School
diversity suits reflect attitude change School
diversity suits reflect attitude change
By Keith Ervin Seattle Times staff reporter
Monday May 13, 2002
Here's what happened: Local school officials, intent on overcoming the effects of segregated-housing patterns, adopted a plan that assigned students to schools on the basis of race. State voters passed an initiative that restricted desegregation efforts in public education. A lawsuit put in question the validity of both the state initiative and the School District's desegregation plan.
This scenario describes the events leading up to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last month that Initiative 200 outlaws the Seattle School District's racial tiebreaker. But it also fits a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down an anti-busing initiative and upheld Seattle's massive desegregation plan. Still the law of the land, the high court's 20-year-old decision in Washington v. Seattle School District is an important piece of the School District's strategy to overturn the recent appeals-court decision and restore the racial tiebreaker.
Moreover, this tale of two conflicts provides insight into how much has changed in the nation's legal landscape and in the demographics and politics of Seattle. While the nation's courts have grown increasingly intolerant of race-based student-assignment plans, Seattle voters have become more willing to accept some personal inconvenience to advance racial diversity in public life. Votes on two state initiatives separated by two decades suggest that Seattleites have moved decisively away from the rest of the state on racial issues.
"This is a place that walks its talk. We do believe in diversity, and we do believe it enriches our lives, and it is part of the Seattle value system. It is one of the things that does separate us from the rest of the state," says political consultant Blair Butterworth. Seattle votes no City voters' overwhelming opposition to I-200 has been cited by School District administrators and board members as one reason for continuing their legal battle to restore race-based school assignments.
The district has asked the 9th Circuit to rehear the case in which a three-judge panel banned use of a racial tiebreaker. The tiebreaker favors students who would enhance a school's racial and ethnic diversity when the school is racially imbalanced and lacks capacity to accommodate all applicants. Among the district's arguments in defense of the tiebreaker is the Supreme Court ruling that struck down Initiative 350. I-350, passed with a 61 percent yes vote in Seattle and 66 percent support statewide, forbade busing to achieve racial-integration goals.
Seattle already was the largest district in the nation to desegregate without a court order when the city expanded the scope of busing in 1978, prompting passage of I-350. The high court, on a 5-4 vote, said the initiative crippled local school boards' traditional authority to determine student assignments and made it more difficult for minorities to achieve integration. "It burdens all future attempts to integrate Washington schools in districts throughout the state, by lodging decision-making authority over the question at a new and remote level of government," Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the majority.
Justice Lewis Powell dissented, objecting to what he called the court's "unprecedented intrusion into the structure of a state government." Precedent for challenge Washington v. Seattle was a key precedent for a coalition of minority groups and the labor movement that challenged California's Proposition 209 in 1996. Identical in wording to I-200, Prop. 209 prohibited race-based discrimination or preferences "in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."
A federal district judge blocked implementation of Prop. 209, saying it violated the Washington v. Seattle precedent by removing local decisions to a more remote level of government. The 9th Circuit disagreed, upholding the ban on race-based hiring, contracting and college admissions.
The appeals court left lawyers scratching their heads over whether Prop. 209 Ñ and thus I-200 Ñ affects student assignments to public schools. When the group Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) sued the Seattle district over its racial tiebreaker two years ago, the district invoked Washington v. Seattle. The outcome of the case was consistent with federal courts' dwindling support for race-based busing. The 9th Circuit, overturning a district-court ruling, rejected Seattle's racial tiebreaker one day after a federal judge lifted a desegregation order in Dayton, Ohio, and the Supreme Court allowed court-ordered busing to end in Charlotte, N.C. Seattle goes own way Seattle residents seem to have moved in a different direction from the courts and from residents across the state.
Eleven years after a decisive majority of Seattle voters supported I-350, local
anti-busing Initiative 34 drew support from only 50.4 percent of voters. (The
1989 measure would have given public schools a share of city sales-tax revenues
to improve schools and establish magnet schools if the district ended mandatory
busing. The School Board declined the offer.) Also in the 1989 election, City
Councilman Norm Rice handily won the mayoral race against City Attorney Doug
Jewett, who made his opposition to busing a centerpiece of his campaign.
Voters' lukewarm reaction to the anti-busing appeals of 1989 may be explained in part by the district's replacement of the much-maligned Seattle Plan with a more flexible "controlled-choice" plan for student assignments to schools. But Seattle voters showed remarkable support for affirmative action in 1998, when they voted 67 to 33 percent against I-200. The Seattle vote made King County the only county in the state to oppose the measure, which banned racial preferences.
