Voting Rights at the Supreme Court: Gerrymandering, School Districts, and Education Equity

On June 8, the United States Supreme Court struck down Alabama’s new map of Congressional voting districts. The opinion in this case, Allen v. Milligan, affirmed prior rulings on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which bans racially discriminatory practices in elections and voting. This decision took observers by surprise, because recent history pointed toward the opposite result: The Court has used multiple cases over the last decade to chip away at the VRA’s protections for voters of color. In fact, the author of the Milligan decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, is well-known for his longstanding opposition to elements of the VRA, and ten years ago, he wrote the opinion in Shelby County v. Holder that struck down a large portion of the Act.

Voting rights advocates mourned the Shelby County decision and celebrated Milligan for the cases’ impact on racial democratic equity. What many don’t realize, though, is that Supreme Court decisions on voting rights also matter for fairness and racial justice in public education.

The border that surrounds a school district serves a number of purposes. It defines the area in which resident students can go to a set of schools. It outlines the local taxing jurisdiction whose property tax dollars will support the district budget. It also demarcates something else: A voting district. People who live within the boundary of a school district vote in its school board elections. That means that changes to school district boundaries are form of election redistricting.

Unlike for congressional voting boundaries, there is no required decennial redistricting for school district borders. But these borders can be altered—and are sometimes manipulated in ways that segregate students or hoard resources. Without a regularly scheduled opportunity to reconsider the entire school district map in a state, changes to school districts tend to come one at a time, and too often, they are instigated by a group seeking to cement its advantage by drawing borders that keep property tax dollars in and high-need students out.

Before the Supreme Court’s Shelby County ruling in 2013, border changes like this used to get a lot more scrutiny. That case dealt with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required that any change affecting elections or voting rights in certain parts of the country be “precleared” by the U.S. Department of Justice, and with part of Section 4, which set out a formula determining which states and regions were covered by this rule. In “covered” areas (the entire states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, as well as specific counties and towns in six additional states), any change to voting districts, including the boundaries of school districts, would need Justice Department approval. This happened all the time. The department’s “Notices of Preclearance Activity” from before 2013 are peppered with proposed school district boundary changes. This made VRA preclearance the only federal check on state and local decisions to change school district lines. After Shelby County, none remained.

As we celebrate the Milligan decision holding the line on racially discriminatory voting laws, let’s remember the protections that have been lost along the way—for voters, but also for students. District boundaries can be drawn expansively or narrowly. They can be used as tools for inclusion or segregation. They can encompass diverse populations and broad tax bases, or they can divide students from resources and from each other. As we think about the equity and racial justice implications of redistricting, we should remember the first district we each encounter—our school district—and seek to ensure greater equity and justice in the opportunities created by those borders as well.

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