MR. JUSTICE STEWART, with whom THE CHIEF JUSTICE joins, concurring in the result in No. 78-610 and dissenting in No. 78-627, post, p. 526.

My views in these cases differ in significant respects from those of the Court, leading me to concur only in the result in the Columbus case, and to dissent from the Court's judgment in the Dayton case.

It seems to me that the Court of Appeals in both of these cases ignored the crucial role of the federal district courts in school desegregation litigation — a role repeatedly emphasized by this Court throughout the course of school desegregation controversies, from Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294 ( Brown II), to Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, 433 U.S. 406 ( Dayton I). The development of the law concerning school segregation has not reduced the need for sound factfinding by the district courts, nor lessened the appropriateness of deference to their findings of fact. To the contrary, the elimination of the more conspicuous forms of governmentally ordained racial segregation over the last 25 years counsels undiminished deference to the factual adjudications of the federal trial judges in cases such as these, uniquely situated as those judges are to appraise the societal forces at work in the communities where they sit.

Whether actions that produce racial separation are intentional within the meaning of Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, Denver, Colo., 413 U.S. 189; Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229; and Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Dev. Corp., 429 U.S. 252, is an issue that can present very difficult and subtle factual questions. Similarly intricate may be factual inquiries into the breadth of any constitutional violation, and hence of any permissible remedy. See Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 ( Milliken I); Dayton I, supra. Those tasks are difficult enough for a trial judge. The coldness and impersonality of a printed record, containing the only evidence available to an appellate court in any case, can hardly make the answers any clearer. I doubt neither the diligence nor the perseverance of the judges of the courts of appeals, or of my Brethren, but I suspect that it is impossible for a reviewing court factually to know a case from a 6,600-page printed record as well as the trial judge knew it. In assessing the facts in lawsuits like these, therefore, I think appellate courts should accept even more readily than in most cases the factual findings of the courts of first instance.

My second disagreement with the Court in these cases stems from my belief that the Court has attached far too much importance in each case to the question whether there existed a "dual school system" in 1954. As I understand the Court's opinions in these cases, if such an officially authorized segregated school system can be found to have existed in 1954, then any current racial separation in the schools will be presumed to have been caused by acts in violation of the Constitution. Even if, as the Court says, this presumption is rebuttable, the burden is on the school board to rebut it. And, when the factual issues are as elusive as these, who bears the burden of proof can easily determine who prevails in the litigation. Speiser v. Randall. 357 U.S. 513, 525-526.

I agree that a school district in violation of the Constitution in 1954 was under a duty to remedy that violation. So was a school district violating the Constitution in 1964, and so is one violating the Constitution today. But this duty does not justify a complete shift of the normal burden of proof.

Presumptions are sometimes justified because in common experience some facts are likely to follow from others. See Ulster County Court v. Allen, 442 U.S. 140; Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U.S. 510. A constitutional violation in 1954 might be presumed to make the existence of a constitutional violation 20 years later more likely than not in one of two ways. First, because the school board then had an invidious intent, the continuing existence of that collective state of mind might be presumed in the absence of proof to the contrary. Second, quite apart from the current intent of the school board, an unconstitutionally discriminatory school system in 1954 might be presumed still to have major effects on the contemporary system. Neither of these possibilities seems to me likely enough to support a valid presumption.

Much has changed in 25 years, in the Nation at large and in Dayton and Columbus in particular. Minds have changed with respect to racial relationships. Perhaps more importantly, generations have changed. The prejudices of the school boards of 1954 (and earlier) cannot realistically be assumed to haunt the school boards of today. Similarly, while two full generations of students have progressed from kindergarten through high school, school systems have changed. Dayton and Columbus are both examples of the dramatic growth and change in urban school districts. It is unrealistic to assume that the hand of 1954 plays any major part in shaping the current school systems in either city. For these reasons, I simply cannot accept the shift in the litigative burden of proof adopted by the Court.

Because of these basic disagreements with the Court's approach, these two cases look quite different to me from the way they look to the Court. In both cases, there is no doubt that many of the districts' children are in schools almost solely with members of their own race. These racially distinct areas make up substantial parts of both districts. The question remains, however, whether the plaintiffs showed that this racial separation was the result of intentional systemwide discrimination.

The Dayton case

After further hearings following the remand by this Court in the first Dayton case, the District Court dismissed this lawsuit. It found that the plaintiffs had not proved a discriminatory purpose behind many of the actions challenged. It found further that the plaintiffs had not proved that any significant segregative effect had resulted from those few practices that the school board had previously undertaken with an invalid intent. The Court of Appeals held these findings to be clearly erroneous. I cannot agree.

As to several claimed acts of post-1954 discrimination, the Court of Appeals seems simply to have differed with the trial court's factual assessments, without offering a reasoned explanation of how the trial court's finding fell short. The Court of Appeals may have been correct in its assessment of the facts, but that is not demonstrated by its opinion. I would accept the trial judge's findings of fact.

Furthermore, the Court of Appeals relied heavily on the proposition that the Dayton School District was a "dual system" in 1954, and today this Court places great stress on the same foundation. In several instances, the Court of Appeals overturned the District Court's findings of fact because of the trial court's failure to shift the burden of proof. Because I think this shifting of the burden is wholly unjustified, it seems to me a serious mistake to upset the District Court's findings on any such basis. If one accepts the facts as found by the District Judge, there is almost no basis for finding any constitutional violations after 1954. Nor is there any substantial evidence of the continuing impact of pre-1954 discrimination. Only if the defendant school board is saddled with the burdens of proving that it acted out of proper motives after 1954 and that factors other than pre-1954 policies led to racial separation in the district's schools, could these plaintiffs possibly prevail.

For the reasons I have expressed, I dissent from the opinion and judgment of the Court.

The Columbus case

In contrast, the Court of Appeals did not upset the District Court's findings of fact in this case. In a long and careful opinion, the District Judge discussed numerous examples of overt racial discrimination continuing into the 1970's. Just as I would defer to the findings of fact made by the District Court in the Dayton case, I would accept the trial court's findings in this case.

The Court of Appeals did rely in part on its finding that the Columbus Board operated a dual school system in 1954, as does this Court. But evidence of recent discriminatory intent, so lacking in the Dayton case, was relatively strong in this case. The particular illustrations recounted by the District Court may not have affected a large portion of the school district, but they demonstrated that the district was not being operated in a racially neutral manner. The District Court found that the Columbus Board had intentionally discriminated against Negro students in some schools, and that there was substantial racial separation throughout the district. The question in my judgment is whether the District Court's conclusion that there had been a systemwide constitutional violation can be upheld on the basis of those findings, without reference to an affirmative duty stemming from the situation in 1954.

I think the Court's decision in Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, Denver, Colo., 413 U.S. 189, provides the answer:

"[W]e hold that a finding of intentionally segregative school board actions in a meaningful portion of a school system, as in this case, creates a presumption that other segregated schooling within the system is not adventitious. It establishes, in other words, a prima facie case of unlawful segregative design on the part of school authorities, and shifts to those authorities the burden of proving that other segregated schools within the system are not also the result of intentionally segregative actions." Id., at 208.

The plaintiffs in the Columbus case, unlike those in the Dayton case, proved what the Court in Keyes defined as a prima facie case. The District Court and the Court of Appeals correctly found that the school board did not rebut this presumption. It is on this basis that I agree with the District Court and the Court of Appeals in concluding that the Columbus School District was operated in violation of the Constitution.

The petitioners in the Columbus case also challenge the remedy imposed by the District Court. Just two Terms ago we set out the test for determining the appropriate scope of a remedy in a case such as this:

"If such violations are found, the District Court in the first instance, subject to review by the Court of Appeals, must determine how much incremental segregative effect these violations had on the racial distribution of the . . . school population as presently constituted, when that distribution is compared to what it would have been in the absence of such constitutional violations. The remedy must be designed to redress that difference, and only if there has been a systemwide impact may there be a systemwide remedy." Dayton I, 433 U.S., at 420.

