Ruling on School Plans Submitted
Public Court Documents
December 3, 1970

10 pages
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Case Files, Milliken Hardbacks. Ruling on School Plans Submitted, 1970. deaecd67-52e9-ef11-a730-7c1e5247dfc0. LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute. https://ldfrecollection.org/archives/archives-search/archives-item/74eb3271-9402-42e2-ad85-810f980315e9/ruling-on-school-plans-submitted. Accessed May 20, 2025.
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ft ft # * UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN SOUTHERN DIVISION ) RONALD BRADLEY, et al. , ) ) Plaintiffs ) ) v . ) ) WILLIAM G. MILLIKEN, et al., ) ) Defendants ) ___________ __________________________________________ ) CIVIL ACTION NO: 35257 RULING ON SCHOOL PLANS SUBMITTED The purpose back of the Court's order of November 6, 1970 was to impress upon the current Board of Education that it had a duty to act; that it could not sit out its period of service. That, in view of the October 13, 1970 action of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit declaring Section 12 of Act No. 48, of the Michigan Public Acts of 1970 unconstitutional, it was under a legal obligation to proceed as if no obstruction had been placed in the path of the implementation of the April 7, 1970 plan of integration. Additionally, our order provided an opportunity for the Board, whose member ship composition was different from that of the April 1970 Board, to reassess policy and to submit such other plan or plans as to it appeared proper.1 Following the adoption of the April Plan, Detroit School officials began preparing procedures to carry the plan into effect at the beginning of the 1970-71 school year. These preparations were contemporaneous with activities in the Michigan legislature which culminated in the passage of Act No. 48, Public A^ts of 1970, signed by the Governor into The Board complied with the timetable set by the Court and.submitted two plans differing from the April plan, and indicated its "priorities" or preferences with respect to the three plans. For the sake of brevity we shall refer to the three plans as the McDonald, the oCampbell and the April Plans. Procedurally the Court has before it for disposition the motion of plaintiffs to order immediate, that is, February 1, 1971 (the beginning of the next semester), implementation of the April Plan, and the defendant Board's alternates in the form of the McDonald and Campbell Plans. We begin our consideration of the three plans with some generalizations and basic concepts. Society is but a group of beings organized to meet common needs. Child-raising, that is, education, is the first and largest industry of every species, including man. If a * 2 law on July 7, 1970. One of the effects of the Act was to delay the implementation of the April Plan for at least a year. Meanwhile, a recall movement was initiated against the four members of the Board who had voted in favor of the April Plan; a movement which, on August 4, 1970, resulted in the removal of the said members of the Board. These four seats on the Board were vacant at the time of the filing of the complaint in this action, but were filled by appointment by the Governor on August 31, 1970 (terms expiring December 31, 1970). The present Board will cease to exist at the end of this year, and a thirteen-member Board will come into existence on January 1, 1971. Only three of the present Board members will continue on the new Board. The new Board will be composed of five members at large and the eight chairmen of the regional boards. 2It should be noted that neither Mr. McDonald nor Mrs. Campbell claims sole credit for the formulation of these plans, but they are their principal architects and spokesmen. Each of these plans represents a composite of contributions from other persons, including, in no small way, those of school staff people. - 2 - • # given society is to survive it must discharge its responsi bility to its young. Fortunately for us, there is something in the nature of man which drives him to develop his peculiar endowments, and it is through learning that we make the best or worst of those endowments. A school system is but one, and perhaps the most important, way in which the human society discharges its responsibility to its young, to itself and to its survival. When we do this well the educator calls it "quality education." In a heterogenous society such as ours we are satisfied that such an education cannot be attained without integration. Our objective then, as the Court sees it, is not integration in itself - which, if achieved in the wrong way, can be counter-productive - but the best education possible, with its sine qua non: integration. Integration for integration's sake alone is self-defeating; it does not advance the cause of integration, except in the short haul, nor does it necessarily improve the quality of education. To put it simply, a good education, to say nothing of the best education, cannot be achieved without integration. To place us in our particularized situation, we have in Detroit a community (society) generally divided by racial lines. To make it an effective society in discharging its most important function it is necessary that the people of the city recognize their true goal and take such steps as will assure its attainment. A society best fulfills its educational function when it presents its members, and particularly its young, with