Supreme Court to Decide Affirmative Action Cases
By Ann Springer
In October, the AAUP joined the American Council on Education and other higher education organizations in an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court addressing whether local school districts can make decisions based on race as a method of ensuring racial diversity and avoiding segregation in public schools.
The two cases under consideration, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, are being decided jointly. In 2000, a coalition called Parents Involved in Community Schools sued the Seattle, Washington, school district, arguing that a district admissions policy violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The policy allowed all students to apply to attend any district high school but used race as a tiebreaker when a high school received more applicants than it could accept.
A district court upheld the tiebreaker plan under federal and state law. On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found in 2005 that the school district had a compelling interest in securing the educational and social benefits of racial and ethnic diversity and in attempting to end racial segregation in its high schools by ensuring that its school assignments do not simply replicate Seattle’s segregated housing patterns. It also concluded that the district’s plan was narrowly tailored to achieve its compelling interests.
In June 2006, the Supreme Court granted review, and in December it heard oral arguments in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 together with Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, a similar case from Kentucky. The Court will address how the equal protection rights of public high school students are affected by the jurisprudence of the University of Michigan admissions cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, which the Supreme Court decided in 2003. It will also consider whether racial diversity is a compelling interest that can justify the use of race in selecting students for admission.
The brief signed by the AAUP notes that “while there are important differences between higher education and the elementary and secondary school settings at issue in these cases, a broad consensus exists among educators at all levels that diversity is essential to their mission and that government should defer to goodfaith efforts to attain its educational benefits.” The brief also argues that “programs to promote racial and ethnic diversity in K–12 education advance . . . efforts to achieve excellence in higher education.” Specifically, it argues that respect for the institutional competence and judgment of educators, along with a recognition of the well-established benefits of student diversity, counsels in favor of giving deference on this issue to educators in the same way the Court did to higher education in the Michigan cases. In making this argument, it discusses the compelling governmental interest in student diversity, drawing on a broad range of research showing the benefits of racial diversity at all levels of education.
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