Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007)
The Way To Resolve Racial Disparity Is To Not Despair Over Race
Three Big Things:
1. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) involved two school districts using race as one factor among many to achieve and maintain integration and diversity in their schools.
2. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that these race-conscious assignment plans violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, effectively limiting how schools could pursue integration.
3. The decision highlighted a fundamental split on the Court about whether the Constitution requires “colorblind” policies or allows race-conscious remedies to address ongoing segregation and promote diversity.
Background
By 2007, it had been more than half a century since Brown v. Board of Education declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” You’d think that would be plenty of time to sort things out, but American public education remained stubbornly segregated in many places. Sometimes this resulted from ongoing resistance — the ugly protests and acts of violence that produced some of the most iconic photographs of the Civil Rights Era. Other efforts were only slightly more subtle, like the sudden proliferation of “segregation academies” that were gradually rebranded as “private religious education.” Often the problem arose as a natural side-effect of related issues: housing patterns, economic inequality, and what social scientists politely call “residential sorting” (and what everyone else recognizes as “white flight”).
Two school districts – Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky – decided they weren’t going to simply throw up their hands and accept this reality. Neither was under federal scrutiny or pressure at the time. Louisville had operated under a federal desegregation decree from 1975 until 2000, when it achieved “unitary” status – the federal government’s way of saying they’d effectively “fixed” all of their racial imbalances. Seattle had never been under court-ordered desegregation, though it had implemented voluntary integration efforts since the late 1970s.
Both had nevertheless implemented student assignment plans that used race as one factor among many to promote integration and maintain diversity in their schools. These policies weren’t quotas, but they weren’t “colorblind” either. When a particular school had more applicants than it did available slots, race could serve as a tiebreaker in determining student placement. Research suggested that exposure to people who aren’t exactly like them tends to benefit all kids, whatever their demographics or backgrounds. Besides, what could be more American than equality and diversity and the like, right?
Such idealism! Naturally, that’s where the trouble started.
The Problem
Louisville’s approach was strongly influenced by their decades under federal oversight. Social science suggested that without continued efforts, much of the district would quickly re-segregate itself. School officials hoped to see more conclusive signs of communal healing before taking pressure off the wound entirely. Race wasn’t the primary consideration in school assignments – families could request specific placements, and most got their preferences. But when conflicts arose, the district considered race as a deciding factor in an effort to ensure that each school’s Black enrollment roughly reflected the district’s overall demographics.
Crystal Meredith, a white parent, sued when her son was denied transfer to a school closer to home because it would have upset the racial balance. Her case was consolidated with several others challenging the plan.
Seattle’s plan was relatively modest in comparison. Families could choose among the city’s numerous options, but when a school reached capacity, they used a series of tiebreakers to decide who got in. These included sibling preference (if your brother or sister already attended the school), geographic proximity, and — if these didn’t resolve the issue — race. As in Louisville, the goal was based on the district’s overall racial composition.
Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) was a nonprofit organization founded by Seattle parents who opposed the district’s integration efforts. They argued that using race as a factor in school assignments violated their children’s constitutional rights, even if the goal was promoting diversity rather than excluding minorities.
Which constitutional rights would those be, you may be asking? That’s where things get really interesting…
The Constitutional Question
PICS and their counterparts in Kentucky argued that these race-conscious assignment plans violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says, in part:
No State shall… deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Their children were being treated differently based on race, which seemed to be in direct opposition to the language of the Amendment. Their fates were being determined by their demographics, not anything they’d done or could control as individuals. In other words, PICS argued, the district’s efforts to maintaining diversity were “reverse discrimination.”
The school districts responded that their goals were entirely different from historical segregation. They weren’t trying to create racial hierarchies or send messages about superiority and inferiority. Instead, they were pursuing the educational benefits of diversity and working to prevent re-segregation that would harm students of all races.
You can probably guess how quickly that didn’t help anyone calm down.
The Legal Landscape
Any high school government class drives home the importance of stare decisis – the principle that the highest court in the land does its best to remain consistent to its decisions over time. If the entire body of constitutional law is up for reinterpretation every time a new majority runs the Court, it creates chaos. No one knows exactly what the rules are, including the hundreds of lower courts who attempt to follow the lead of the Supreme Court in their decisions every term.