equal opportunities to achieve identity, experience stimulation, and attain a decent measure of security. There is within each child an innate - 3 - force pressing upon him to fulfill whatever potentials he possesses, and an educational system which recognizes this and programs its efforts in this direction is the one most likely to succeed in attaining its goal. Keeping these basic truths in mind, we turn to a consideration of the plans before the Court. We shall not here recite in detail the features of the three plans which, however, are before us as part of the record. For the purposes of our present ruling we consider the Campbell, or "Magnet Curriculum" Plan, albeit perhaps an "exciting concept of secondary education," as one which does not lend itself to early implementation because of the programming and operational difficulties which attend it. It is a distinctive departure from past and present practices, and lacks a background of experience. The most obvious question mark concerning it is its impact upon the achievement of identity. It is best viewed as an educational concept meriting study by our educators. Laying aside the Campbell Plan, we turn to the remaining plans: the April Plan and the McDonald or "Magnet School" Plan. It is the plaintiffs' view, as we understand it, that the Court is limited to considering only the April Plan at this time. This view we do not share. The defendant Board takes the position that, absent a finding that the Detroit school system is a segregated one - an issue necessarily relegated by us to the hearing on the merits - the Court lacks authority to order any plan into effect. It will become plain in the course of our ruling that the Court does not believe this to be so. - 4 - The McDonald Plan is intended to achieve integration by providing a specialized curriculum at certain high schools. Each of such specializing schools would serve two of the eight regions of the school system, with the expectation of drawing students from a wider area, thus bringing about a built-in and, hopefully, a greater degree of integration. The categories of specialization would be Vocational, Business, Arts and Science. The plan is voluntary, and all high schools, including the so-called magnet schools, would offer a regular high school curriculum for students living in the present high school attendance areas. The April Plan would redraw the school feeder patterns for 11 of the city's 21 high schools (not counting Cass Technical High School) so as to improve integration in the affected schools. It is designed to be progressive in application, affecting some 3,000 students graduating from junior high schools in each of three successive years. Both the McDonald and April Plans have other features which we do not here detail, but which we take into account in our appraisals. Comparing the McDonald and April Plans, it appears to us that the April Plan's principal aim is to improve integration by the "numbers,1 as several witnesses described it. Whether in the long run it will do even that is a serious question. It is a plan which does not take into account the basics which we have heretofore mentioned, and it does not offer incentive to or provide motivation for the student himself. Instead of offering a change of - 5 - diet, it offers forced-feeding. The McDonald Plan on the other hand, we believe, offers the student an opportunity to advance in his search for identity, provides stimulation through choice of direction, and tends to establish security. That it will promote integration to the extent projected remains to be seen, but based on the experience in this same school system, i.e., Cass Technical High School, it holds out the best promise of effective, long-term integration. It appears to us the most likely of the three plans to provide the children of the City of Detroit with quality education as we have defined it. The McDonald Plan has been characterized by the plaintiffs as an experiment. The short answer to this is that all plans are experiments, just as is life itself. To sum up, in our view the McDonald Plan is the best of the plans before the Court. We pass now to considering the role of the Court so far as implementation is concerned. Whether we view the present situation from Court—side or Board-side, it appears to us that the Board is required to proceed with the implementation of the plan. It has on its own shown a preference for the McDonald Plan - we believe justifiably so. The question remaining is when to put the plan into effect. There have been expressions by some of the witnesses that any of the three plans could be implemented by February 1, 1971. It appears to us that the McDonald Plan, calling as it does for rather radical and comprehensive changes, cannot be properly implemented until September 1971 - the beginning of the next school year. (We do not mean to imply that any less time would be need for implementation of the other plans.) - 6 - # If to integrate is "to combine to form a more complete, harmonious or coordinated entity,"3 then the plan we have chosen is, of the three, most likely to be productive. It places the emphasis not on "desegration" 4(representing the legal rights of Blacks), but on 5"integration" (an ideal of social acceptability). Added to the already serious problems of administer ing the affairs of their offices, the members of the Detroit Board of Education, past, present and future, the Superin tendent, the administrative staff and the