Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, No. 1
Parents Involved sued the Seattle School District for an injunction barring the use of racial factors in school placement, arguing that the use those factors is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The District allowed all students to apply to attend any district high school, and used race as a tiebreaker when a high school both received more applicants than it could accept and had a nonwhite population more that fifteen percent higher or lower than the school district’s nonwhite population.
According to the United States Supreme Court cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, racial classifications used in school placement decisions must meet a strict scrutiny standard, which requires the classification to further a compelling government interest and be narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. The district court upheld the tiebreaker plan under federal and state law. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that the system violated the law of the state of Washington, then withdrew its opinion and certified the case for review by the Washington Supreme Court. That court held that the plan did not violate state law, returned the case to the Ninth Circuit for a decision on the federal law question. The Ninth Circuit then held that the system violated the Equal Protection Clause because it was not narrowly tailored.
On en banc review, the Ninth Circuit reversed its earlier decision, finding that the school district had a compelling interest in securing the educational and social benefits of racial and ethnic diversity, and in ameliorating racial isolation or concentration
in its high schools by ensuring that its assignments do not simply replicate Seattle’s segregated housing patterns. It also concluded that the District’s Plan was narrowly tailored to achieve it's compelling interests. The court analyzed the narrow tailoring of the system according to the five Grutter/Gratz factors: individualized consideration, the absence of quotas, consideration of race-neutral alternatives, no undue harm to races, and an ending point. The court found all of these factors present except individual consideration, but since that factor was not applicable to noncompetitive high school placement, the system was narrowly tailored.
Questions Presented:
(1) How are the Equal Protection rights of public high school students affected by the jurisprudence of Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), and Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003)?
(2) Is racial diversity a compelling interest that can justify the use of race in selecting students for admission to public high schools?
(3) May a school district that is not racially segregated and that normally permits a student to attend any high school of her choosing deny a child admission to her chosen school solely because of her race in an effort to achieve a desired racial balance in particular schools, or does such racial balancing violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
