In a 5-4 decision on June 28, 2007, the Supreme Court struck down integration ("diversity") plans in Seattle WA and Jefferson County KY. which used race as a factor in school assignment. SEE DETAILS IN SECTION "CONFUSION IN COURT RULINGS

On June 5, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court had agreed to hear the challenge to the Seattle school district's use of race as a factor in the assignment of students in Seattle public schools. The case was heard along with a challenge to the practice of using race as a factor in school assignment in Jefferson County, Kentucky.

The challenge was brought in a suit by Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) headed by Kathleen Brose in July 2000. The district stopped the use of race at the time the suit was filed, but PICS pursued the case through state and federal courts.

No court had ever found the 47,000-student school system guilty of deliberate segregation. Under blatant social engineering practices, the district was was attempting to achieve a racial mix that they considered desirable diversity, arguing that diversity is a key educational value and that segregated housing patterns must be changed.

U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein had ruled April 6, 2000, that the policy of using race as a tiebreaker in admissions was legal because it applied to both whites and nonwhites. Rothstein further said that a race-based assignment policy is a legitimate antidote to segregated neighborhoods and that use of a racial tiebreaker in school assignments does not constitute the kind of discrimination or preferential treatment banned by Initiative 200.

Rothstein's ruling also tossed out the parent group’s claim that the Seattle School District’s race-based school assignments violated the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Rothstein said racial diversity in the classroom is a compelling government interest.

The school district had argued that Initiative 200’s ban on racial preferences and discrimination does not apply to school assignments because no students are denied the benefits of public education. The district unbelievably argued that the words in Initiative 200 “without distinction or preference on account of race” actually “authorized rather than prohibited race-conscious school assignment practices.” (Seattle Times 12/19/01)

Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) then appealed Rothstein’s decision to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Many believed that PICS vs. Seattle was a good case for appeal because there is no history of intentional segregation in Seattle schools.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reversed Judge Barbara Rothstein's decision on April 16,2002. The Appeals court ruled that Seattle’s use of race in determining high school admissions is a violation of the state of Washington’s Initiative 200 aproved by the voters in 1998.

The panel’s decision was encouraging. A federal court -- maybe the most liberal appeals court in the nation -- had allowed the will of the people to prevail over social engineering.

The district, of course, had announced that it would appeal the panel's decision - either to the full Circuit Court or to the Supreme Court.

Then, unbelievably, not long after their decision the panel abruptly withdrew their ruling, saying that the matter was a matter of state law and would be better settled in state court.

Washington state law (Initiative 200) says “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”

The constitution of Washington state says, “It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all students without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste or sex.”

In an 8-1 ruling, the Washington state Supreme Court on June 27, 2003, upheld the Seattle School District’s use of race as a tiebreaker in high school admissions, ruling that the district policy did not violate state law. The case went back to the federal appeals court for a ruling on its constitutionality.

The state court, unbelievably, ruled that the district’s "open choice" plan does not violate Initiative 200, the voter-approved law that bans racial preferences in education, government hiring and contracting in the state of Washington.

The district policy was to allow students to pick which high schools they would like to attend. If too many students picked the same school, the district used tiebreakers to determine who would be admitted. Race was not the sole criteria. The first tiebreaker was whether a student had siblings already attending the school. The second tiebreaker was race. If a school was predominantly black, whites were given preference and vice versa.

The state court’s lone dissenter, Justice Richard Sanders, called the ruling a tortured argument that overlooks individual cases of discrimination.

"The fact the procedure may provide preferential treatment to one race in one instance and to another in a subsequent instance does not render it racially neutral, but rather unlawful in both instances," Sanders wrote. (It takes only common sense to understand that. One has to wonder why Sanders was the only justice with that ability on the Washington State Supreme Court.)

Russ Brooks, an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, the group that argued against the district’s tie-breaker policy for the parent group, said, "Today’s ruling does our students a disservice. "Instead of teaching our children to view people as individuals, it teaches our students that race matters."

Finally an 11-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court upheld the constitutionality of the use of race by 7-4. PICS then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.