Opinion ID: 792253
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Absence of Quotas

Text: 75 In Grutter, the Court approved the law school's plan, in part, because it did not institute a quota, whereby a fixed number of slots are reserved exclusively for minority groups, thereby insulating members of those groups from competition with other candidates. 27 539 U.S. at 335, 123 S.Ct. 2325. Although the law school's plan did not seek to admit a set number or percentage of minority students, during the height of the admission's season, the law school would consult daily reports that kept track of the racial composition of the incoming class. Id. at 318, 123 S.Ct. 2325. The Court held that this attention to numbers did not transform the law school plan into a quota, but instead demonstrated that the law school sought to enroll a critical mass of minority students in order to realize the educational benefits of a diverse student body. Id. Similarly, we conclude that the District's 15 percent plus or minus variance is not a quota because it does not reserve a fixed number of slots for students based on their race, but instead it seeks to enroll a critical mass of white and nonwhite students in its oversubscribed schools in order to realize its compelling interests. 28 76
77 The District's race-based tiebreaker does not set aside a fixed number of slots for nonwhite or white students in any of the District's schools. The tiebreaker is used only so long as there are members of the underrepresented race in the applicant pool for a particular oversubscribed school. If the number of students of that race who have applied to that school is exhausted, no further action is taken, even if the 15 percent variance has not been satisfied. That is, if the applicant pool has been exhausted, no students are required or recruited to attend a particular high school in order to bring it within the 15 percent plus or minus range for that year. 78 Moreover, the number of white and nonwhite students in the high schools is flexible and varies from school to school and from year to year. 29 This variance in the number of nonwhite and white students throughout the District's high schools is because, under the Plan, assignments are based on students' and parents' preferences. 30 The tiebreakers come into play in the assignment process only when a school is oversubscribed. As Morgan Lewis, the Manager of Enrollment Planning, Technical Support and Demographics, testified, If all the parents . . . don't pick [a] school in a massive number, then everyone gets in. And so it's . . . a case where the choice patterns, the oversubscription . . . [is] the reason the [tiebreaker] kicks in. . . . Everything happens when more people want the seats. And why they want the seats sometimes we don't know. 79
80 Within this flexible system, where parental and student choices drive the assignments to particular schools, the District seeks to enroll and maintain a relatively stable critical mass of white and nonwhite students in each of its oversubscribed high schools in order to achieve its compelling interest in racial diversity and to prevent the assignments from replicating Seattle's segregated housing patterns. Faced with the question of what constituted a critical mass of students in this particular context, the District determined that a critical mass was best achieved by adopting the 15 percent plus or minus variance tied to demographics of students in the Seattle public schools. Thus, when an oversubscribed high school has more than 75 percent nonwhite students (i.e., more than 15 percent above the overall 60 percent nonwhite student population) and less than 25 percent white students, or when it has less than 45 percent nonwhite students (i.e., more than 15 percent below the overall 60 percent nonwhite student population) and more than 55 percent white students, the school is considered racially concentrated or isolated, meaning that it lacks a critical mass of students needed to realize the educational benefits of a diverse student body. 81 Parents attack the District's use of the 15 percent plus or minus variance tied to the District's school population demographics because they believe that the District cannot use race at all in its assignment process. We have rejected this argument, however, applying Grutter and Gratz. See supra Part II.B. Alternatively, Parents contend that the District's goal of enrolling between 75 and 45 percent nonwhite students and between 25 and 55 percent white students in its oversubscribed schools establishes a quota, not a critical mass. They note that the critical mass sought by the law school in Grutter was smaller, consisting of between 12 and 20 percent of underrepresented minority students in each law school class. 82 Parents' argument, however, ignores Grutter's admonition that the narrow tailoring inquiry be context-specific. First, like the District's enrollment goals, which are tied to the demographics of the Seattle schools' total student population, the law school's goal of enrolling between 12 to 20 percent of underrepresented minorities in a given year was tied to the demographics of its applicant pool. 31 Second, in tying the use of the tiebreaker to the District's demographics with a 15 percent plus or minus trigger point, the District adopted a common benchmark in the context of voluntary and court-ordered school desegregation plans. As the District's expert testified, 83 Most of the cases I've participated in . . . generally worked with numbers that reflect the racial composition of the school district but, at the same time, tr[ied] to allow the district sufficient flexibility so that it would not have to regularly and repeatedly move students on a short-term basis simply to maintain some specific number. That's why we see ranges of plus or minus 15 percent in most cases of school desegregation. 84 Even Parents' expert testified that school districts throughout the country determine whether a district is sufficiently desegregated by looking to the population of the district in question. See also Comfort, 418 F.3d at 21 (holding that a transfer policy conditioned on district demographics (+/-10-15%) was not a quota because it reflects the defendants' efforts to obtain the benefits of diversity in a stable learning environment); Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Educ., 233 F.3d 232, 287-88 (4th Cir.2000) (Traxler, J., dissenting) (citing to a book written by David J. Armor, Parents' expert, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law 160 (1995), which observed that over 70 percent of the school districts with desegregation plans use a variance of plus or minus 15 percent or greater); cf. 34 C.F.R. § 280.4(b) (defining minority group isolation as a condition in which minority group children constitute more than 50 percent of the enrollment of [a] school). Given this empirically and time-tested notion of critical mass in the public high school desegregation context, it would make little sense to force the District to utilize the same percentages that constituted a critical mass in the elite law school context to determine what constitutes a critical mass for Seattle public high schools. See Grutter, 539 U.S. at 336, 123 S.Ct. 2325 ([S]ome attention to numbers, without more, does not transform a flexible admissions system into a rigid quota.) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). 85 Accordingly, we conclude that the District's 15 percent plus or minus trigger point tied to the demographics of the Seattle school population is not a quota. It is a context-specific, flexible measurement of racial diversity designed to attain and maintain a critical mass of white and nonwhite students in Seattle's public high schools. 86