Facts
- Seattle Public Schools let students rank preferred high schools; oversubscribed schools used tiebreakers to assign seats.
- After sibling preference, Seattle used a race tiebreaker classifying students as “white” or “nonwhite” to keep each school near district-wide racial proportions.
- Seattle had not operated a de jure segregated school system and was not subject to a desegregation order.
- Jefferson County (Louisville) previously operated under a federal desegregation decree that ended after the district was declared unitary.
- Jefferson County adopted a plan classifying students as “black” or “other,” using race in elementary assignments and transfer decisions to keep school enrollments within specified racial ranges.
- Parents and students challenged both districts’ use of race to determine school assignment as violating the Equal Protection Clause.
Issues
- Whether public school districts that are not remedying de jure segregation may classify individual students by race to assign them to K–12 schools to pursue diversity or reduce racial isolation.
- Whether Seattle’s and Jefferson County’s race-based assignment mechanisms satisfy strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause.
Decision
- The Supreme Court reversed the judgments upholding both plans and remanded.
- The Court held the specific Seattle and Jefferson County assignment plans unconstitutional because they did not satisfy strict scrutiny.
- The Court concluded the plans functioned to obtain racial balance through individual racial classifications and were not narrowly tailored.
- Justice Kennedy supplied the decisive vote to invalidate the plans while stating that districts may pursue diversity and avoid racial isolation through measures that do not make individual assignments turn on race.
Legal Principles
- Explicit governmental racial classifications are subject to strict scrutiny and are presumptively invalid unless narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.
- Racial balancing for its own sake is not a compelling interest.
- K–12 assignment systems that classify students into broad racial categories and use race as a decisive tiebreaker or constraint on individual placement are not narrowly tailored.
- Narrow tailoring requires serious, good-faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives and avoids making race determinative for individual students.
- Even when pursuing diversity or reducing racial isolation, school districts may employ race-conscious, non-individualized strategies (e.g., attendance zones, site selection, resource allocation, targeted outreach) that do not allocate seats based on a student’s race.
Conclusion
The Court invalidated Seattle’s and Jefferson County’s voluntary integration plans because they assigned individual students using blunt racial categories to achieve district racial targets, failing strict scrutiny; districts may seek diversity and reduce isolation only through methods that do not make a student’s race control school assignment.