Giving Compass' Take:

• Mark Keierleber at The 74 demonstrates how a recent lawsuit brought unequal integration efforts in Hartford, Connecticut under the public eye.

• How can lawsuits like this one reveal underlying discrimination hiding in old policies? How can you support efforts to draw attention to such inequalities? 

• Find more examples of school integration policies in other states.


Last week, the California-based Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian nonprofit where Thompson is a senior attorney, dropped a federal lawsuit that alleged that a network of high-performing magnet schools in the Hartford area — created to desegregate the city’s racially isolated education system — relied on an unconstitutional “racial quota” that limited the number of black and Latino students to 75 percent of the schools’ student bodies. Meanwhile, a lottery system to select children for the schools, the suit alleged, gave preference to white and Asian students from the more affluent suburbs. Pacific Legal dropped its lawsuit just weeks after Connecticut policymakers agreed to a historic court settlement in a separate, decades-old school desegregation case that rendered its claims moot.

The battle over integrating Hartford’s public schools dates back to a 1989 lawsuit alleging that the extreme racial and socioeconomic segregation between the city’s schools and those in the surrounding suburbs violated the state constitution.

That court battle remains active 30 years later, with civil rights groups fighting to expand access to the choice school programs for Hartford children. But the recent settlement of that case, announced Jan. 10, brings it closer to a long-term resolution. The agreement adds more than 1,000 additional seats to the magnet schools, nearly 600 of which are reserved for children from Hartford. Additionally, the state agreed to spend more than $2 million to facilitate integration efforts — for example, by recruiting students to the magnet schools and providing incentives to suburban school districts to accept more students from Hartford.

Though Pacific Legal ended its lawsuit against Hartford’s integration efforts, Thompson said the foundation could target school district policies in other cities next.

“We won’t stop,” Thompson said, “until the precedent is established that school districts are forbidden from using race in student assignments in K-12 education.”

Read the full article about a recent readjustment to integration policies by Mark Keierleber at The 74.