In the context in which the Columbus case has reached us, I cannot say that the remedy imposed by the District Court was impermissible under this test. For the reasons discussed above, the District Court's conclusion that there was a systemwide constitutional violation was soundly based. And because the scope of the remedy is tied to the scope of the violation, a remedy encompassing the entire school district was presumptively appropriate. In litigating the question of remedy, however, I think the defendants in a case such as this should always be permitted to show that certain schools or areas were not affected by the constitutional violation.

The District Court in this case did allow the defendants to show just that. The school board proposed several remedies, but it put forward only one plan that was limited by the allegedly limited effects of the violation. That plan would have remedied racial imbalance only in the schools mentioned in the District Court's opinion. Another remedy proposed by the school board would have resulted in a rough racial balance in all but 22 "all-white" schools. But the board did not assert that those schools had been unaffected by the violations. Instead, it justified that plan on the ground that it would bring the predominately Negro schools into balance with no need to involve the 22 all-white schools on the periphery of the district. The District Court rejected this plan, finding that it would not offer effective desegregation since it would leave those 22 schools available for "white flight." The plan ultimately adopted by the District Court used the Negro school population of Columbus as a benchmark, and decreed that all the public schools should be 32% minority, plus or minus 15%.

Although, as the Court stressed in Green v. County School Board, 391 U.S. 430, a remedy is to be judged by its effectiveness, effectiveness alone is not a reason for extending a remedy to all schools in a district. An easily visible correlation between school segregation and residential segregation cannot by itself justify the blanket extension of a remedy throughout a district. As Dayton I made clear, unless a school was affected by the violations, it should not be included in the remedy. I suspect the defendants in Columbus might have been able to show that at least some schools in the district were not affected by the proved violations. Schools in the far eastern or northern portions of the district were so far removed from the center of Negro population that the unconstitutional actions of the board may not have affected them at all. But the defendants did not carry the burden necessary to exclude those schools.

The remedy adopted by the District Court used numerical guidelines, but it was not for that reason invalid. As this Court said in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1:

"Awareness of the racial composition of the whole school system is likely to be a useful starting point in shaping a remedy to correct past constitutional violations. In sum, the very limited use made of mathematical ratios was within the equitable remedial discretion of the District Court." Id., at 25.

On this record, therefore, I cannot say that the remedy was improper.

For these reasons, I concur in the result in Columbus Board of Education v. Penick, and dissent in Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman.

MR. JUSTICE POWELL, dissenting.[fn*] [fn*] Page 479 [This opinion applies also to No. 78-627, Dayton Board of Education et al. v. Brinkman et al., post, p. 526.]

I join the dissenting opinions of MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST and write separately to emphasize several points. The Court's opinions in these two cases are profoundly disturbing. They appear to endorse a wholly new constitutional concept applicable to school cases. The opinions also seem remarkably insensitive to the now widely accepted view that a quarter of a century after Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) ( Brown I), the federal judiciary should be limiting rather than expanding the extent to which courts are operating the public school systems of our country. In expressing these views, I recognize, of course, that my Brothers who have joined the Court's opinions are motivated by purposes and ideals that few would question. My dissent is based on a conviction that the Court's opinions condone the creation of bad constitutional law and will be even worse for public education — an element of American life that is essential, especially for minority children.

I

MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST'S dissents demonstrate that the Court's decisions mark a break with both precedent and principle. The Court indulges the courts below in their stringing together of a chain of "presumptions," not one of which is close enough to reality to be reasonable. See ante, at 472 (opinion of STEWART, J.). This chain leads inexorably to the remarkable conclusion that the absence of integration found to exist in a high percentage of the 241 schools in Columbus and Dayton was caused entirely by intentional violations of the Fourteenth Amendment by the school boards of these two cities. Although this conclusion is tainted on its face, is not supported by evidence in either case, and as a general matter seems incredible, the courts below accepted it as the necessary premise for requiring as a matter of constitutional law a systemwide remedy prescribing racial balance in each and every school.

There are unintegrated schools in every major urban area in the country that contains a substantial minority population. This condition results primarily from familiar segregated housing patterns, which — in turn — are caused by social, economic, and demographic forces for which no school board is responsible. These causes of the greater part of the school segregation problem are not newly discovered. Nearly a decade ago, Professor Bickel wrote:

"In most of the larger urban areas, demographic conditions are such that no policy that a court can order, and a school board, a city or even a state has the capability to put into effect, will in fact result in the foreseeable future in racially balanced public schools. Only a reordering of the environment involving economic and social policy on the broadest conceivable front might have an appreciable impact." A. Bickel, The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress 132, and n. 47 (1970).

Federal courts, including this Court today, continue to ignore these indisputable facts. Relying upon fictions and presumptions in school cases that are irreconcilable with principles of equal protection law applied in all other cases, see, e. g., Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256 (1979); Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Dev. Corp., 429 U.S. 252 (1977); Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976), federal courts prescribe systemwide remedies without relation to the causes of the segregation found to exist, and implement their decrees by requiring extensive transportation of children of all school ages.

The type of state-enforced segregation that Brown I properly condemned no longer exists in this country. This is not to say that school boards — particularly in the great cities of the North, Midwest, and West — are taking all reasonable measures to provide integrated educational opportunities. As I indicated in my separate opinion in Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, Denver, Colo., 413 U.S. 189, 223-236 (1973), de facto segregation has existed on a large scale in many of these cities, and often it is indistinguishable in effect from the type of de jure segregation outlawed by Brown. Where there is proof of intentional segregative action or inaction, the federal courts must act, but their remedies should not exceed the scope of the constitutional violation. Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, 433 U.S. 406 (1977); Austin Independent School Dist. v. United States, 429 U.S. 990, 991 (1976) (POWELL, J., concurring); Pasadena City Board of Education v. Spangler, 427 U.S. 424 (1976); Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974); Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1, 16 (1971). Systemwide remedies such as were ordered by the courts below, and today are approved by this Court, lack any principled basis when the absence of integration in all schools cannot reasonably be attributed to discriminatory conduct.

MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST has dealt devastatingly with the way in which the Court of Appeals endowed prior precedents with new and wondrous meanings. I can add little to what he has said. I therefore move to more general but, in my view, important considerations that the Court simply ignores.

II

Holding the school boards of these two cities responsible for all of the segregation in the Dayton and Columbus systems and prescribing fixed racial ratios in every school as the constitutionally required remedy necessarily implies a belief that the same school boards — under court supervision — will be capable of bringing about and maintaining the desired racial balance in each of these schools. The experience in city after city demonstrates that this is an illusion. The process of resegregation, stimulated by resentment against judicial coercion and concern as to the effect of court supervision of education, will follow today's decisions as surely as it has in other cities subjected to similar sweeping decrees.

The orders affirmed today typify intrusions on local and professional authorities that affect adversely the quality of education. They require an extensive reorganization of both school systems, including the reassignment of almost half of the 96,000 students in the Columbus system and the busing of some 15,000 students in Dayton. They also require reassignments of teachers and other staff personnel, reorganization of grade structures, and the closing of certain schools. The orders substantially dismantle and displace neighborhood schools in the face of compelling economic and educational reasons for preserving them. This wholesale substitution of judicial legislation for the judgments of elected officials and professional educators derogates the entire process of public education. Moreover, it constitutes a serious interference with the private decisions of parents as to how their children will be educated. These harmful consequences are the inevitable byproducts of a judicial approach that ignores other relevant factors in favor of an exclusive focus on racial balance in every school.