City folk might be ambivalent about busing, but they overwhelmingly believed there was good reason to give a boost to minorities in the competition for government jobs and contracts, and admission to state universities. "Just when we're making advances, they take all the tools away from us," School Board member Barbara Schaad-Lamphere's 15-year-old daughter told her after the 9th Circuit decision. Schaad-Lamphere, whose late stepfather, former School Board member Phil Swain, was the subject of an unsuccessful recall movement by busing opponents in the early 1970s, has been startled by the rapid shift in the legal climate.
In 1996, she visited leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union and asked them not to sue the School District over its abandonment of busing. She was surprised six years later when the 9th Circuit said the scaled-back desegregation plan violated students' rights. Committed to integration Though Seattleites are split on the racial tiebreaker, Schaad-Lamphere believes they have become increasingly committed to racial integration. "I think being an urban dweller in Seattle these days means that you're partly here because of diversity; you don't want to have the lily-white neighborhoods of your childhood."
Political consultant Butterworth agrees, noting that Seattle has evolved from a more conservative, blue-collar burg in the 1970s to a cosmopolitan city with a growing population of high-tech professionals and Asian, Hispanic and African immigrants. When Ballard High School Principal David Engle announced his resignation in protest of the 9th Circuit decision, faculty and students gave him a standing ovation.
The anger that sparked the parent group's lawsuit was caused as much by the district officials' broken promise that Queen Anne and Magnolia children could attend Ballard High as by opposition to the racial tiebreaker, Butterworth noted. "We Seattleites pride ourselves in being fair-minded and open-minded," said Magnolia resident Kathleen Brose.
Based on what she read in the newspapers and what her neighbors told her in 1998, "I got the feeling that if Initiative 200 was passed, people would be discriminated against." Brose voted against I-200 but later regretted it when she saw longtime friends and neighbors treated differently because of their race.
She founded PICS and turned to I-200 as the basis for suing the School District. With Seattle schools more integrated than at any time in their history, thanks mostly to greater residential integration, Brose sees no need for the racial tiebreaker. "If we were truly racist, we would be out of here, living in the white suburbs," Brose said. "What we really want people to understand is that we're not against diversity, we're for neighborhood schools."
Welcomes diversity Bob Dorse, the retired businessman who sponsored anti-busing Initiative 350 and who now tutors students at predominantly nonwhite Mercer Middle School, said he welcomes the integration of neighborhoods and schools. "What happens in a diverse environment is good behavior," Dorse said. "When you have people in enclaves Ñ and I guess the example of that would be what's going on in Israel and Palestine Ñ they're in enclaves, and they don't mix. If you mix, you behave. "That mixture has to be by choice, not by force."
But with 84 percent of African-American students and 74 percent of Asian-American students still living south of the Ship Canal, the School Board and Superintendent Joseph Olchefske believe some mandatory method, such as the tiebreaker, is needed if schools are to remain integrated. As controversial as the district's desegregation efforts have been, some supporters see them as a resounding success.
"What you see are schools where people have an incredible rainbow of friends," said former School Board member T.J. Vassar. "You see kids clearly understanding how to work out their differences among them based on their culture, and you see them being able to pick out friends, regardless of their backgrounds, based on important things they have in common." Vassar credits the city's experiment in busing with encouraging a generation of young adults to live in integrated neighborhoods. "The Montlake Cut was at one point the Mason-Dixon Line in Seattle.
It simply is not that way any more. Part of the reason it is not that way, part of the reason neighborhoods have more ethnic diversity, is due to what has happened in the schools." Now, with mandatory desegregation efforts legally on the ropes, School Board members are beginning to consider whether there's some other way to promote racial diversity in the classroom. Ideas that have gained some momentum are smaller, specialized schools, magnet programs in existing schools, and a tiebreaker based on socioeconomic status rather than race.
It won't be an easy process for a school district that began voluntary desegregation in 1963 and that, in the words of I-200 campaign chairman John Carlson, has "an almost religious fixation on race." School officials' belief, as they put it, that "race matters" seems to be supported by the city's new majority. However much as race may matter, the 9th Circuit has told Seattle, it doesn't justify treating students differently because of the color of their skin.
Keith Ervin can be reached at 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com.
News and Announcements | AAD Home Page