Cite as: 531 U. S. 288 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
But the removal of the designation language from Rule 0520-1-2-.08 affected nothing but words. Today the State Board's member-designees continue to sit on the Association's committees as nonvoting members, and the State continues to welcome Association employees in its retirement scheme. The close relationship is confirmed by the Association's enforcement of the same preamendment rules and regulations reviewed and approved by the State Board (including the recruiting Rule challenged by Brentwood), and by the State Board's continued willingness to allow students to satisfy its physical education requirement by taking part in interscholastic athletics sponsored by the Association. The most one can say on the evidence is that the State Board once freely acknowledged the Association's official character but now does it by winks and nods.4 The amendment to the Rule in 1996 affected candor but not the "momentum" of the Association's prior involvement with the State Board. Evans v. Newton, 382 U. S., at 301. The District Court spoke to this point in finding that because of "custom and
law. 1995 WL 115890, at *4-*5 (citing Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U. S. 991, 1004 (1982)).
4 The significance of winks and nods in state-action doctrine seems to be one of the points of the dissenters' departure from the rest of the Court. In drawing the public-private action line, the dissenters would emphasize the formal clarity of the legislative action providing for the appointment of Girard College's trustees, see supra, at 296-297; post, at 310, in preference to our reliance on the practical certainty in this case that public officials will control operation of the Association under its bylaws. Similarly, the dissenters stress the express formality of the special statute defining Amtrak's ties to the Government, see supra, at 296; post, at 310, in contrast to the reality in this case that the Association's organizers structured the Association's relationships to the officialdom of public education. But if formalism were the sine qua non of state action, the doctrine would vanish owing to the ease and inevitability of its evasion, and for just that reason formalism has never been controlling. For example, a criterion of state action like symbiosis (which the dissenters accept, post, at 311) looks not to form but to an underlying reality.
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