Seattle Schools Community Forum: Can School Districts Use Race in Enrollment Policies?

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Can School Districts Use Race in Enrollment Policies?:

Can School Districts Use Race in Enrollment Policies?

Yes, you can.

The question is - why is Seattle Schools saying, in document after document - you can't?

From the majority opinion:

Importantly, Justice Kennedy drew a distinction between school district plans that rely on the race of individual students and plans that seek to achieve diversity or avoid racial isolation through more generalized race-conscious measures:
If school authorities are concerned that the student-body compositions of certain schools interfere with the objective of offering an equal educational opportunity to all of their students, they are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a general way and without treating each student in different fashion solely on the basis of a systematic, individual typing by race.
Id. at 788-89 (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment).
Justice Kennedy went on to state that race-conscious approaches that do not rely on individual racial classifications are “unlikely” to “demand strict scrutiny” and are likely to pass constitutional muster. In so doing, he also provided some examples of the sorts of approaches that he had in mind:
School boards may pursue the goal of bringing together students of diverse backgrounds and races through other means, including strategic site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones with general recognition of the demographics of neighborhoods; allocating resources for special programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race. These mechanisms are race conscious but do not lead to different treatment based on a classification that tells each student he or she is to be defined by Seattle Schools Community Forum: Can School Districts Use Race in Enrollment Policies?:

 Seattle Schools Community Forum: Seattle Schools This Week - http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2016/10/seattle-schools-this-week_30.html