These harmful consequences, moreover, in all likelihood will provoke responses that will defeat the integrative purpose of the courts' orders. Parents, unlike school officials, are not bound by these decrees and may frustrate them through the simple expedient of withdrawing their children from a public school system in which they have lost confidence. In spite of the substantial costs often involved in relocation of the family or in resort to private education, experience demonstrates that many parents view these alternatives as preferable to submitting their children to court-run school systems. In the words of a leading authority:

"An implication that should have been seen all along but can no longer be ignored is that a child's enrollment in a given public school is not determined by a governmental decision alone. It is a joint result of a governmental decision (the making of school assignments) and parental decisions, whether to remain in the same residential location, whether to send their child to a private school, or which school district to move into when moving into a metropolitan area. The fact that the child's enrollment is a result of two decisions operating jointly means that government policies must, to be effective, anticipate parental decisions and obtain the parents' active cooperation in implementing school policies." Coleman, New Incentives for Desegregation, 7 Human Rights, No. 3, pp. 10, 13 (1978).

At least where inner-city populations comprise a large proportion of racial minorities and surrounding suburbs remain white, conditions that exist in most large American cities, the demonstrated effect of compulsory integration is a substantial exodus of whites from the system. See J. Coleman, S. Kelly, J. Moore, Trends in School Segregation, 1968-1973, pp. 66, 76-77 (1975). It would be unfair and misleading to attribute this phenomenon to a racist response to integration per se. It is at least as likely that the exodus is in substantial part a natural reaction to the displacement of professional and local control that occurs when courts go into the business of restructuring and operating school systems.

Nor will this resegregation be the only negative effect of court-coerced integration on minority children. Public schools depend on community support for their effectiveness. When substantial elements of the community are driven to abandon these schools, their quality tends to decline, sometimes markedly. Members of minority groups, who have relied especially on education as a means of advancing themselves, also are likely to react to this decline in quality by removing their children from public schools. As a result, public school enrollment increasingly will become limited to children from families that either lack the resources to choose alternatives or are indifferent to the quality of education. The net effect is an overall deterioration in public education, the one national resource that traditionally has made this country a land of opportunity for diverse ethnic and racial groups. See Keyes, 413 U.S., at 250 (opinion of POWELL, J.).

III

If public education is not to suffer further, we must "return to a more balanced evaluation of the recognized interests of our society in achieving desegregation with other educational and societal interests a community may legitimately assert." Id., at 253. The ultimate goal is to have quality school systems in which racial discrimination is neither practiced nor tolerated. It has been thought that ethnic and racial diversity in the classroom is a desirable component of sound education in our country of diverse populations, a view to which I subscribe. The question that courts in their single-minded pursuit of racial balance seem to ignore is how best to move toward this goal.

For a decade or more after Brown I, the courts properly focused on dismantling segregated school systems as a means of eliminating state-imposed discrimination and furthering wholesome diversity in the schools. Experience in recent years, however, has case serious doubt upon the efficacy of far-reaching judicial remedies directed not against specific constitutional violations, but rather imposed on an entire school system on the fictional assumption that the existence of identifiable black or white schools is caused entirely by intentional segregative conduct, and is evidence of systemwide discrimination. In my view, some federal courts — now led by this Court — are pursuing a path away from rather than toward the desired goal. While these courts conscientiously view their judgments as mandated by the Constitution (a view that would have astonished constitutional scholars throughout most of our history), the fact is that restructuring and overseeing the operation of major public school systems — as ordered in these cases — fairly can be viewed as social engineering that hardly is appropriate for the federal judiciary.

The time has come for a thoughtful re-examination of the proper limits of the role of courts in confronting the intractable problems of public education in our complex society. Proved discrimination by state or local authorities should never be tolerated, and it is a first responsibility of the judiciary to put an end to it where it has been proved. But many courts have continued also to impose wide-ranging decrees, and to retain ongoing supervision over school systems. Local and state legislative and administrative authorities have been supplanted or relegated to initiative-stifling roles as minions of the courts. Indeed, there is reason to believe that some legislative bodies have welcomed judicial activism with respect to a subject so inherently difficult and so politically sensitive that the prospect of others confronting it seems inviting. Federal courts no longer should encourage this deference by the appropriate authorities — no matter how willing they may be to defer. Courts are the branch least competent to provide long-range solutions acceptable to the public and most conducive to achieving both diversity in the classroom and quality education.

School boards need not wait, and many have not waited, for innovative legislative guidance. The opinion of the Court in Swann, though often cited (as in this case) for views I think were never intended, identified some constructive actions always open to school authorities:

"An optional majority-to-minority transfer provision has long been recognized as a useful part of every desegregation plan. Provision for optional transfer of those in the majority racial group of a particular school to other schools where they will be in the minority [or less in the majority] is an indispensable remedy for those students willing to transfer to other schools in order to lessen the impact on them of the state-imposed stigma of segregation. In order to be effective, such a transfer arrangement must grant the transferring student free transportation and space must be made available in the school to which he desires to move." 402 U.S., at 26-27.

See also Keyes, 413 U.S., at 240-241 (opinion of POWELL, J.). Incentives can be employed to encourage these transfers, such as creation of magnet schools providing special educational benefits and state subsidization of those schools that expand their minority enrollments. See, e. g., Willie, Racial Balance or Quality Education?, in School Desegregation, Shadow and Substance 7 (Levinsohn Wright eds. 1976). These and like plans, if adopted voluntarily by States, also could help counter the effects of racial imbalances between school districts that are beyond the reach of judicial correction. See Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974); cf. Coleman, 7 Human Rights, at 48-49.

After all, and in spite of what many view as excessive government regulation, we are a free society — perhaps the most free of any in the world. Our people instinctively resent coercion, and perhaps most of all when it affects their children and the opportunities that only education affords them. It is now reasonably clear that the goal of diversity that we call integration, if it is to be lasting and conducive to quality education, must have the support of parents who so frequently have the option to choose where their children will attend school. Courts, of course, should confront discrimination wherever it is found to exist. But they should recognize limitations on judicial action inherent in our system and also the limits of effective judicial power. The primary and continuing responsibility for public education, including the bringing about and maintaining of desired diversity, must be left with school officials and public authorities.

MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST, with whom MR. JUSTICE POWELL joins, dissenting.

The school desegregation remedy imposed on the Columbus school system by this Court's affirmance of the Court of Appeals is as complete and dramatic a displacement of local authority by the federal judiciary as is possible in our federal system. Pursuant to the District Court's order, 42,000 of the system's 96,000 students are reassigned to new schools. There are like reassignment of teachers, staff, and administrators, reorganization of the grade structure of virtually every elementary school in the system, the closing of 33 schools, and the additional transportation of 37,000 students.

It is difficult to conceive of a more serious supplantation because, as this Court recognized in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 493 (1954) ( Brown I), "education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments"; indeed, it is "a vital national tradition." Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, 433 U.S. 406, 410 (1977) ( Dayton I); see Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717, 741-742 (1974); Wright v. Council of City of Emporia, 407 U.S. 451, 469 (1972). That "local autonomy has long been thought essential both to the maintenance of community concern and support for public schools and to quality of the educational process," Milliken, supra, at 741-742, does not, of course, place the school system beyond the authority of federal courts as guardians of federal constitutional rights. But the practical and historical importance of the tradition does require that the existence of violations of constitutional rights be carefully and clearly defined before a federal court invades the traditional ambit of local control, and that the subsequent displacement of local authority be limited to that necessary to correct the identified violations. "It is for this reason that the case for displacement of the local authorities by a federal court in a school desegregation case must be satisfactorily established by factual proof and justified by a reasoned statement of legal principles." Dayton I, supra, at 410.

