There's no compelling reason to manage race in schools

In 1962, Seattle's Ballard High School was more than 99 percent white. In 2005 its entering ninth-grade class was classified:

• 58 percent Caucasian;

• 16 percent Asian;

• 12 percent Hispanic;

• 11 percent African American;

• 3 percent Native American.

Ballard didn't use race in selecting the 2005 class and doesn't use it today. Its racial mix reflects the sort of city Seattle is, and the School District's "distance tiebreaker," which gives preference to students who live closer to the school.

Under the same system, the ninth-grade class at Rainier Beach High is majority black and at Franklin is majority Asian, but in no public high school in Seattle is one race more than 67 percent of the total.

The district wants to reach in and manage white/nonwhite proportions directly. From 1998 to 2000, it did that with a "racial tiebreaker." The question before the U.S. Supreme Court next Monday in Parents v. Seattle Schools is whether the School District has a "compelling governmental interest" to do it again.

I believe it does not.

A compelling reason is one so strong it forces your hand. The Supreme Court has said that if public agencies want to label Americans by race and treat them differently, they need that strong a reason, because racial discrimination tears a hole in the Constitution.

The court accepted such a reason in 1944, when it allowed a "pressing public necessity" for putting Japanese Americans into internment camps. Assigning kids to schools by race is not as draconian as that, but it violates the same presumption of equality.

What would a compelling reason look like? In public schools, it would have to be academic achievement.

The district can do many things to increase academic achievement. For example, it improved Ingraham High by adding the International Baccalaureate. A private donor offers an intriguing proposal to bring innovative technical training to Rainier Beach High School. But different standards for different races — why would it do that?

In its written argument to the Supreme Court, the district says there is "inherent educational value" in "diversity," which every school already has. The American Educational Research Association does a little better. It quotes a study that shows "a modest positive relationship" for math and "a somewhat weaker effect for reading." (The actual study found a correlation in some school districts and none in others.)

You can be sure that if there were strong evidence that a certain racial make-up is essential in educating kids, that evidence would be in the written arguments to the court. And it's not there.

Did Seattle test scores fall after the district stopped using the racial tiebreaker? No. They went up.

Most of the argument for racial management involves social behavior — the sort of thing Justice Antonin Scalia has derided as, "Gets along well with others."

But dividing up kids into racial groups and treating them differently is not a recipe for brotherhood. It encourages tribal feeling. It fosters resentment. Says the brief from families in Lynn, Mass.: "It teaches the lesson that race matters more than any other individual characteristic."

Government has treated citizens differently because of their race many times in America, always with a reason that seemed compelling at the time. Always, we regretted it later. We regretted the expulsion of Chinese from Seattle. We regretted the Japanese internment. We regretted Jim Crow.

To erase segregation, we tried forced busing, and we came to regret that, too. Nobody defends busing anymore. It was a disaster. But a "racial tiebreaker" is said to be a "compelling governmental interest."

It's not. There is no compelling interest for government schools to treat American children differently on account of race. The compelling interest is academics.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com