Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education

Despite the fact that a labor contract citing specific minority hiring goals and preservation was reached through collective bargaining with affirmative action goals that were to remedy societal discrimination, it was found to violate the Equal Protection Clause as non-minority teachers were harmed in the process of preserving minority percentages in staffing.

In 1973, the Jackson, Michigan, school board and teachers' union evaluated their labor agreement in light of affirmative action goals. Based on a review of student/teacher ratios in 1969 which showed that 15.2 percent of the students and only 3.9 percent of the teachers were African American, the school board revised the contract in order to maintain or improve this ratio. The revision stated that if teacher layoffs were required, teachers with less service or seniority would be laid off first; however, at no time would the percentage of minority teachers laid off exceed the percentage of minority teachers at the time of the layoff.

In 1982 and 1983, teacher layoffs became necessary in the district. As a result of the labor agreement, some minority teachers with less seniority were retained while non-minority teachers with more service were laid off. A group of the non-minority teachers who were laid off sued the Jackson School Board, alleging that the layoff had violated their rights to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. This clause states:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan found for the school district, noting that the policy was an attempt to cure discrimination in society by providing minority role models for minority students. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the lower court's decision.

The teachers' group asked the Supreme Court to review the case, also known as taking the case on certiorari. On 19 May 1986, the court reversed the lower courts' decision, but were unable to agree on an opinion between themselves. Five of the justices agreed that the layoffs did violate the Equal Protection Clause, although four filed separate opinions. Justice Powell, joined in his opinion by Justices Burger, Rehnquist, O'Connor, and White, noted that societal discrimination was not enough to provide a compelling state interest to justify the layoff provision in the contract. The school district also needed to show direct discrimination within the district in order for the affirmative action plan to be legitimate. This review of government actions in order to ensure a compelling interest on the part of the state in which the means of implementing the actions are "least restrictive" is also known as "strict scrutiny." Powell also stated that the school board should have based its minority hiring goals on the number of minority teachers as a percentage of the available teaching pool, rather than relative to the racial makeup of the student body.

Justices Marshall, Brennan, and Blackmun dissented. Their opinion was that the layoff provision was arrived at through the collective bargaining process and was therefore a valid method for preserving a hiring policy whose goal was to achieve diversity and stability for all students. In his separate dissent, Justice Stevens stated that the decision to include more minority teachers in the district was valid, regardless of whether the district had proved previous discrimination.

While the Court supported the petitioner's claim that the Equal Protection Clause had been violated, it was clear, given the closely divided opinions of the Court, that the practice of establishing minority hiring and composition goals as a part of employers' affirmative action plans was still under review in 1986. Given the conservative bent of the Supreme Court, it was apparent that affirmative action policies in the United States would be reviewed on a regular basis.