I think the District Court and Court of Appeals in this case did not heed this admonition. One can search their opinions in vain for any concrete notion of what a "systemwide violation" consists of or how a trial judge is to go about determining whether such a violation exists or has existed. What logic is evident emasculates the key determinants set down in Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, Denver, Colo., 413 U.S. 189 (1973), for proving the existence and scope of a violation warranting federal-court intervention: discriminatory purpose and a causal relationship between acts motivated by such a purpose and a current condition of segregation in the school system. The lower courts' methodology would all but eliminate the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation and render all school systems captives of a remote and ambiguous past.

Today the Court affirms the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in this case and Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman ( Dayton II), post, p. 526, in opinions so Delphic that lower courts will be hard pressed to fathom their implications for school desegregation litigation. I can only offer two suggestions. The first is that the Court, possibly chastened by the complexity and emotion that accompanies school desegregation cases, wishes to relegate the determination of a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in any plan of pupil assignment, and the formulation of a remedy for its violation, to the judgment of a single district judge. That judgment should be subject to review under the "clearly erroneous" standard by the appropriate court of appeals, in much the same way that actions for an accounting between private partners in a retail shoe business or claimants in an equitable receivership of a failing commercial enterprise are handled. "Discriminatory purpose" and "systemwide violation" are to be treated as talismanic phrases which, once invoked, warrant only the most superficial scrutiny by appellate courts.

Such an approach is, however, obviously inconsistent with the Dayton I admonition and disparages both this Court's oft-expressed concern for the important role of local autonomy in educational matters and the significance of the constitutional rights involved. It also holds out the disturbing prospect of very different remedies being imposed on similar school systems because of the predilections of individual judges and their good-faith but incongruent efforts to make sense of this Court's confused pronouncements today. Concepts such as "discriminatory purpose" and "systemwide violation" present highly mixed questions of law and fact. If district court discretion is not channelized by a clearly articulated methodology, the entire federal-court system will experience the disaffection which accompanies violation of Cicero's maxim not to "lay down one rule in Athens and another rule in Rome."

Yet, the only alternative reading of today's opinions, i. e., a literal reading, is even more disquieting. Such a reading would require embracing a novel analytical approach to school segregation in systems without a history of statutorily mandated separation of the races — an approach that would have dramatic consequences for urban school systems in this country. Perhaps the adjective "analytical" is out of place, since the Court's opinions furnish only the most superficial methodology, a framework which if it were to be adopted ought to be examined in a far more thorough and critical manner than is done by the Court's "lick and a promise" opinions today. Given the similar approaches employed by the Court in this case and Dayton II, this case suffices for stating what I think are the glaring deficiencies both in the Court's new framework and in its decision to subject the Columbus school system to the District Court's sweeping racial balance remedy.

I

The Court suggests a radical new approach to desegregation cases in systems without a history of statutorily mandated separation of the races: if a district court concludes — employing what in honesty must be characterized as an irrebuttable presumption — that there was a "dual" school system at the time of Brown I, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), it must find post-1954 constitutional violations in a school board's failure to take every affirmative step to integrate the system. Put differently, racial imbalance at the time the complaint is filed is sufficient to support a systemwide, racial balance, school busing remedy if the district court can find some evidence of discriminatory purpose prior to 1954, without any inquiry into the causal relationship between those pre-1954 violations and current segregation in the school system.

This logic permeates the findings of the District Court and Court of Appeals, and the latter put it most bluntly.

"[T]he District Judge on review of pre-1954 history found that the Columbus schools were de jure segregated in 1954 and, hence, the Board had a continuing constitutional duty to desegregate the Columbus schools. The pupil assignment figures for 1975-76 demonstrate the District Judge's conclusion that this burden has not been carried. On this basis alone (if there were no other proofs), we believe we would be required to affirm the District Judge's finding of present unconstitutional segregation." 583 F.2d 787, 800 (1978).

In Brinkman v. Gilligan, 583 F.2d 243, 256 (CA6 1978), also affirmed today, this post-1954 "affirmative duty" is characterized as a duty "to diffuse black and white students" throughout the system.

The Court in this case apparently endorses that view. For the Court finds that "[e]ach instance of a failure or refusal to fulfill this affirmative duty continues the violation of the Fourteenth Amendment," ante, at 459, and the mere fact that at the time of suit "most blacks were still going to black schools and most whites to white schools" establishes current effect. Ante, at 461.

In order to fully comprehend the dramatic reorientation the Court's opinion thus implies, and its lack of any principled basis, a brief historical review is necessary. In 1954, this Court announced Brown I and struck down on equal protection grounds laws requiring or permitting school assignment of children on the basis of race. See also Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954). The question of remedy was reserved for a new round of briefing, and the following Term this Court remanded to the District Courts in the five consolidated cases "to take such proceedings and enter such orders and decrees consistent with this opinion as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases." Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294, 301 (1955) ( Brown II).

The majority concedes that this case does not involve racial assignment of students mandated by state law; Ohio abandoned any "statutory requirement or authorization to operate segregated schools" by 1888. Ante, at 455. Yet, it was precisely this type of segregation — segregation expressly mandated or permitted by state statute or constitution — that was addressed by Brown I, and the mandate of the Brown cases was that "[a]ll provisions of federal, state, or local law requiring or permitting such discrimination must yield" to "the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional." 349 U.S., at 298. The message of Brown II was simple and resonant because the violation was simple and pervasive.

There were, however, some issues upon which the Brown II Court was vague. It did not define what it meant by "effectuat[ing] a transition to a racially nondiscriminatory school system," id., at 301, and therefore the next 17 years focused on the question of the appropriate remedy where racial separation had been maintained by operation of state law.

The earliest post- Brown school cases in this Court only intimated that "a transition to a racially nondiscriminatory school system" required adoption of a policy of nondiscriminatory admission. It was not until the 1967 Term that this Court indicated that school systems with a history of statutorily or constitutionally mandated separation of the races would have to do more than simply permit black students to attend white schools and vice versa. In that Term, the Court had before it "freedom-of-choice" plans put forward as desegregation remedies. The factual context of the lead case, Green v. County School Board, 391 U.S. 430 (1968), is a far cry from the complicated urban metropolitan system we confront today. The New Kent County school system consisted of two schools — one black and one white — with a total enrollment of 1,300 pupils. At the time of suit a black student had never attended the white school or a white student the black school.

This Court found that the "freedom-of-choice" plan approved by the District Court for the desegregation of the New Kent County schools was inadequate. Noting that the "pattern of separate `white' and `Negro' schools in the New Kent County school system established under compulsion of state laws is precisely the pattern of segregation to which Brown I and Brown II were particularly addressed," the Court observed that Brown II charged "[s]chool boards such as the respondent then operating state-compelled dual systems . . . with the affirmative duty to take whatever steps might be necessary to convert to a unitary system in which racial discrimination would be eliminated root and branch." 391 U.S., at 435, 437-438. In the three years following court approval of the freedom-of-choice plan in New Kent County, not a single white child had chosen to attend the historically black school, which continued to serve 85% of the county's black school-children. The Green Court concluded that a freedom-of-choice plan, in a school system such as this and in the absence of other efforts at desegregation, was not sufficient to provide the remedy mandated by Brown II. The Court suggested zoning, i. e., some variation of a neighborhood school policy, as a possible alternative remedy.

