The Thirteenth Amendment and Equal Educational Opportunity

Abstract

Inequities for Black Americans, including educational ones, are often rooted in “neutral” policies — ones facially innocent, but effectively discriminatory. This Article establishes the Thirteenth Amendment as a viable alternative in anti-discrimination law for challenging such policies. Undoing these policies has traditionally been the work of the statutorily-based disparate-impact theory. But for a range of reasons, that theory’s success at bringing about enduring social change is stunted. The Thirteenth Amendment is rich legal ground into which we might instead sow new seed.

The Amendment’s social and legislative histories and Supreme Court precedent establish that the Amendment was designed to eradicate social policies that entrench or perpetuate the vestiges of slavery, whether those policies are racially explicit or facially neutral. Accordingly, the Amendment overlaps with the disparate-impact theory’s original goal of remedying the present effects of past discrimination. This Article operationalizes the Amendment in this regard by applying it to a relatively popular context for disparate-impact challenges: school discipline policies.

The views of the Amendment’s earliest advocates confirm that one of the most profound enactments of freedom for Black Americans was, among other things, obtaining an education. This Article is the first to explain why any education practice, like harsh school discipline policies, that discriminatorily denies access to public education also violates the Amendment’s conferral of meaningful freedom to Black Americans.

This Article emphasizes the special role of Congress acting on its power under the Amendment to define the aspects of such freedom and outlines how Congress might do so. Direct congressional action under the Amendment is vital because it mitigates the difficulties of judicially enforced disparate-impact theory. Such action would also constitute an overdue re-conciliatory step towards directly confronting slavery’s legacy, as the Amendment vests in Congress a responsibility to scrutinize any lingering barriers to Black Americans’ acts of freedom, like obtaining an education. It outlining an education equity framework under the Thirteenth Amendment, the Article nods towards the Amendment’s enforcement possibilities as anchor for anti-discrimination law beyond public education.

Keywords: Thirteenth Amendment, Race, Public Education, Disparate Impact, Constitution, Title VI, Constitution, Discrimination, Racial Justice