One might reasonably assume, then, that Roberts and company would feel somewhat guided by a trio of similar cases already decided regarding similar disputes. Public school cases often followed precedents established in higher education, and there seemed little reason for that to change now.
Well, at first.
The landmark case for this sort of thing was Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). Allan Bakke, a white applicant to medical school, challenged the university’s affirmative action program, claiming he was denied admission because of his race. He won, but the Court didn’t overturn the concept entirely. Instead, it distinguished between rigid quotas, which violated the Fourteenth Amendment, and using race as one factor among many, which did not. The Court acknowledged that “the goal of achieving a diverse student body is sufficiently compelling to justify consideration of race in admissions decisions.”
The other two cases were fraternal twins: Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003). In Gratz, the Court struck down the undergraduate admissions system at the University of Michigan by a 6-3 margin because it was too mechanical – automatically giving 20 points (out of 150 total) to underrepresented minorities, which the Court said was essentially a quota system. In Grutter, however, the Court upheld the more “holistic” approach of Michigan’s law school, where race was considered as “one factor among many” in an individualized review process.
Granted, one could argue that the Court had been gradually pulling back from aggressive integration efforts for decades, but the most recent precedents seemed to confirm the guiding principle established in Bakke: diversity was a worthy goal, but race could not be the sole factor in determining placement, nor could the decision-making process be overly mechanical.
The Decision
The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 against both school districts (although Justice Kennedy wrote a separate justification for doing so). The plurality opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, is a mix of skeptical analysis and outcome-driven jurisprudence.
It begins reasonably enough, with Roberts noting that strict scrutiny (a legal term meaning “there needs to be a REALLY good reason for something”) always applies to racial classifications by government, and that passing that scrutiny requires a “compelling government interest” served by the most “narrowly tailored” solution possible.
Roberts next distinguishes these cases from Grutter in several ways. University admissions, he notes, consider a wide variety of factors that contributed to diversity: “admittees who have lived or traveled widely abroad, are fluent in several languages, have overcome personal adversity and family hardship, have exceptional records of extensive community service, and have had successful careers in other fields.” These K-12 plans, in contrast, focused purely on racial balance within narrow percentage ranges.
Unlike the law school in Grutter, which demonstrated compelling educational benefits from its specific diversity goals, Roberts found no research showing these districts’ particular racial balances were more effective than naturally occurring student mixes. Even where school demographics didn’t match the community’s, the Court found sufficient diversity to provide any presumed educational benefits. If sufficient diversity occurred naturally anyway, then the controversial aspects of the districts’ plans weren’t even necessary.
Besides, Roberts argued, neither district was currently under a federal mandate to worry about integration – they’d been declared “unitary” years before. Without such a mandate, and without evidence that their specific racial balance targets were more educationally beneficial than other forms of diversity, the districts couldn’t demonstrate a compelling need for race-conscious assignments.
Redubbing History
But it was Roberts’s interpretation of Brown v. Board of Education that proved most controversial. After extensive citations suggesting the dangers of racial classifications, he wrote:
All this {referring to the evils of racial quotas and such} is true enough in the contexts in which these statements were made – government contracting, voting districts, allocation of broadcast licenses, and electing state officers – but when it comes to using race to assign children to schools, history will be heard.
This moment of grandiosity is rather out of character for Roberts, who typically frames his most controversial decisions as calmly and rationally inevitable. A skeptical observer might wonder if his awkward bellicosity belies the discomfort of someone about to attempt a rhetorical sleight of hand he knows can’t possibly survive even casual scrutiny.
In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), we held that segregation deprived black children of equal educational opportunities regardless of whether school facilities and other tangible factors were equal, because government classification and separation on grounds of race themselves denoted inferiority. It was not the inequality of the facilities but the fact of legally separating children on the basis of race on which the Court relied to find a constitutional violation in 1954. . .
The next Term, we accordingly stated that “full compliance” with Brown required school districts “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis.”