That brings the history of school desegregation litigation in this Court to THE CHIEF JUSTICE'S opinion in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971), upon which the majority and respondents heavily rely. Swann also addressed school systems with a history of statutorily or constitutionally mandated separation of the races; "[t]hat was what Brown v. Board of Education was all about." Id., at 6. Swann was an attempt to define "in more precise terms" the appropriate scope of the remedy in cases of that nature. Ibid. It simply did not attempt to articulate the manner by which courts were to determine the existence of a violation in school systems without a history of segregation imposed by statute or the state constitution. Certainly school systems with such a history were charged by Brown II to "effectuate a transition to a racially nondiscriminatory school system." But Swann did not speak of the failure to conform to this duty as a "continuing violation." The specific references to an affirmative duty in Swann were to the duty of a school board found to have overseen a school system with state-imposed segregation to put forward a plan to remedy that situation. It was in this context that the Court observed that upon "default by the school authorities of their obligation to proffer acceptable remedies, a district court has broad power to fashion a remedy that will assure a unitary school system." 402 U.S., at 16.

This understanding of the "affirmative duty" was acknowledged in the first case confronting a school system without a history of state-mandated racial assignment, Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, Denver, Colo., 413 U.S. 189 (1973). There the Court observed:

"[W]e have held that where plaintiffs prove that a current condition of segregated schooling exists within a school district where a dual system was compelled or authorized by statute at the time of our decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) ( Brown I), the State automatically assumes an affirmative duty `to effectuate a transition to a racially nondiscriminatory school system,' Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294, 301 (1955) ( Brown II), see also Green v. County School Board, 391 U.S. 430, 437-438 (1968), that is, to eliminate from the public schools within their school system `all vestiges of state-imposed segregation.' Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1, 15 (1971).

"This is not a case, however, where a statutory dual system has ever existed." Id., at 200-201 (footnote omitted).

It was at this juncture that the Court articulated the proposition that has become associated with Keyes.

"Nevertheless, where plaintiffs prove that the school authorities have carried out a systematic program of segregation affecting a substantial portion of the students, schools, teachers, and facilities within the school system, it is only common sense to conclude that there exists a predicate for a finding of the existence of a dual school system." Id., at 201.

The notion of an "affirmative duty" as acknowledged in Keyes is a remedial concept defining the obligation on the school board to come forward with an effective desegregation plan after a finding of a dual system. This could not be clearer in Keyes itself.

"[P]roof of state-imposed segregation in a substantial portion of the district will suffice to support a finding by the trial court of the existence of a dual system. Of course, where that finding is made, as in cases involving statutory dual systems, the school authorities have an affirmative duty `to effectuate a transition to a racially nondiscriminatory school system.' Brown II, supra, at 301." Id., at 203.

Indeed, Keyes did not discuss the complexion of the Denver school system in 1954 or in any other way intimate the analysis adopted by the Court today. Rather, it emphasized that the relevance of past actions was determined by their causal relationship to current racially imbalanced conditions.

Even so brief a history of our school desegregation jurisprudence sheds light on more than one point. As a matter of history, case law, or logic, there is nothing to support the novel proposition that the primary inquiry in school desegregation cases involving systems without a history of statutorily mandated racial assignment is what happened in those systems before 1954. As a matter of history, 1954 makes no more sense as a benchmark — indeed it makes less sense — than 1968, 1971, or 1973. Perhaps the latter year has the most to commend it, if one insists on a benchmark, because in Keyes this Court first confronted the problem of school segregation in the context of systems without a history of statutorily mandated separation of the races.

As a matter of logic, the majority's decision to turn the year 1954 into a constitutional Rubicon also fails. The analytical underpinnings of the concept of discriminatory purpose have received their still incomplete articulation in the 1970's. It is sophistry to suggest that a school board in Columbus in 1954 could have read Brown I and gleaned from it a constitutional duty "to diffuse black students throughout the . . . system" or take whatever other action the Court today thinks it should have taken. And not only was the school board to anticipate the state of the law 20 years hence, but also to have a full appreciation for discrete acts or omissions of school boards 20 to 50 years earlier.

Of course, there are always instances where constitutional standards evolve and parties are charged with conforming to the new standards. But I am unaware of a case where the failure to anticipate a change in the law and take remedial steps is labeled an independent constitutional violation. The difference is not simply one of characterization: the Court's decision today enunciates, without analysis or explanation, a new methodology that dramatically departs from Keyes by relieving school desegregation plaintiffs from any showing of a causal nexus between intentional segregative actions and the conditions they seek to remedy.

Causality plays a central role in Keyes as it does in all equal protection analysis. The Keyes Court held that before the burden of production shifts to the school board, the plaintiffs must prove "that the school authorities have carried out a systematic program of segregation affecting a substantial portion of the students, schools, teachers, and facilities within the school system." 413 U.S., at 201 (emphasis added). The Court recognized that a trial court might find "that a lesser degree of segregated schooling . . . would not have resulted even if the Board had not acted as it did," and "that at some point in time the relationship between past segregative acts and present segregation may become so attenuated as to be incapable of supporting a finding of de jure segregation warranting judicial intervention." Id., at 211. The relevance of past acts of the school board was to depend on whether "segregation resulting from those actions continues to exist." Id., at 210. That inquiry is not central under the approach approved by the Court today. Henceforth, the question is apparently whether pre-1954 acts contributed in some unspecified manner to segregated conditions that existed in 1954. If the answer is "Yes," then the only question is whether the school board has exploited all integrative opportunities that presented themselves in the subsequent 25 years. If not, a systemwide remedy is in order, despite the plaintiff's failure to demonstrate a link between those past acts and current racial imbalance.

The Court's use of the term "affirmative duty" implies that integration be the pre-eminent — indeed, the controlling — educational consideration in school board decisionmaking. It takes precedence over other legitimate educational objectives subject to some vague feasibility limitation. That implication is dramatically demonstrated in this case. Both lower courts necessarily gave special significance to the Columbus School Board's post-1954 school construction and siting policies as supporting the systemwide remedy in this case. They did not find — in fact, could not have found — that the siting and construction of schools were racially motivated. As the District Court observed:

"In 1950, pursuant to a request of the then Columbus school superintendent, the Bureau of Educational Research at The Ohio State University began a comprehensive, scientific and objective analysis of the school plant needs of the school system. The Bureau studied and reported on community growth characteristics, educational programs, enrollment projections, the system's plan of organization, the existing plant, and the financial ability of the community to pay for new school facilities. Thereafter, a number of general and specific recommendations were made to the Columbus Board by the Bureau. The recommendations included the size and location of new school sites as well as additions to existing sites. The recommendations were conceived to accommodate the so-called `community or neighborhood school concept.' The 1950 concept was related to a distance criteria grounded on walking distance to schools as follows: 3/4 mile for elementary, 1 1/2 miles for junior high and 2 miles for senior high students.

"The Board of Education adopted and relied upon the Bureau's recommendations in proposing and encouraging the passage of bond issues in 1951, 1953, 1956, 1959 and 1964. School construction of new facilities and additions to existing structures were accomplished in substantial conformity with the Bureau's periodic studies and recommendations." 429 F. Supp. 229, 237-238 (SD Ohio 1977).

Thus, the Columbus Board of Education employed the most objective criteria possible in the placement of new schools.

Nevertheless, the District Court and Court of Appeals found that conformity with these recommendations was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because "in some instances the need for school facilities could have been met in a manner having an integrative rather than a segregative effect." Id., at 243. By endorsing this logic, the Court, as a result of its finding of an affirmative duty, employs remedy standards to determine the existence of post-1954 violations in school construction and ignores the previously pivotal role of discriminatory purpose.

This unprecedented "affirmative duty" superstructure sits atop a weak foundation — the existence of a "dual" school system in 1954. This finding was predicated on the presence of four predominantly black elementary schools and one predominantly black junior high school on the "near east side of Columbus," a then and now black residential area. The Columbus School Board at that time employed, as it does now, a neighborhood school policy. The specific Board actions that the District Court cited were racial assignment of teachers and gerrymandering along part of the border between two school districts. The Court concludes that these violations involved a substantial part of the Columbus school system in 1954, and invokes Keyes for the proposition that the finding of a dual school system follows "absent sufficient contrary proof by the Board, which was not forthcoming in this case." Ante, at 458.

