Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education

Facts of the Case

Wygant involved a dispute over the application of the reduction-in-force, or layoff, provision of a collective bargaining agreement between the teachers' union and the Jackson (Michigan) Board of Education. According to the provision, “At no time will there be a greater percentage of minority personnel laid off than the current percentage of minority personnel employed at the time of the layoff” (Wygant, p. 270).

The facts revealed that the district had a history of racial tensions, although there was never a judicial declaration that the board engaged in discriminatory hiring practices. The provision was adopted as a necessary complement to the affirmative action hiring practices that the board adopted to create an integrated workforce.

In Wygant, the nonminority teachers who were affected by the layoffs challenged the provision as an improper use of a racial classification under the Equal Protection Clause and Title VII. A federal trial court dismissed most claims but ruled that the practice survived equal protection review. The Sixth Circuit affirmed that the school board had sufficiently justified the preferences used as necessary to redress societal discrimination in seeking to provide role models for minority students.

The Court Ruling

A sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court reversed in favor of the teachers. In a plurality, the justices found that since strict scrutiny applied, it was necessary to examine the facts in order to evaluate whether the school board's use of the racial classification was necessary and narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling state interest. In deciding that the provision failed both parts of the test, Justice Powell first explained, in perhaps the most cited quotation from the decision, [Page 903]that “societal discrimination, without more, is too amorphous a basis for imposing a racially classified remedy” (Wygant, p. 276).

At the same time, the plurality reasoned that the burden that the teachers who were released had suffered was too great to bear in furtherance of such a general goal. In contrast, the justices maintained that hiring preferences did not create the same effect and any burden was “diffused” among applicants generally.

Justice O'Connor, although agreeing with the outcome, wrote separately to express her view that the lower courts erred by not examining the propriety of the hiring goal. As such, she indicated that the school board's goal was improper because the number of minority teachers was tied to the number of minority students, when it should have been connected to the number of minority teachers available in the hiring pool. Justice White also concurred but wrote a short one-paragraph concurrence. He expressed his view that any policy that dismissed White teachers in order to add Black teachers should have been impermissible regardless of justification.

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