Roberts is acknowledging, correctly, that this landmark decision specifically determined that the technicalities weren’t enough – it wasn’t just about busses or buildings or the letter of the law. Government-approved segregation was inherently harmful to students and inconsistent with the Fourteenth Amendment. Hence the Court’s decision to order schools to figure out admission policies “on a nonracial basis.”
In Roberts’ mind, it’s that last little phrase through which “history will be heard” – not the phrase’s context, its intended application, or the history of events before, during, or after its utterance. Just those four words in the abstract, which were now finding new life and meaning in the hands of the Court.
Detractors would quickly point out that this was a gross misrepresentation of what Brown was all about. That Court had unanimously determined that schools must be desegregated for the good of all students. A half-century later, the Roberts Court is citing this decision as proof it’s always been unconstitutional to racially desegregate schools – at least in this manner.
Roberts concludes with a line which became the key takeaway of this case, for better or worse:
Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again – even for very different reasons. . . The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
If you lean conservative, that’s a mic drop of epic self-evidence. In their efforts to avoid or “make up for” discrimination in one direction, the districts are actively discriminating in the other. Let’s just focus on doing our jobs better and not worry about being so “woke,” and things should work out just fine. That’s America!
For progressive types, however, it’s a maddening bit of rhetoric which makes them want to break things and give up trying to make any sense of the times in which we live. “The most logical way to ensure men and women have the same access to restrooms in sports arenas and concert halls is to build the exact same number of women’s and men’s restrooms in sports arenas and concert halls.” (The “duh!” is implied, but no less patronizing.) In their minds, this is semantic sophistry dressed up as profound legal reasoning. Apparently “discrimination” now means “trying to avoid discrimination,” and districts shouldn’t be worrying about such things in the first place because racial inequity is a quaint relic of days gone by with little impact on students of the 21st century.
Justice Breyer’s Dissent
Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg, argues that Roberts opinion fundamentally misunderstands both the Constitution and the practical realities of American education:
The plurality pays inadequate attention to… past opinions’ rationales, their language, and the contexts in which they arise. As a result, it reverses course and reaches the wrong conclusion. In doing so, it distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools.
Breyer emphasizes the original purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment: to bring formerly enslaved people into American society as full members. The Amendment’s drafters, he insists, would have understood the difference between using race “to keep the races apart” and using it “to bring the races together.”
He also predicts practical consequences to the Court’s ruling. Without the ability to consider race, school districts will inevitably re-segregate as housing patterns and private choices concentrate students by race and class.
Justice Stevens’s Dissent
Justice Stevens wrote a separate dissent specifically targeting Roberts’s reinterpretation of Brown:
There is a cruel irony in The Chief Justice’s reliance on our decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.” This sentence reminds me of Anatole France’s observation: “The majestic equality of the law, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” The Chief Justice fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools.
Stevens’s dissent captured the fundamental disagreement at the heart of the case: whether formal equality (treating everyone the same regardless of context) or substantive equality (addressing the effects of historical discrimination) better served constitutional principles.
Aftermath
The immediate effect of PICS v. Seattle SD1 was to invalidate both districts’ integration plans and cast constitutional doubt on similar efforts around the country. School districts scrambled to develop new approaches that might pass muster under this new, narrower standard.
Some turned to socioeconomic integration, using family income rather than race as a factor in school assignments. Others focused on “race-neutral” approaches like strategic attendance zone planning, magnet school programs designed to attract diverse populations, or financial incentives for families to choose integrated schools. A few districts tried “managed choice” systems that considered multiple factors while avoiding explicit racial classifications.
But the broader impact was to signal a major shift in how the Court viewed race and education. The decision effectively ended the era of voluntary racial integration that had emerged from Brown and its progeny. The same 5-4 conservative majority would go on to further restrict affirmative action in university admissions over the following years, culminating in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), which prohibited race-conscious admissions entirely. The underlying conviction that racial inequality is no longer something with which the courts should be concerned would shape subsequent decisions outside the world of education as well.
For some, this is a long-overdue course correction and can’t help but lead to better outcomes for everyone – whatever their race. For others, this is one more discouraging reminder of just how fragile democracy can be.