Connecticut’s schools are slightly more integrated, mainly in the inner suburbs, it is not because of Sheff. That integration has resulted from the general increase in prosperity of members of racial minorities, enabling them to relocate to towns with better schools — or, really, better students.
The latest judicial “settlement” of the Sheff case has state government promising to make more room for Hartford students in regional schools. But this still will leave Hartford’s schools and most others in Connecticut heavily segregated, and the additional integration will remain pathetically small compared to the expense.
The results have been similarly dismal for Connecticut’s other big state Supreme Court decision on civil rights in education, Horton v. Meskill, issued in 1979.
The Horton decision found the state’s system of school financing to be unconstitutional because it relied too much on municipal taxing ability, which varied sharply with property wealth among towns. The resulting disparity in school spending was deemed to be the cause of the awful educational performance in poor municipalities.
State government responded to the Horton decision with much larger financial grants to poor municipalities, leading to a huge increase in the state’s total educational spending. But student performance in poor municipalities remains as bad as it was at the time of the Horton decision. Indeed, for years student performance has been falling almost everywhere in the state.
So it seems that educational performance has little to do with racial integration and spending. Now if only having children outside marriage and parental neglect were unconstitutional.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 