There are two major difficulties with this use of Keyes. First, without any explanation, the Court for the first time applies it to define the character of a school system remote in time — here 25 or more years ago — without any examination of the justifications for the Keyes burden-shifting principles when those principles are used in this fashion. Their use is a matter of "`policy and fairness,'" 413 U.S., at 209 (quoting 9 J. Wigmore, Evidence § 2486, p. 275 (3d ed. 1940)), and I think the Keyes "presumption" scores poorly on both counts when focused on a period beyond memory and often beyond records. What records are available are equally available to both sides. In this case the District Court relied almost exclusively on instances that occurred between 1909 and 1943: undoubtedly beyond the period when many Board members had their experiences with the system as students, let alone as administrators. It is much more difficult for school board authorities to piece together the influences that shaped the racial composition of a district 20, 30, or 40 years ago. The evidence on both sides becomes increasingly anecdotal. Yet the consequences of the School Board's inability to make such a showing only become more dramatic. Here violations with respect to 5 schools, only 3 of which exist today, occurring over 30 years ago are the key premise for a systemwide racial balance remedy involving 172 schools — most of which did not exist in 1950.

My second concern about the Court's use of the Keyes presumption may render my first concern academic. For as I suggest in Part III below, the Court today endorses views regarding the neighborhood school policy and racially identifiable neighborhoods that essentially make the Keyes presumption irrebuttable.

II

The departure from established doctrines of causation and discriminatory purpose does not end with the lower courts' preoccupation with an "affirmative duty" exhumed from the conduct of past generations to be imposed on the present without regard to the forces that actually shaped the current racial imbalance in the school system. It is also evident in their examination of post-1954 violations, which the Court refers to as "the intentionally segregative use of optional attendance zones, discontiguous attendance areas, and boundary changes." Ante, at 461-462 (footnotes omitted).

As a preliminary matter, I note that the Court of Appeals observed, I think correctly, that these post-1954 incidents "can properly be classified as isolated in the sense that they do not form any systemwide pattern." 583 F.2d, at 805. All the incidents cited, let alone those that can meet a properly applied segregative intent standard, could not serve as the basis for a systemwide racial balance remedy.

In Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976), Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Dev. Corp., 429 U.S. 252 (1977), and Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256 (1979), we have emphasized that discriminatory purpose as a motivating factor in governmental action is a critical component of an equal protection violation. Like causation analysis, the discriminatory-purpose requirement sensibly seeks to limit court intervention to the rectification of conditions that offend the Constitution — stigma and other harm inflicted by racially motivated governmental action — and prevent unwarranted encroachment on the autonomy of local governments and private individuals which could well result from a less structured approach.

This Court has not precisely defined the manner in which discriminatory purpose is to be proved. Indeed, in light of the varied circumstances in which it might be at issue, simple and precise rules for proving discriminatory purpose could not be drafted. The focus of the inquiry in a case such as this, however, is not very difficult to articulate: Is a desire to separate the races among the reasons for a school board's decision or particular course of action? The burden of proof on this issue is on the plaintiffs. Washington v. Davis, supra, at 244-245; Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Dev. Corp., supra, at 270.

The best evidence on this score would be a contemporaneous explanation of its action by the school board, or other less dramatic evidence of the board's actual purpose, which indicated that one objective was to separate the races. See Arlington Heights, supra, at 268. Objective evidence is also probative. Indeed, were it not, this case would warrant very little discussion, for all the evidence relied on by the courts below was of an "objective" nature.

But objective evidence must be carefully analyzed for it may otherwise reduce the "discriminatory purpose" requirement to a "discriminatory impact" test by another name. Private and governmental conduct in matters of general importance to the community is notoriously ambiguous, and for objective evidence to carry the day it must be a reliable index of actual motivation for a governmental decision — at least sufficient to meet the plaintiff's burden of proof on purpose or intent. We have only recently emphasized:

"`Discriminatory purpose' . . . implies more than intent as volition or intent as awareness of consequences. . . . It implies that the decisionmaker . . . selected or reaffirmed a particular course of action at least in part `because of,' not merely `in spite of,' its adverse effects upon an identifiable group." Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, supra, at 279.

The maintenance of this distinction is important: both to limit federal courts to their constitutional missions and to afford school boards the latitude to make good-faith, color-blind decisions about how best to realize legitimate educational objectives without extensive post hoc inquiries into whether integration would have been better served — even at the price of other educational objectives — by another decision: a different school site, a different boundary, or a different organizational structure. In a school system with racially imbalanced schools, every school board action regarding construction, pupil assignment, transportation, annexation, and temporary facilities will promote integration, aggravate segregation, or maintain segregation. Foreseeability follows from the obviousness of that proposition. Such a tight noose on school board decisionmaking will invariably move government of a school system from the townhall to the courthouse.

The District Court in this case held that it was bound by the standard for segregative intent articulated by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Oliver v. Michigan State Board of Education, 508 F.2d 178, 182 (1974):

"A presumption of segregative purpose arises when plaintiffs establish that the natural, probable, and foreseeable result of public officials' action or inaction was an increase or perpetuation of public school segregation. The presumption becomes proof unless defendants affirmatively establish that their action or inaction was a consistent and resolute application of racially neutral policies." 429 F. Supp., at 254 n. 3.

This is precisely the type of "impact" trigger for shifting the burden of proof on the intent component of an equal protection violation that we rejected in Washington v. Davis, supra. There the Court of Appeals had applied the standards of Title VII to determine whether a qualifying test for police candidates discriminated against blacks in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. According to the Court of Appeals, the plaintiffs were initially required to show disproportionate impact on blacks. That impact was a constitutional violation absent proof by the defendants that the test was "an adequate measure of job performance in addition to being an indicator of probable success in the training program." 426 U.S., at 237. Put differently, the defendants were to show that the test was the product of a racially neutral policy. This Court reversed, rejecting "the view that proof of discriminatory racial purpose is unnecessary in making out an equal protection violation." Id., at 245.

Indeed, reflection indicates that the District Court's test for segregative intent in this case is logically nothing more than the affirmative duty stated a different way. Under the test, a "presumption of segregative purpose arises when plaintiffs establish that the natural, probable, and foreseeable result of public officials' . . . inaction was . . . perpetuation of public school segregation. The presumption becomes proof unless defendants affirmatively establish that their . . . inaction was a consistent and resolute application of racially neutral policies." If that standard were to be applied to the average urban school system in the United States, the implications are obvious. Virtually every urban area in this country has racially and ethnically identifiable neighborhoods, doubtless resulting from a melange of past happenings prompted by economic considerations, private discrimination, discriminatory school assignments, or a desire to reside near people of one's own race or ethnic background. See Austin Independent School Dist. v. United States, 429 U.S. 990, 994 (1976) (POWELL, J., concurring). It is likewise true that the most prevalent pupil assignment policy in urban areas is the neighborhood school policy. It follows inexorably that urban areas have a large number of racially identifiable schools.

Certainly "public officials' . . . inaction . . . perpetuat[es] . . . public school segregation" in this context. School authorities could move to pairing, magnet schools, or any other device to integrate the races. The failure to do so is a violation under Oliver unless the "inaction was a consistent and resolute application of racially neutral policies." The policy that most school boards will rely on at trial, and the policy which the Columbus School Board in fact did rely on, is the neighborhood school policy. According to the District Court in this case, however, not only is that policy not a defense, but in combination with racially segregated housing patterns, it is itself a factor from which one can infer segregative intent and a factor in this case from which the District Court did infer segregative intent, stating that "[t]hose who rely on it as a defense to unlawful school segregation fail to recognize the high priority of the constitutional right involved." 429 F. Supp., at 258.

