Freeman V Pitts Case Summary

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Recommended: The Successes and Failures of Educational Diversity

Freeman v Pitts (1992) Following the Brown cases, the Dekalb County School System in Georgia had yet to attempt to desegregate their schools. In 1966-1967 the Dekalb County school board adopted a “freedom of choice” transfer plan. This transfer plan gave black students the option to go to a formerly de jure all white school. But, this “freedom of choice” plan did not help desegregating schools that were all black. A year after Dekalb County School System adopted “freedom of choice”, the court struck it down in Green v. New Kent County School Board in the state of Virginia. The Court also ruled that lower courts should examine “every facet of school operations”. This meant that the schools would be looked at to see if they have desegregated …show more content…

A year later a federal court district court terminated the freedom of choice plan which put an end to de jure black schools. This allowed the federal court to supervise DCSS for what would be over 10 years. In 1986, Robert Freeman and the DCSS declared that they have achieved “unitary status” in the schools. The district court confirmed that they had achieved desegregation in student assignments, transportation, facilities and extracurricular activates. But the school had fail to achieve desegregation in teacher and principal assignments, resource allocations, and the quality of education in some schools in the county. So DCSS was ordered to continue to desegregate in those categories. Pitts appealed and said that there was still racial inequality in the school system. The court of appeals for the 11th circuit then reversed and then rejected the incremental approach that DCSS was taking. Freeman then appealed to the Supreme Court was the court ruled 8-0 in favor of …show more content…

The Court held that a district court must only supervise a school system in the criteria where it has failed to follow the court’s desegregation plan. The Court said that the incremental plan provides district courts with a strategy to achieve the long term goal of a school system with no supervision. Federal courts possess the ability to put an end to supervision over school districts in incremental stages if the school has achieved the conditions that were set forth due to the Brown cases. The Court of Appeal's was wrong in rejecting incremental approach because racial balance is only to be used when the racial imbalance is due to the violation of the constitution. Once this problem is fixed, the school district should not have the duty to fix racial imbalances because of the demography and location of the school district. Just because the student attendance has more race than the other that does not mean that the school is not obeying the conditions of Brown cases. This re-segregation is the result of private choice, so there is nothing that violates the constitution, so it is not the Federal Courts responsibility to try to fix this issue of racial

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