Knight v. Alabama, No. 05-11527 (11th Cir. Jan. 31, 2007)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has rejected a claim that the inadequacy of the State of Alabama’s K-12 public school funding system has a segregative effect on the state’s system of higher education because state funds intended for higher education are diverted to lower education. In 1981, the plaintiffs sued the State of Alabama, alleging the state had failed to complete the desegregation of its universities and colleges. After several years of litigation, the U.S. district court issued a remedial decree, and for the past decade under the court’s supervision the parties worked to effectuate the changes called for. The Eleventh Circuit observed that this lawsuit "has been about remedying segregation in Alabama’s system of higher education by making changes in the education policies that tended to keep Alabama’s historically black colleges black, and its historically white colleges white … This lawsuit, however, has never been about how Alabama raised the money to meet its court-ordered obligations to higher education, much less about how Alabama funds its system of lower (K-12) education." However, in 2003 the plaintiffs filed a motion requesting the lower court to order the state to adequately fund its system of lower education through a complete reformation of the Alabama K-12 funding system, including its constitutional limits on local property tax revenues. Only when the public schools are adequately funded, the plaintiffs argued, will there be sufficient other funds to achieve the desegregation goals of their lawsuit over higher education. The district court denied the plaintiffs’ motion. While the court agreed that "the current property tax system in Alabama has a crippling effect on the ability of local and state government to raise revenue adequately to fund K-12 schools," it disagreed "that this lower school funding problem was sufficiently related to the desegregation of the State’s higher education system to permit a remedy in this lawsuit."
The Eleventh Circuit affirmed. The appellate court, too, agreed that the Alabama’s current tax policies seriously limit both the state’s and counties’ ability to raise adequate revenue from property taxes to fund K-12 schools and that the policies were adopted for "segregative purposes and with discriminatory intent." However, it found no segregative effect on higher education, because the tax policies in question do not "govern higher education" as contemplated in the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Fordice, 505 U.S. 717 (1992). In Fordice, the Court enunciated the constitutional standards governing claims of persistent segregation in higher education. The Eleventh Circuit pointed out that the challenged tax policies have nothing to do with admissions, faculty, or any other aspects of higher education that Fordice recognized might discourage African-American students from attending historically white institutions and white students from attending historically African-American institutions. Nor were they the sort of education policies that Fordice recognized could perpetuate racial identifiability in higher education. The plaintiffs’ claim, therefore, was not properly brought under Fordice. Even if Fordice were applicable, the court found that the state would had met its burden of proving that its property tax policies do not have a segregative effect, and "the challenged tax policies have not undermined that desegregative process to a level that even remotely triggers the United States Constitution."
Knight v. Alabama, No. 05-11527 (11th Cir. Jan. 31, 2007)
[Full opinion]