Supreme Court Rejects Seattle District's Use Of Race In School Assignments

Supreme Court Rejects Seattle District's Use Of Race In School Assignments

[link to seattlepi.nwsource.com]


Court rejects Seattle district's use of race in school assignments
By JESSICA BLANCHARD, CHRISTINE FREY AND CHARLES POPE
P-I REPORTERS

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected diversity plans that take account of students' race for assignments in Seattle's public schools.


The decision, covering two similar cases involving the Seattle and Louisville, Ky., schools could imperil similar plans in hundreds of districts nationwide, and it leaves public school systems with a limited arsenal to maintain racial diversity.

The court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court's judgment.

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Roberts wrote. The ruling applies to school districts that aren't under a court order to remove the vestiges of past discrimination.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that was joined by the court's other three liberals. Breyer said the ruling would "threaten the promise" of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, and warned, "this is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret."

The decision strips school boards of a tool for offsetting the impact of racially divided housing patterns. Both sides say they don't know precisely how many school districts nationwide have similar rules, though lawyers say the practice is common, perhaps involving hundreds of districts and millions of children.

Federal appeals courts had upheld both the Seattle and Louisville plans after some parents sued. The Bush administration took the parents' side, arguing that racial diversity is a noble goal but can be sought only through race-neutral means.

The Seattle case began when a group of parents formed Parents Involved in Community Schools and sued the district in 2000, claiming the policy of using race as a tiebreaker when determining school assignments was unfair and violated students' civil rights.

Kathleen Brose, president of Parents Involved in Community Schools, fought back tears as she discussed her victory.

"It's been seven years. A lot of people have moved on, but I don't want another parent to go through what I did -- what we did," she said during a news conference.

Her daughter Elisabeth, now 22, wanted to attend Ballard High School, the closet high school to their Magnolia home. But she wasn't able to get into the school -- or into Roosevelt or Nathan Hale either.

She was assigned to her fourth choice -- Franklin -- but the school didn't have an orchestra for Elisabeth to pay her cello. So she ended up at her fifth choice, Ingraham, for a year. She later transferred to a new school that opened at Seattle Center, The Center School.

The move was upsetting to the girl, who couldn't attend high school with her friends from junior high. Children are taught not to judge people by their skin color, yet students were denied access to certain schools because of their race, said Brose, whose younger daughter now attends Ballard High School.

"The public schools are for all of us," she said.

While disappointed that the racial tiebreaker was struck down, Seattle district officials portrayed the ruling as an endorsement of the importance of diversity in public schools.

"I don't believe it's a matter of winning or losing," said Superintendent Raj Manhas. "The high court affirmed that diversity matters ...That's fundamental."

Seattle Public Schools is in the midst of revamping its process for assigning students to schools, and it was unclear Thursday morning how the ruling would affect the district's plans. School district officials were not available for comment Thursday morning, but scheduled a morning news conference to discuss the ruling.

The school district's policy also affected students of color, said Seattle attorney Harry Korrell, who represented the parents. Some non-whites who wanted to attend neighborhood high school Franklin were turned away because there were too many students of color there and the district wanted to enroll more white students.

"It's a sweeping victory for students and parents everywhere," Korrell said.

The racial tiebreaker that the Supreme Court struck down Thursday hasn't been in use in Seattle Public Schools for more than five years.

The tiebreaker was part of a School Board decision in 1997 to allow the district's 46,000 students to attend a school of their choice. The assignment plan they adopted that year aimed to end the district's widely unpopular mandatory busing program and return to a neighborhood schools assignment plan, so students could attend school closer to home.

School officials considered a student's race as one of several tiebreakers at popular schools; their race was a factor if the student's attendance would help bring the high school closer to the district-wide average of about 40 percent white students. The tiebreaker helped some minority students get into predominately white high schools, and vice versa.

A student with a sibling at a school got first priority; a student's race was the second tiebreaker, followed by the distance a student lived from the school.

The district has defended the racial tiebreaker, arguing it is necessary to create more diverse schools in a city where many neighborhoods are still segregated.

The Seattle lawsuit accused the school district of violating the Constitution, the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and voter-approved Initiative 200, a state law prohibiting preferential treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender.

The case challenged only the use of the racial tiebreaker for high-school assignments, but the district in 2002 suspended the use of the tiebreaker for all schools while the lawsuit worked its way through the courts.

Since then, the district has used the other tiebreakers, such as whether the student lived nearby or had any siblings attending the school, to determine assignments.

Enrollment records show the racial makeup at some Seattle high schools has changed since the district suspended the use of the racial tiebreaker. A few examples:


At Ballard High School, white students made up slightly more than 58 percent of the student population in 2000; that rose to more than 62 percent in 2006.


At Cleveland High School, the percentage of black students increased from 35 percent in 2000 to just over 59 percent last fall; during the same time period, the percentage of Asian students dropped from nearly 43 percent to just under 23 percent.


At Franklin High School, white students made up about 23 percent of the population in 2000 and declined to just over 9 percent by 2006. Over the same time period, the percentage of Asian students at the school rose from about 39 percent to more than 48 percent.

Louisville's schools spent 25 years under a court order to eliminate the effects of state-sponsored segregation. After a federal judge freed the Jefferson County, Ky., school board, which encompasses Louisville, from his supervision, the board decided to keep much of the court-ordered plan in place to prevent schools from re-segregating.

The lawyer for the Louisville system called the plan a success story that enjoys broad community support, including among parents of white and black students.

The opinion was the first on the divisive issue since 2003, when a 5-4 ruling upheld the limited consideration of race in college admissions to attain a diverse student body.

Since then, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who approved of the limited use of race, retired. Her replacement, Justice Samuel Alito was in the majority that struck down the school system plans in Kentucky and Washington.

The Associated Press contributed to this article