But the Constitution does not command that school boards not under an affirmative duty to desegregate follow a policy of "integration uber alles." If the Court today endorses that view, and unfortunately one cannot be sure, it has wrought one of the most dramatic results in the history of public education and the Constitution. A duty not to discriminate in the school board's own actions is converted into a duty to ameliorate or compensate for the discriminatory conduct of other entities and persons.

I reserve judgment only because the Court at points in its opinion seems of the view that the District Court applied a test other than the Oliver test for segregative intent, despite the District Court's clear indication to the contrary. 429 F. Supp., at 253-254, n. 3. In fact, in Dayton II, post, at 536 n. 9, the Court expressly rejects the Oliver test, and in its opinion in this case, ante, at 464-465, indicates that the District Court treated foreseeable effects as only another bit of evidence and finds that not incompatible with this Court's prior cases.

"Those cases do not forbid `the foreseeable effects standard from being utilized as one of the several kinds of proofs from which an inference of segregative intent may be properly drawn.' [429 F. Supp.], at 255. Adherence to a particular policy or practice, with full knowledge of the predictable effects of such adherence upon racial imbalance in a school system is one factor among many others which may be considered by a court in determining whether an inference of segregative intent should be drawn.' Ibid."

I have no difficulty with the proposition that foreseeable effects are permissible considerations "as one of the several kinds of proofs" as long as they are not the only type of proof. Use of foreseeable effects in the latter fashion would be clearly inconsistent with Davis, Arlington Heights, and Feeney. But I do have great difficulty with this Court's taking the above quotations from the District Court out of context and thereby imputing a general test for discriminatory purpose to the District Court from a passage which in fact was part of a discussion of the probativeness of a very special kind of evidence on intent: a neighborhood school policy simpliciter. As far as gauging the purpose underlying specific actions is concerned, it is quite clear from its expression and application of the relevant test for intent, that the District Court looked for foreseeability per se.

As such, the District Court's treatment of specific post-1954 conduct reflects the same cavalier approach to causality and purpose that underlies the 1954 affirmative duty. That determination requires no more "omnipotence and omniscience," ante, at 457 n. 6, than similar determinations in Dayton I, Davis, and Arlington Heights. The court found violations with respect to three optional attendance zones. The Near-Bexley zone, the only zone discussed by this Court, afforded students the option to attend schools in either one of two bordering districts. The District Court found that the zone gave white students of Bexley the opportunity to avoid attending the predominantly black schools to the east. I do not think that the District Court finding can be said to be clearly erroneous despite the lack of any direct evidence on discriminatory purpose, for the School Board did not suggest any educational justification for this zone and none is apparent. But as that court recognized, the zone is of little significance as far as the current state of segregation in the school system is concerned. "The July 10, 1972, minutes of the State Board of Education . . . appear to indicate that in 1972, there were 25 public elementary school students and two public high school students residing in the optional zone." 429 F. Supp., at 245 (emphasis added). As of 1975, the zone has been dismantled, and the District Court clearly suggests that it does not have any current effect on the Columbus school system.

Two other optional attendance zones were identified as offensive. One existed for two years, between 1955 and 1957, and permitted students in a predominantly white neighborhood to attend the "white" West Broad Elementary School rather than the predominantly black Highland School. Like the Near-Bexley option, there is no apparent educational justification and, therefore, no grounds to upset the District Court's finding of a violation. This optional zone afforded the District Court an excellent opportunity to probe the effects of a past violation, because in 1957 the optional zone was made a permanent part of the West Broad district. But the District Court made no findings as to the current effect of the past violation nor saw fit to hypothesize how many students might have been affected. It was clearly of the opinion that no such inquiry was necessary.

The final optional attendance zone demonstrates the influence of the "affirmative duty" — whether the 1954 variety or that which follows from Oliver. This optional zone was also created in 1955 in roughly the same part of Columbus. It gave some students within Highland's boundaries the option of attending the neighboring West Mound Street Elementary School. Again, the District Court found, this permitted transfer to a "whiter" school. But the District Court also found that there was a legitimate educational objective for creation of the zone: Highland was overcrowded and West Mound was under capacity. The District Court, however, concluded that the School Board's actions were objectionable because "feasible alternatives" were available; that is, other optional attendance zones could have been drawn which would have had "an integrative effect on West Mound." This again suggests a duty on the School Board to select the most integrative alternative.

The second set of post-1954 actions faulted by the District Court were two discontiguous attendance areas. These were situations where students in a defined geographical area were assigned to a school in a zone not contiguous with their neighborhood. One zone was established in 1963 and involved about 70 students. The School Board unsuccessfully argued at trial that the children were sent to the predominantly white Moler Elementary School because the nearest school, the predominantly black Alum Crest Elementary, had no room for them. The District Court indicates that this violative condition existed until 1969, presumably because after that date the discontiguous area had a substantial black population and an integrative effect on the Moler Elementary School. Since the discontiguous area now has an integrative effect, one might ask what is its current segregative effect on the school system? Ironically, under the District Court's reasoning, it would be a violation for the Columbus School Board to now disband the Moler Elementary discontiguous attendance area.

The second discontiguous zone existed from 1957 to 1963 and permitted students on three streets within the Heimandale Elementary District to attend the "whiter" Fornof Elementary School. The Columbus School Board "inherited" this discontiguous attendance arrangement when it annexed the Marion-Franklin District in 1957. Both schools at that time were at or over capacity and when a six-classroom addition was made to Heimandale in 1963, the discontiguous zone was terminated and the children assigned to Heimandale. According to the HEW Civil Rights Survey, Heimandale today is a racially balanced school. App. 747. The District Court made no findings as to the current effect of the Board's 5-year retention of the Heimandale-Fornof arrangement.

The last discrete violation discussed by the District Court involved the Innis-Cassady alternative organizational proposals. These proposals involved an area of the Columbus school district that was annexed in 1971. The area had one school, the Cassady Elementary School, which was very overcrowded, and placing another school in the district was a priority for the Columbus School Board in 1972. The District Court did not fault the site chosen for the second school in the old Mifflin District. However, it inferred segregative intent in the School Board's decision to use a K-6 organization in both schools, rather than using K-3 organization in one school and 4-6 organization in the other and thereby drawing students from throughout the district. The District Court found that the latter would have been the more integrative alternative because of residential segregation in the district. At trial, the School Board attempted to justify its choice by pointing out that the pairing alternative would have required substantial transportation and a deviation from the standard K-6 organization employed throughout the Columbus school system. The court found "no evidence in this record" that pairing would have necessitated "substantial transportation" and that the Board had on prior occasions used a K-3 structure — apparently a reference to the K-3 primary center for crippled children.

Thus, the Innis-Cassady discussion evinces this same affirmative duty to select the more integrative alternative and a consequent shift of the burden of proof to the School Board to prove that the segregative choice was mandated by other legitimate educational concerns. But under Washington v. Davis and Arlington Heights the burden is on the plaintiffs to show impact and purpose, and in a situation where there is "no evidence" in the record to prove or disprove a proffered justification for a school board decision, the plaintiffs have failed to establish a violation of their constitutional rights.

Secondly, the fact that a school board has once or twice or three times in the past deviated from a policy does not impugn that policy as a justification for a school board decision. There is no constitutional requirement of perfect consistency. Arlington Heights, 429 U.S., at 269. The fact that the Columbus School Board currently maintains a K-3 organization for crippled children hardly diminishes the Board's interest in maintaining a standard organizational structure for traditional schools throughout the school district. Rather, in Arlington Heights we spoke of substantive departures from existing policy as casting light on discriminatory purpose, "particularly if the factors usually considered important by the decisionmaker strongly favor a decision contrary to the one reached." Id., at 267.