faculty, are beset by a decentralization decree which cannot but involve every aspect of school administration and school programming. The ordered decentralization has been characterized by the Superintendent as a novel one - one never before attempted in any other school district in the United States regardless of size. It introduces confusion over the proper roles of the regional and central boards. That it will lead to controversies between them appears evident; that it aggravates, not lessens, the problems besetting the administrators is plain; and that it may fan the fires of discontent among the citizenry is likely. If a unified school system for the City of Detroit is the aim, then the combination of centralization and decentralization, with their attendant questions of jurisdiction, control and responsibility, appears to have missed the mark. At 3 Webster's Third New International Dictionary. 4A Dictionary of American Social Reform. 5 Ibid. - 7 - # the least it will require time and call for much effort on the part of all involved in their several official stations/ working cooperatively, to stabilize the Detroit school system into a smoothly working framework of management We turn next to the legal posture of the case. Plaintiffs have cited Alexander v . Holmes County Board of Education/ 369 U.S. 19/ 24 L.Ed.2d 19 (1969), and Keyes v. School District No. One/ Denver/ Colorado/ 313 F. Supp. 61 (D. Colo. 1970). We consider neither to be in point so far as our present issue is concerned. We cannot at this point proceed on the assumption that plaintiffs will succeed in proving their claim/ in the hearing on the merits, that the Detroit school is a segregated school system, de jure or de facto. While the question of whether the United States Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States, not only prohibits discriminatory segregation according to races, but also requires integration, has 7not yet been decided by that Court, we believe that 6 What further and additional problems will result from the passage of the so-called Parochiaid Amendment to the Consti tution of the State of Michigan, we cannot say. What is obvious is that the proposed closing of some or all Catholic parochial schools in the Detroit diocese will put further strains on the school system of the city. 7 There are school cases now pending before the Supreme Court in which it may well have an opportunity to answer that question and respond to the call of Chief Justice Burger to "clear up any confusion concerning the Court's prior mandates in school desegregation cases, and to resolve some of the basic practical problems * * * including whether, as a constitutional matter, any particular racial balance must be - 8 - 8 consistent with that Court's rulings, where a school district has taken steps enhancing integration in its schools it may not reverse direction. In the setting of our case nonaction is (or amounts to) prohibited action. This is also our reading of the opinion of our court of appeals in ruling upon the appeal taken from our former decisions in this case. The court said: " * * * In the present case the Detroit Board of Education in the exercise of its discretion took affirmative steps on its own initiative to effect an improved racial balance in twelve senior high schools. This action was thwarted or at least delayed, by an act of the State legislature." It also pointed out that "State action cannot be interposed to delay, obstruct or nullify steps lawfully taken for the purpose of protecting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment." It follows from this that any action or failure to act by the Board of Education designed in effect to "delay, obstruct or nullify" the previous (April 7th) step toward improving racial balance in the Detroit schools is prohibited State action. It is our judgment that the McDonald Plan is superior to the other two plans before the Court in advancing the cause of integration, and that preparations should be achieved in the schools, to what extent school districts and zones may and must be altered as a constitutional matter, and to what extent transportation may or must be provided to achieve the ends sought by prior holdings of the court." See Northcross v. Bd. of Ed. of Memphis, 397 U.S. 232, 25 L.Ed.2d 246 (March 9, 1970). 8 See cases cited in the opinion of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the prior appeal in this cause, pages 10 and 11 of the slip sheet. - 9 - -» * * # # started immediately for its institution at the beginning of the next full school year in September 1971. The administrative work involved in a transformation to the McDonald Plan requires, and the staff deserves, lead time in which to program and prepare for its establishment. The course of action taken by the Court will provide the present and incoming Boards a sense of direction, give the administrative staff both direction and time for an orderly transition, and allow students an opportunity to anticipate the changes in educational offerings so that they may exercise the choices which will open to them. It is our belief that in this way the students, in their quest for identity and in their inherited drive for realizing their potentials, will bring about such integration as no coercive method could possibly achieve. The foregoing constitutes our findings of fact and conclusions of law. An appropriate order may be submitted. DATED: December 3, 1970_____ at Detroit, Michigan. - 1 0 -