Joshua Dunn presents a carefully researched study of Missouri v. Jenkins, a Kansas City case that led to the nation's “most expansive and expensive” school desegregation effort (p. 4). Dunn draws important lessons from the case regarding the limitations of judicial policymaking and the inability, and often unwillingness, of our nation to respond to demands by urban communities of color that equal and excellent schools be made available to all children.

In 1984, Judge Russell Clark ruled that Missouri and the Kansas City Metropolitan School District (KCMSD) were “operating an unconstitutionally segregated school district” (p. 3). Clark ordered the upgrading of facilities and the creation of a theme-based magnet school program to attract white students from private and suburban schools. To that end, marketing campaigns were launched and free door-to-door taxi service offered to suburban students. To ensure racial balance in schools, a quota system mandated that “for every six black students, there had to be four white students” (p. 147). Clark ordered the state and the KCMSD to cover the cost and mandated the doubling of local property taxes and the raising of income taxes on individuals working within the district. While the Eighth Circuit Court and the US Supreme Court upheld Clark's orders, except for the income tax increase, in 1995 the Supreme Court found the plan's “voluntary method of drawing white students and teachers from the suburbs” (p. 167) to be unconstitutional and ordered district control returned to the KCMSD. The plan, in the end, failed to integrate schools and raise achievement levels.

One of the book's many strengths is Dunn's lucid analysis of the institutional constraints faced by lower court judges. Critiques of judicial policymaking by other scholars have focused on judges' lack of access to impartial and specialized information and on their inability to execute orders in ways that can bring about desired outcomes (p. 10). Complex Justice provides plenty of support for these critiques. The book's central contribution, however, is the author's insistence that scholars pay attention to a third constraint that judges often face: “Supreme Court precedents that hinder their ability to frame effective policies and secure their implementation” (p. 11). Dunn argues that this constraint is stronger in “mature” policy areas like desegregation in which “doctrines are settled, leaving little room for discretion for lower courts,” than in “emergent” areas in which courts “have not set down precise policy boundaries” (p. 6).

Dunn carefully analyzes the effects on district judges of the Court's incremental and conflicting post-Brown desegregation decisions. The Court's decisions in Green (1968), Swann (1971), and Keyes (1973) moved jurisprudence away from the equity issues raised by Brown's promise that “the opportunity of education … is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms” (US Supreme Court 347 U.S. 483 [1954]) and toward the promotion of statistical racial balance in schools. At the same time, the “flight” of white students from urban districts and the Court's decisions in Rodriguez (1973), denying a right to equitable educational funding, and in Milliken I (1974), forbidding interdistrict remedies such as busing for intradistrict violations, limited the remedial options available to judges. Clark's use of magnet schools to improve instruction and attract suburban students was, according to Dunn, the “reasonable result or outcome” of the “doctrinal box” (p. 182) Clark was placed in by precedent and by the district court's aggressive stance on desegregation.

Dunn convincingly demonstrates how precedents “calcified” in ways that influenced the outcomes in the case. However, the rich details he provides about the players involved suggest that these outcomes might also have resulted from factors not highlighted by the book's main argument. For example, if different educational experts had drawn the remedial plans submitted to Clark, would he still have adopted a theme-school plan? If the case had been heard by a judge with greater educational expertise, would the judge have accepted the plaintiff's plan as uncritically, and would the judge have disregarded a court-mandated study that found that the plan would not attract white students (p. 95)? Would a magnet school plan focusing on providing quality college-preparatory instruction have been more successful at attracting white students and raising achievement levels than the adopted plan focusing on theme schools like a “Classical Greek” high school emphasizing Olympic-style sports (p. 115)? And would the plan “not have been the comprehensive failure it turned out to be” (p. 158) had the district hired more capable superintendents, as Dunn himself suggests? There is no way to answer such questions, but the outcomes in Missouri v. Jenkins might have been less “constrained” than the book's focus on judicial precedent suggests. Nonetheless, students of the judiciary would do well to give serious consideration to Dunn's insights regarding “the difficulties of judicial policymaking in a mature policy area” (p. 184).

Another of the book's strengths is the author's attention to the struggle for excellent schools waged by Kansas City's black community. According to Dunn, the majority of the black community viewed the problem in the district to be the substandard and unequal quality of the schools their children were forced to attend, rather than the segregation of white and black students, as assumed by Clark's rationale and remedy. In fact, activists argued that “[i]f white students who attend overwhelmingly white schools in environments that some consider racially isolated can succeed and excel, our children can reach similar levels if given adequate facilities, effective curriculum and instruction, developmental support mechanisms, and culturally relevant materials” (pp. 152–3). These activists mobilized to take control of the school board and return the district to a system of neighborhood schools. As Dunn rightly cautions, the disconnect between the call for equitably funded neighborhood schools with excellent instruction, which came from members of the local black community, and the call for racially balanced classrooms, which came from the lawyer claiming to represent their interests and judges claiming to be protecting their children's rights, “shows that imputing motives and desires to disadvantaged groups is often dangerous” (pp. 4–5).

The concluding chapter discusses reforms that might alleviate “the problems afflicting urban education” (p. 186). These reforms, like Clark's plan, do not appear to reflect the “desires” of the city's “disadvantaged groups.” Beyond citing the popularity among parents of charter schools and voucher programs and referencing a book on a “popular charter school” (pp. 186, 214 n. 8), Dunn provides no evidence that charter schools or vouchers would successfully address black parents' demands for excellent schools. He also provides no evidence that changing school districts' electoral systems, dissolving districts, or turning their control over to states would address such demands. In fact, local black leaders oppose these reforms (pp. 187–8). Dunn does note that the Afrocentric magnet school demanded by black parents is one of the state's “best performing schools” and suggests that “prompting this initiative might be Missouri v. Jenkins's most lasting contribution” (p. 189). However, the reasons for its success and the possibilities of replicating it in urban districts without a history of community organization and mobilization are not explored.

I wish that a book that so eloquently highlights the need for scholars and policymakers to listen to “the desires” of “disadvantaged groups” had contained more ink showing readers how to better incorporate such desires into our study of education policy. Such an effort, perhaps, is beyond the scope of this book, and it is to be hoped that readers will take up where it leaves off.

Missouri v. Jenkins is generally considered a failure, the “Waterloo” of “court-ordered school desegregation,” in the words of Time magazine (p. 159), and there is a danger that because of its $2 billion price tag, the case may be used as confirmation that, regardless of what researchers say, money does not “matter” in improving urban education. It would be a tragedy, however, if the story is used to further defund urban schools. Desegregation, in the words of a local black activist, requires “removing the vestiges of segregated schools: lack of adequate resources, deteriorating buildings, inadequate supplies and a generally undereducated teaching force” (p. 157). All of this requires money. Dunn's analysis suggests that the shortcomings of Clark's remedy lie not in the amount of money spent but in the ways that the money was spent and, ultimately, in the constraints placed on judges by Rodriguez and Milliken I. To make educational opportunity “available to all on equal terms” requires neither free taxi rides for white students nor the further erosion of public education—whether through budget cuts, charter schools, or voucher programs. It requires, instead, imagining ways of overcoming the legacy of the Court's unwillingness in Rodriguez and Milliken I to grapple with the interaction of race and class that allows educational resources to be attached to white students.