Thus, it is clear that with respect to a number of the post-1954 actions that the District Court found to be independent violations, foreseeability was not one kind of evidence, but the whole ball game — whether the District Court thought that result dictated by the Oliver test or the post-1954 "affirmative duty" purportedly imposed as a result of pre-1954 conduct. Those findings that could be supported by the concept of discriminatory purpose propounded in Davis and Arlington Heights were not accompanied by any effort to link those violations with current conditions of segregation in the school system. In sum, it is somewhat misleading for the Court to refer to these actions as in some sense independent of the constitutional duty it suggests that the Columbus Board assumed in 1954. And, in any event, the small number of students involved in these instances could not independently support the sweeping racial balance remedy imposed by the District Court. Cf. Dayton I, 433 U.S. 406 (1977).

III

The casualness with which the District Court and Court of Appeals assumed that past actions of the Board had a continuing effect on the school system, and the facility and doctrinal confusion with which they went from these actions to announce a "systemwide violation" undermine the basic limitations on the federal courts' authority. If those violations are not the product of a careful inquiry of the impact on the current school system, if they are reaction to taint or atmosphere rather than identifiable conditions that would not exist now "but for" the constitutional violation, there are effectively no limits on the ability of federal courts to supplant local authority. Only two Terms ago, in Dayton I, supra, at 420, we set out the basic line of inquiry that should govern school desegregation litigation:

"The duty of both the District Court and the Court of Appeals in a case such as this, where mandatory segregation by law of the races in the schools has long since ceased, is to first determine whether there was any action in the conduct of the business of the school board which was intended to, and did in fact, discriminate against minority pupils, teachers, or staff. Washington v. Davis, supra. All parties should be free to introduce such additional testimony and other evidence as the District Court may deem appropriate. If such violations are found, the District Court in the first instance, subject to review by the Court of Appeals, must determine how much incremental segregative effect these violations had on the racial distribution of the Dayton school population as presently constituted, when that distribution is compared to what it would have been in the absence of such constitutional violations. The remedy must be designed to redress that difference, and only if there has been a systemwide impact may there be a systemwide remedy. Keyes, 413 U.S., at 213."

See also School Dist. of Omaha v. United States, 433 U.S. 667 (1977); Brennan v. Armstrong, 433 U.S. 672 (1977).

The District Court made no attempt to determine the incremental segregative effects of identified violations; given the absence of causality considerations in the court's findings, it was simply not in a position to do so. To distinguish Dayton I, the majority relies on the District Court's conclusion that its "finding of liability in this case concerns the Columbus school district as a whole." 429 F. Supp., at 266. But incantation is not a substitute for analysis and the District Court's findings and analysis do not support its conclusion.

But the majority's opinion takes on its most delusive air when the Court suggests that the scope of the remedy is the Board's own fault.

"[T]he Board was given ample opportunity to counter the evidence of segregative purpose and current, systemwide impact, and the findings of the courts below were against it in both respects." Ante, at 468.

Specifically, the Court is alluding to the Board's purported failure to show that the violation was not systemwide under Keyes or that a more limited remedy should have been applied under Swann. In fact, the logic of the District Court, apparently endorsed by the Court today, turns the Swann and Keyes showing into chimeras.

Once a showing is made that the District Court believes satisfies the Keyes requirement of purposeful discrimination in a substantial part of the school system, the School Board will almost invariably rely on its neighborhood school policy and residential segregation to show that it is not responsible for the existence of certain predominantly black and white schools in other parts of the school system. Under the District Court's reasoning, as I have noted, not only is that evidence not probative on the Board's lack of responsibility, it itself supports an inference of a constitutional violation. In addition, the District Court relied on a general proposition that "there is often a substantial reciprocal effect between the color of the school and the color of the neighborhood it serves" to block any inquiry into whether racially identifiable schools were the product of racially identifiable neighborhoods or whether past discriminatory acts bore a "but for" relationship to current segregative conditions.

"It is not now possible to isolate these factors and draw a picture of what Columbus schools or housing would have looked like today without the other's influence. I do not believe that such an attempt is required.

"I do not suggest that any reasonable action by the school authorities could have fully cured the evils of residential segregation. The Court could not and would not impose such a duty upon the defendants. I do believe, however, that the Columbus defendants could and should have acted to break the segregative snowball created by their interaction with housing. That is, they could and should have acted with an integrative rather than a segregative influence upon housing; they could and should have been cautious concerning the segregation influences that are exerted upon the schools by housing. They certainly should not have aggravated racial imbalance in the schools by their official actions." 429 F. Supp., at 259 (emphasis added).

But, as the District Court recognized, other factors play an important role in determining segregated residential patterns.

"Housing segregation has been caused in part by federal agencies which deal with financing of housing, local housing authorities, financing institutions, developers, landlords, personal preferences of blacks and whites, real estate brokers and salespersons, restrictive covenants, zoning and annexation, and income of blacks as compared to whites." Ibid.

The Swann Court cautioned that "[t]he elimination of racial discrimination in public schools is a large task and one that should not be retarded by efforts to achieve broader purposes lying beyond the jurisdiction of school authorities. One vehicle can carry only a limited amount of baggage." 402 U.S., at 22. Yet today the School Board is called to task for all the forces beyond its control that shaped residential segregation in Columbus. There is thus no room for Keyes or Swann rebuttal either with respect to the school system today or that of 30 years ago.

IV

I do not suggest that the inquiry required by Dayton I and Keyes is a simple one, and reviewing courts must defer to the findings of district court judges. But appellate courts also must ensure that these judges are asking themselves the right questions: it is clear in the instant case that critical questions regarding causality and purpose were not asked at all. The city of Columbus has changed enormously in the last 25 years and with it the racial character of many neighborhoods. Incidents related here may have been paved over by years of private choice as well as undesirable influences beyond the control of school authorities, influences such as poverty and housing discrimination, both public and private. Expert testimony should play an important role in putting together the demographic history of a city and the role of a school board in it. I do not question that there were constitutional violations on the part of the Columbus School Board in the past, but there are no deterrence or retribution components of the rationale for a school desegregation remedy. The fundamental mission of such remedies is to restore those integrated educational opportunities that would now exist but for purposefully discriminatory school board conduct. Because critically important questions were neither asked nor answered by the lower courts, the record before us simply cannot inform as to whether so sweeping a remedy as that imposed is justified.

At the beginning of this dissent, far too many pages ago, I suggested that the Court's opinion may only communicate a "hands-off" attitude in school desegregation cases and that my concerns should therefore be institutional rather than doctrinal. School desegregation cases, however, will certainly be with this Court as long as any of its current Members, and I doubt the Court can for long, like Pilate, wash its hands of disparate results in cases throughout the country.

It is most unfortunate that the Court chooses not to speak clearly today. Dayton I and Keyes are not overruled, yet their essential messages are ignored. The Court does not intimate that it has fathomed the full implications of the analysis it has sanctioned — an approach that would certainly make school desegregation litigation a "loaded game board," Swann, 402 U.S., at 28, but one at which a school board could never win. A school system's only hope of avoiding a judicial receivership would be a voluntary dismantling of its neighborhood school program. If that is the Court's intent today, it has indeed accepted the role of Judge Learned Hand's feared "Platonic Guardians," and intellectual integrity — if not the Constitution or the interests of our beleaguered urban school systems and their students of all races — would be better served by discarding the pretextual distinction between de facto and de jure segregation. Whether the Court's result be reached by the approach of Pilate or Plato, I cannot subscribe to it.