High Court Eases Busing Standards : Civil rights: A classroom racial imbalance is not itself a basis for action in a district that was once segregated. Situation must be traceable to district policy, justices say.

WASHINGTON — Sounding a new retreat from court-ordered school desegregation, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a dramatic “racial imbalance” in a public school system that was once segregated is not in itself a basis for ordering mandatory busing.

Only if the existence of all-black or all-white classrooms is “traceable” to school district policies can federal judges intervene, the high court said.

“(These districts are) under no duty to remedy imbalance that is caused by demographic factors,” wrote Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, speaking for five justices. “Where resegregation is a product not of state action, but of private choices,” federal judges have no authority to intervene, Kennedy said.

The decision stems from a long-running lawsuit filed on behalf of black children who were seeking greater desegregation of their suburban Atlanta school system.

More than half the black students in the DeKalb County, Ga., school district attend schools that are 90% black because of “white flight” from the county in the last 20 years and a migration of blacks into it.

To remedy this growing “segregation” of the schools, an appeals court in Atlanta called for cross-county busing, an order blocked by the justices Tuesday.

The ruling primarily affects an estimated 800 school systems--mostly in the South and Midwest--that were found guilty decades ago of official segregation.

While the court’s opinion undercuts the legal basis for new or expanded desegregation efforts in those school systems, it was unclear whether it would affect the decades-old desegregation orders under which they now operate.

The uncertainty remains because the eight justices who heard the DeKalb County case wrote four separate opinions and failed to agree on a single standard for determining full compliance with school desegregation decrees.

They agreed only to send the DeKalb case back to a trial judge to determine whether the continuing racial imbalance in the schools is “traceable” to policies of the local school board. If the board policies are found to have caused the imbalance, the district could be ordered to remedy them.

“They have made it a little easier for a school district to get out from under court supervision, but not much easier,” said Christopher Hansen of the American Civil Liberties Union, who represented the black schoolchildren in the case.

A lawyer for a national organization of school officials agreed. “This is not a very helpful opinion because they (the justices) didn’t agree on much,” said Gwendolyn Gregory, an attorney for the National School Boards Assn.

A bare majority did agree, however, that the rapidly shifting population of a city or its suburbs does not give judges cause to order desegregation. The statement is significant because the classrooms in most metropolitan areas have become far more racially unbalanced than they were 20 years ago when cross-town busing began.

“Racial balance is not to be achieved for its own sake,” Kennedy said in his opinion in the case (Freeman vs. Pitts, 89-1290). “It is beyond the authority and beyond the practical ability of the federal courts to try to counteract these kinds of continuous and massive demographic shifts.

“To attempt such results would require on-going and never-ending supervision by the courts of school districts,” he said.

Those words may sound familiar. In 1976, the Supreme Court used much the same language in a ruling that limited busing in Pasadena, Calif. But federal judges in other regions have continued to rule that officials in once-segregated school systems must remedy a continuing “racial imbalance” that is caused by white flight or shifting housing patterns.

On Tuesday, the court also said that judges can withdraw from a school case in a piecemeal fashion. For example, if a school district successfully desegregates its student bodies, but not its faculty, a judge can withdraw from most of the case, while continuing to oversee the effort to bring the faculty into compliance.

Last year, the court under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist first signaled a sharp change in its approach to school desegregation.

Since 1954, the justices had pressed the nation’s public schools to desegregate their classrooms, insisting that officials had “an affirmative duty” to make up for the legacy of official segregation. When voluntary measures failed, the justices ordered massive, unpopular cross-town busing of schoolchildren.

But Rehnquist spoke for a new, more conservative majority last year in calling for a gradual phase-out of federal court oversight of the public schools. Desegregation orders were intended only as a “temporary measure,” the chief justice said. Once a school board has “complied in good faith,” a judge should end the case and return full control to local officials, he said.

Shortly afterward, the justices agreed to review the 23-year-old DeKalb County case, seeking to clarify what constituted “good faith compliance” with a desegregation decree.

That effort appeared to fail Tuesday. The justices split 4-4 on setting standards for ending a court order. Justice Clarence Thomas took no part in the case because it was heard in October, several weeks before he joined the court.

In 1969, when the DeKalb County schools came under federal court control, 5% of its students were black. By closing several all-black schools, the district managed to desegregate its other classrooms. Since then, it used several voluntary methods, such as “magnet schools,” to maintain desegregation.

However, thousands of black families have moved into the southern half of the school system and now their children make up 60% of the student body there. White families have fled those same neighborhoods, creating scores of nearly all-black schools.

Rehnquist and Kennedy, joined by Justices Byron R. White and Antonin Scalia, agreed that no further desegregation need be undertaken unless school officials are found to have caused that white flight.

Justice David H. Souter, in a concurring opinion, said that further student desegregation “may still be necessary” because the district retains some characteristics of a “dual school system.”

Justices Harry A. Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor took the position that court supervision should not be ended because school officials had failed “to eradicate segregation.”

What the Georgia Schools Have Done (Southland Edition, A10)

Here is a look at the DeKalb County schools, subject of a desegregation ruling .

Students: 77,000, 60% black.

Location: Eastern Atlanta suburbs.

Integration efforts: Segregated by law until 1966. First desegregation efforts began in 1969, following legal action by parents.

Current mechanisms for desegregation include:

Twelve magnet schools, where students are encouraged to pursue specialized curricula. They range from performing arts for kindergarten students to science and math and technology for older students. Admission by application; classes kept to 50-50 racial composition.

Majority-to-minority program. Students in the racial majority in their school can transfer to a school where they would be in the minority. Current program enrollment: 4,400 students. Typically used by black students to attend highly regarded, predominantly white schools.

Source: Times Wire Services