Below The Beltway

George Will writes about a case that will be argued before the Supreme Court this morning that will hopefully put another nail in the coffin of affirmative action:

SEATTLE — This city’s school district decided in 2000 that because the son of Jill Kurfirst and the daughter of Winnie Bachwitz are white, they should be assigned to an inferior and distant high school. If they had not left the Seattle school system, this would have required them to rise at 5 a.m. in order to leave home by 5:30 a.m., alone and in the dark, to take the first of three buses, returning home between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., with almost no time left for homework, family activities and adequate sleep.

The parents argue that the racial school assignments — actually, assignments by pigmentation — that so injured their children violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. The reliably unreliable U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit — often reversed but never in doubt — predictably ruled, with interesting indifference to pertinent Supreme Court precedents, against the parents. Soon — oral arguments are tomorrow — the Supreme Court can remind the 9th Circuit of the Constitution’s limits on what schools can do in the name of “diversity.”

In Seattle, you see, students can apply to attend any city high school they or their parents want. When it came to the most successful, and therefore most popular schools, though, the school district decided that grades alone weren’t a good enough criteria to determine admission:

The district gave preference to certain applicants, using considerations it called “tiebreakers.” One, which benefited about 10 percent of applicants, was whether the student had a sibling at the desired school. Another was whether the student’s race would produce or maintain a 40-60 balance.

When registering children for high school, parents were asked to specify each child’s race. If parents did not specify, the district did so based on visual inspection of the parents’ or child’s pigmentation. The school board president has said that “skin tone matters.”

A more blatant example of racism you could hardly find. And yet the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found it acceptable:

The 9th Circuit, siding with the district, argued two propositions, both of which conflict with Supreme Court precedents.

One was that racial preferences are benign if they do not ” unduly harm any students” or ” uniformly benefit any race or group of individuals to the detriment of another” (emphases added). But the Supreme Court has rejected this idea that the equal protection clause protects group rights rather than individual rights.

Second, the 9th Circuit said broad deference is owed to the judgments of local school districts. But no line of cases has established that high schools enjoy even the limited latitude that universities have in treating race as a factor when deciding who may be admitted. Rather, the Supreme Court has held that public secondary education “must be available to all on equal terms.”

Hopefully, the Supreme Court will do the right thing.