• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Court to review race in high school admissions

Posted on: Monday, 5 June 2006, 09:58 CDT

By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday it would decide whether race can be used as a tie-breaking factor in public high school admissions, the first time that President George W. Bush's two appointees will rule on a racial issue.

Taking up the politically charged issue in an election year, the justices agreed to decide whether racial diversity represented a compelling government interest that can justify the use of race in selecting students for admission.

The high court was closely divided by a 5-4 vote in 2003, the last time it confronted similar issues in a pair of rulings that involved preferences for minorities in university admissions decisions.

The public high school case from Seattle will test the views of the court's two newest members, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, conservatives who were appointed by Bush. The court also agreed to decide a second case with similar issues involving the Louisville, Kentucky, area.

As U.S. Justice Department lawyers in the early 1980s during Ronald Reagan's presidency, both Roberts and Alito strongly opposed quotas and some affirmative action programs designed to favor minorities.

Alito replaced the more moderate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote the majority opinion in 2003 that upheld the University of Michigan's program that favored minorities who apply to its law school.

In the Seattle case, about 40 percent of the 46,000 public school students are white and 60 percent are not. Students state their preferences from among the 10 public high schools.

Since some schools are more popular and are oversubscribed, the process involved the use of a "tiebreaker" system to decide who gets in.

Admitted first are students who have a sibling at the school. Next are students who bring the school in line with the district's overall racial mix. The next tiebreaker goes to students who live the closest to the school.

A group of parents sued in 2000 and argued it was unfair for the school district to consider race. A U.S. appeals court disagreed and ruled by a 7-4 vote that the district has a compelling interest to secure the educational and social benefits of racial diversity.

Lawyers for the parents appealed to the Supreme Court. They urged the justices to examine how the public high school student's constitutional rights to equal protection have been affected by the Supreme Court's rulings in 2003.

They said the Supreme Court had never decided a case involving a school district's voluntary use of race-based pupil assignments for a purpose other than to remedy the effects of past segregation.

The similar case from Kentucky involved racial guidelines that keep black student enrollment at most schools between 15 and 50 percent to maintain diversity.

The high court will hear arguments in the two cases during its upcoming term that begins in October, adding to its docket that already contains another hot-button social issue dealing with abortion.

Source: REUTERS

More News in this Category