Editor: The following article was published by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a university research center housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education. http://nepc.colorado.edu We thank them for permission to reprint this article for our readers.
RGB and Education: A Legacy of Equity
From the National Education Policy Center
During her
27 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg left behind a
distinctive legacy on education issues by developing the jurisprudence
extending constitutional protections concerning gender equity, desegregation,
student and LGBTQ rights, and the
separation of church and state even as an increasingly conservative court
relegated her opinions to minority dissents. As attention understandably turns
to the abrupt political machinations concerning her replacement, it’s important
not to forget the ways she shaped — or attempted to shape — some of the core
educational issues of our time. Here are just four examples of her
education-related opinions.
Missouri v. Jenkins, 1995. In
Justice Ginsburg’s first opinion in an education case, she opposed the decision
to end Kansas City’s desegregation plan, joining the main dissent in the 5-4
case and also writing a dissent of her own. “The Court stresses that the
present remedial programs have been in place for seven years. . . . But
compared to more than two centuries of firmly entrenched official
discrimination, the experience with the desegregation remedies ordered by the
District Court has been evanescent,” she stated. In 2007, Justice Ginsburg also
dissented in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle SchoolDistrict, where the Court’s majority prohibited school districts from
considering students’ race as a way to avoid segregation that occurs through
their school choice plans.
United States v. Virginia,
1996. Justice Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion striking down the Virginia
Military Institute’s admissions policy that prohibited females from attending.
Her opinion explained that Virginia’s creation of a separate women’s-only
academy did not cure the violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection
clause, since women did not receive same benefits as men. “‘Inherent
differences’ between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause
for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for
artificial constraints on an individual’s opportunity,” she wrote. “Sex
classifications may be used to compensate women ‘for particular economic
disabilities [they have] suffered.’ But such classifications may not be used,
as they once were, to create or perpetuate the legal, social, and economic
inferiority of women.” Justice Ginsberg applied the standard that she had
helped developed when she was a litigator and advocate for women’s rights: in
order to survive equal-protection scrutiny, sex discrimination must “serve important
governmental objectives” and be “substantially related to the achievement of
those objectives.”
Safford Unified School District #1 v. Redding, 2009. Justice Ginsburg sided with the majority in finding
that school officials’ search of a 13-year-old girl’s underwear, based simply
on having earlier found the equivalent to two Advils and one Aleve, violated
her Fourth Amendment right to be protected from unreasonable government
searches and seizures. During oral arguments, she spoke out when some male
justices minimized the student’s discomfort. “They have never been a
13-year-old girl,” she later told USA TODAY. “It’s a very sensitive age
for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”
Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 2020. This past term, the Court ruled that the state
of Montana had discriminated against religious schools by applying a state
constitutional provision prohibiting public funding for religious institutions
through a neovoucher scheme. Previously, to avoid the potential for such
discrimination, Montana’s state supreme court, had eliminated the tax credit
program for all private schools, not just religious schools. In a dissent from
the conservative court majority, written just months before Justice Ginsburg’s
death, she pointed this out and chastised her colleagues for over-reaching when
there was no actual controversy or discrimination to be addressed:
Nearing the end of its opinion, the Court writes: ‘A State
need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it
cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.’ . .
. Because Montana’s Supreme Court did not make such a decision — its judgment
put all private school parents in the same boat — this Court had no occasion to
address the matter.
In addition
to participating in legal decisions impacting education, Justice Ginsburg also
expressed the hope that her presence on the court alongside Justices Elena
Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, would be an inspiration to future generations. “When
the schoolchildren file in and out of the court and they look up and they see
three women, then that will seem natural and proper—just how it is,” she told
The Washington Post.
Ruth Bader
Ginsburg died Sept. 18th at her home in Washington. She was 87.
