Ruling on School Plans Submitted

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.)

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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