Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District is Up on Supreme Court Site.
Justin Bathon on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 11:40AM The K-12 affirmative action case is on the Supreme Court site. It is 185 pages long and also has multiple concurrences and dissents, much like Morse v. Frederick (this is certainly an extremely divided court). At first blush, before I have had time to digest it all, it looks as though neither Seattle nor Louisville's race based admissions plan was constitutional, however, at least in theory affirmative action in K-12 schools seems to have survived because of a seperate concurrence by Justice Kennedy. Kennedy in analyzing the Jefferson County (Louisville) case found that if they were more specific in terms of their plan and they could clearly articulate the compelling interest at state, he may have approved the plan. Similarly, in the Seattle case, although there was more specificity in terms of the plans procedures, Seattle did not have a justification for the classifications of "white" and "nonwhite" in a district that is already fairly diverse. Had Seattle's district been a high majority of white (and similarly narrowly tailored on the procedures) he may have approved it. Kennedy then went on to state that the Roberts opinion went to far in dismissing the use of race by the government to promote legitimate goals. He said,
"In the administration of public by the state and local authorities it is permissible to consider the racial makeup of schools and to adopt general policies to encourage a diverse student body, one aspect of which is its racial composition ... If school authorities are concerned that the student-body compositionsof certain schools interfere with the objective of offering an equal educational opportunity to all of their students, theyare free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a general way and without treating each student in different fashion solely on the basis of a systematic, individual typing by race.
School boards may pursue the goal of bringing together students of diverse backgrounds and races through other means, including strategic site selection of new schools;drawing attendance zones with general recognition of thedemographics of neighborhoods; allocating resources forspecial programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race. These mechanisms are race conscious but do not lead to different treatment based on a classification that tells each student he or she is to be defined by race, so it is unlikely any of them would demand strict scrutiny to be found permissible. ... Executive and legislative branches, which for generations now have considered these types of policies and procedures, should be permitted to employ them with candorand with confidence that a constitutional violation does not occur whenever a decisionmaker considers the impacta given approach might have on students of different races. Assigning to each student a personal designation according to a crude system of individual racial classifications is quite a different matter; and the legal analysis changes accordingly." Kennedy, Concurrence
The other opinions are worth noting too and more analysis will be coming in the days ahead as scholars begin to interpret how this will play out for schools.
An early analysis by Bill Mears at CNN can be found here.
