Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 70, 79 (1995)

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Cite as: 515 U. S. 70 (1995)

Syllabus

salary increases exceed such authority, a challenge to the scope of the remedy is fairly included in the question presented for review. See this Court's Rule 14.1 and, e. g., Procunier v. Navarette, 434 U. S. 555, 560, n. 6. Pp. 83-86. 2. The challenged orders are beyond the District Court's remedial authority. Pp. 86-103. (a) Although a District Court necessarily has discretion to fashion a remedy for a school district unconstitutionally segregated in law, such remedial power is not unlimited and may not be extended to purposes beyond the elimination of racial discrimination in public schools. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Ed., 402 U. S. 1, 22-23. Proper analysis of the orders challenged here must rest upon their serving as proper means to the end of restoring the victims of discriminatory conduct to the position they would have occupied absent that conduct, see, e. g., Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U. S. 717, 746, and their eventual restoration of state and local authorities to the control of a school system that is operating in compliance with the Constitution, see, e. g., Freeman, 503 U. S., at 489. The factors that must inform a court's discretion in ordering complete or partial relief from a desegregation decree are: (1) whether there has been compliance with the decree in those aspects of the school system where federal supervision is to be withdrawn; (2) whether retention of judicial control is necessary or practicable to achieve compliance in other facets of the system; and (3) whether the district has demonstrated to the public and to the parents and students of the once disfavored race its good-faith commitment to the whole of the decree and to those statutes and constitutional provisions that were the predicate for judicial intervention in the first place. Id., at 491. The ultimate inquiry is whether the constitutional violator has complied in good faith with the decree since it was entered, and whether the vestiges of discrimination have been eliminated to the extent practicable. Id., at 492. Pp. 86-89. (b) The order approving salary increases, which was grounded in improving the "desegregative attractiveness" of the KCMSD, exceeds the District Court's admittedly broad discretion. The order should have sought to eliminate to the extent practicable the vestiges of prior de jure segregation within the KCMSD: a systemwide reduction in student achievement and the existence of 25 racially identifiable schools with a population of over 90% black students. Instead, the District Court created a magnet district of the KCMSD in order to attract non-minority students from the surrounding suburban school districts and to redistribute them within the KCMSD schools. This interdistrict goal is beyond the scope of the intradistrict violation identified by the District Court. See, e. g., Milliken, supra, at 746-747. Indeed, the District

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