Seattle will fight to keep race-based admissions

5/7/02 – Arguing that racially integrated schools are a "core value" in the education of students, the Seattle school system is fighting a recent court ruling that struck down its use of race in assigning students to city schools.

The legal fight is just the latest in a series of court battles nationwide that has curbed the legal authority of school boards to adopt student-assignment plans that promote racial diversity–and, in turn, has fueled a national trend toward increasingly segregated schools.

"We're going toward a rapid resegregation of America's schools," warns Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University.

In Seattle, the effort to ensure racially mixed schools suffered a harsh blow last month when a three-member panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Seattle's use of race as a factor in determining school assignments violates state Initiative 200.

That initiative, passed by voters in 1998, prohibits racial preferences in public employment, public education, and public contracting.

Superintendent Joseph Olchefske says the school system will appeal the ruling and will request that a full panel of the court review the decision.

"Diversity is a value we hold dear, and experience tells us that students thrive in ethnically diverse schools," Olchefske says. "It is important that we give young people of all backgrounds an opportunity to grow and learn together. That is how we build a society that is better and more tolerant than the one we inhabit today."

An injunction issued by the court has forced school officials to reprocess student assignments for approximately 9,000 students. Until the court ruling, Seattle's school choice plan used race as one of several tiebreakers to determine assignments when enrollment requests exceeded the space available.

From a legal perspective, the court's ruling should not be as significant as it might appear, says NSBA Senior Staff Attorney Edwin Darden. The decision is based on state law–and thus is a weak legal precedent for use outside Washington state.

Yet, the ruling underscores the complex legal environment in which school boards are expected to tackle issues of school integration.

Several courts have ruled recently that race-based student assignments do not pass constitutional muster, while other courts have upheld the authority of school boards to voluntarily seek racial diversity in local schools.

Such uncertainly has left school boards struggling to find a secure legal standing for their integration efforts. In San Francisco, which was barred from using race-based assignments as part of a federal court settlement in 1999, school officials are using socioeconomic factors rather than race as criteria in assigning students.

According to Darden, "The school board that wants to do the right thing–have a diverse learning environment–must re-evaluate what it's doing and bolster its position against that stray individual who would challenge its policy." (Darden is the co-author of From Desegregation to Diversity: A School District's Self-Assessment Guide, just published by NSBA's Council of Urban Boards of Education.)

Orfield warns that the trend toward school resegregation isn't going away and will have a profound impact on education.

"Every place we've looked, resegregated schools are profoundly unequal, and all the promises to make them equal have failed," he says. "Almost always, the resegregated neighborhood schools have concentrated levels of poverty."