Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007), also known as the PICS case, is a United States Supreme Court case which found it unconstitutional for a school district to use race as a factor in assigning students to schools in order to bring its racial composition in line with the composition of the district as a whole, unless it was remedying a prior history of de jure segregation."[4] He went on to say, "What the government is not permitted to do, absent a showing of necessity not made here, is to classify every student on the basis of race and to assign each of them to schools based on that classification.Nonetheless, Bakke was used to uphold the validity of affirmative action programs that fostered diversity in higher education for a quarter of a century.To that end, in 2011, the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice jointly issued Guidance on the Voluntary Use of Race to Achieve Diversity and Avoid Racial Isolation in Elementary and Secondary Schools, acknowledging the flexibility that school districts have in taking proactive steps to meet the compelling interests of promoting diversity and avoiding racial isolation within the parameters of current law.At a particular school either whites or non-whites could be favored for admission depending on which race would bring the racial balance closer to the goal.A non-profit group, Parents Involved in Community Schools, sued the District, arguing that the racial tiebreaker violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Washington state law.Part III A first reiterated that "when the government distributes burdens or benefits on the basis of individual racial classifications, that action is reviewed under strict scrutiny."[26] Part III C[13] addressed the school districts' claim that "the way in which they have employed individual racial classifications is necessary to achieve their stated ends."Jefferson County has failed to present any evidence that it considered alternatives, even though the district already claims that its goals are achieved primarily through means other than the racial classifications.He writes that Justice Breyer misused and misapplied previous Supreme Court precedents in this area and that he greatly exaggerates the consequences of the decision of this case.Justice Thomas goes on to call out the dissent for adopting segregationist reasoning advanced in Brown, particularly its insistence that the Court should defer to local school board knowledge, expertise, and judgment.In his concurrence, Kennedy differed with the plurality because, he found, the goal of obtaining a diverse student body is a compelling state interest.Kennedy's opinion also emphasized the risks posed by allowing for the proliferation of mechanically imposed individual race classifications of its citizens.Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a sharply worded short dissent in which he accused the plurality of misusing and misapplying previous Supreme Court precedents including Brown v. Board of Education.In the Justice's 77-page written opinion he called the ruling a "radical" step away from established law that would take from communities a critical tool used for many years in the prevention of resegregation.At a press conference the day of the opinion, Attorney for the Plaintiff Teddy Gordon stated that he would, if necessary, seek legal measures to prevent the use of the current Student Assignment Plan for the 2007–2008 school year.When questioned about the close timing, Gordon stated that all the District had to do was "push a button" to change things over to a plan compliant with the Court's ruling.