Cite as: 515 U. S. 70 (1995)
Souter, J., dissenting
As a final element of its remedy, in 1987 the District Court ordered funding for increases in teachers' salaries as a step toward raising the level of student achievement. "[I]t is essential that the KCMSD have sufficient revenues to fund an operating budget which can provide quality education, including a high quality faculty." Jenkins, 672 F. Supp., at 410. Neither the State nor the KCMSD objected to increases in teachers' salaries as an element of the comprehensive remedy, or to this cost as an item in the desegregation budget.
In 1988, however, the State went to the Eighth Circuit with a broad challenge to the District Court's remedial concept of magnet schools and to its orders of capital improvements (though it did not appeal the salary order), arguing that the District Court had run afoul of Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U. S. 717 (1974) (Milliken I), by ordering an interdistrict remedy for an intradistrict violation. The Eighth Circuit rejected the State's position, Jenkins, 855 F. 2d 1295, and in 1989 the State petitioned for certiorari.
The State's petition presented two questions for review, one challenging the District Court's authority to order a property tax increase to fund its remedial program, the other going to the legitimacy of the magnet school concept at the very foundation of the Court's desegregation plan:
"For a purely intradistrict violation, the courts below have ordered remedies—costing hundreds of millions of dollars—with the stated goals of attracting more non-minority students to the school district and making programs and facilities comparable to those in neighboring districts . . . . "The questio[n] presented [is] . . . .
". . . Whether a federal court, remedying an intra-district violation under Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), may
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