Supreme Court reviews race in assigning schools.

Tim group Parents Involved in Community Schools sued Seattle School District No. 1 in 2000 after the founder's daughter was one of 300 students denied their top high school choice because of a racial "tie-breaker." A U.S. district judge in Seattle and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Seattle integration program and said that the district had a "compelling interest in securing the educational and social benefits of racial diversity." But now, predominantly white parents in Louisville, Ken. and Seattle are arguing their schools' integration programs in front of the Supreme Court.

The two cases leave concerned parents wrestling with voluntary integration programs that use race as a factor in assigning students to specific public elementary and secondary schools. The Supreme Court is asking whether the two programs, which have been upheld by federal appeals courts until now, are "acceptable" moves toward student diversity or just a way for the schools to set illegal racial quotas.

Parents are arguing that the programs are denying children admission to first choice schools not to remedy past discrimination but to achieve a racial balance, which violates equal treatment guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The two districts have responded by saying that school integration-along with its educational and social benefits-justifies a careful, limited use of race in deciding which school a student should attend. Attorney Michael Madden, who represents the Seattle school district, says race is only one factor and is only used in some instances as a tiebreaker when too many students apply to one school.

In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation violated 14th Amendment rights. Legal experts are saying the five conservative justices who comprise the majority of the current court will likely vote the same way. The court's tour liberal justices have indicated, however, that they see no constitutional problem with school districts considering race to have individual school populations approximate the entire system's racial makeup.

"It's a fundamental disagreement about the meaning of the Brown case," says Philip Tegeler, executive director of the Poverty Race Research Action Council.

The court's ruling could not only affect a thousand public school systems with voluntary integration plans but also those that face demographic change, like Long Island's 124 racially stratified districts. Striking down integration policies there would essentially end any efforts to desegregate the school system.

The Bush administration has sided with the parents, stating that race-based student assignments can only be used to "eliminate the vestiges of past discrimination," not to maintain integration. But Theodore Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund says that accepting the Bush argument would be a "repudiation of Brown."

Thousands of schools throughout the country are still almost completely segregated and, according to the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation, as many as 1,000 districts still voluntarily pursue integration using race in some form. The court has not yet issued an official ruling.