Quotations from the Parents Involved Decision

Chief Justice Roberts' opinion (Section III-B joined by Scalia, Thomas, and Alito):

The plans are directed only to racial balance, pure and simple, an objective this Court has repeatedly condemned as illegitimate. The plans are not tailored to achieving a degree of diversity necessary to realize the asserted educational benefits; instead the plans are tailored to “the goal established by the school board of attaining a level of diversity within the schools that approximates the district’s overall demographics.” The districts offer no evidence that the level of racial diversity necessary to achieve the asserted educational benefits happens to coincide with the racial demographics of the respective school districts.

The parties and their amici debate which side is more faithful to the heritage of Brown v. Board of Education: “The Fourteenth Amendment prevents states from according differential treatment to American children on the basis of their color or race.” What do the racial classifications at issue here do, if not accord differential treatment on the basis of race? Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again—even for very different reasons.” 

Justice Thomas' opinion:

These race-based student-assignment programs do not serve any compelling state interest.

Most of the dissent’s criticisms of today’s result can be traced to its rejection of the color-blind Constitution. My view of the Constitution is Justice Harlan’s view in Plessy: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) (dissenting opinion).
The segregationists in Brown embraced the arguments the Court endorsed in Plessy. Though Brown decisively rejected those arguments, today’s dissent replicates them to a distressing extent. What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today. None of the considerations trumpeted by the dissent is relevant to the constitutionality of the school boards’ race-based plans because no contextual detail can “provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race.”

In place of the color-blind Constitution, the dissent would permit measures to keep the races together and proscribe measures to keep the races apart. Although no such distinction is apparent in the Fourteenth Amendment, the dissent would constitutionalize today’s faddish social theories. The Constitution is not that malleable. Because “our Constitution is color-blind,” such race-based decisionmaking is unconstitutional.

Justice Kennedy's opinion:

The dissent finds that the school districts have identified a compelling interest in increasing diversity, including for the purpose of avoiding racial isolation. The plurality, by contrast, does not acknowledge that the school districts have identified a compelling interest here. For this reason, among others, I do not join Parts III-B and IV. Diversity, depending on its meaning and definition, is a compelling educational goal a school district may pursue.

[P]arts of the opinion by the Chief Justice imply an all-too-unyielding insistence that race cannot be a factor in instances when, in my view, it may be taken into account. The plurality opinion is too dismissive of the legitimate interest government has in ensuring all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race.  The plurality opinion is at least open to the interpretation that the Constitution requires school districts to ignore the problem of de facto resegregation in schooling. I cannot endorse that conclusion. To the extent the plurality opinion suggests the Constitution mandates that school authorities must accept the status quo of racial isolation in schools, it is, in my view, profoundly mistaken.

Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion

These cases consider the longstanding efforts of two local school boards to integrate their public schools. The school board plans before us resemble many others adopted in the last 50 years by primary and secondary schools throughout the Nation. All of those plans represent local efforts to bring about the kind of racially integrated education that Brown v. Board of Education promised. The plurality announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools, and it undermines Brown’s promise of integrated primary and secondary education. This cannot be justified in the name of the Equal Protection Clause.

A longstanding and unbroken line of legal authority tells us that the Equal Protection Clause permits local school boards to use race-conscious criteria to achieve positive race-related goals, even when the Constitution does not compel it. The basic objective of those who wrote the Equal Protection Clause [w]as forbidding practices that lead to racial exclusion. The Amendment sought to bring into American society as full members those whom the Nation had previously held in slavery. There is reason to believe that those who drafted an Amendment with this basic purpose in mind would have understood the legal and practical difference between the use of race-conscious criteria to keep the races apart, and the use of race-conscious criteria to bring the races together.