The "racial tiebreaker" used by Seattle Public Schools was upheld by the Nutty 9th U.S. Circuit Court, but will face review by the United States Supreme Court beginning Monday. Yesterday in the Seattle Times, Bruce Ramsey nailed the tiebreaker's flaws. Today, nationally syndicated columnist George Will has at it in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

SEATTLE -- This city's school district decided in 2000 that because the son of Jill Kurfirst and the daughter of Winnie Bachwitz are white, they should be assigned to an inferior and distant high school. If they had not left the Seattle school system, this would have required them to rise at 5 a.m. to leave home by 5:30 a.m., alone and in the dark, to take the first of three buses, returning home between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., with almost no time left for homework, family activities and adequate sleep.

The parents argue that the racial school assignments -- actually, assignments by pigmentation -- that so injured their children violate the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws. The reliably unreliable 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- often reversed but never in doubt -- predictably ruled, with interesting indifference to pertinent Supreme Court precedents, against the parents. Soon -- oral arguments are Monday -- the Supreme Court can remind the 9th Circuit of the Constitution's limits on what schools can do in the name of "diversity."

Meanwhile, state and Seattle school officials at a public meeting yesterday on lower minority academic achievement (read: black, Hispanic and Native American academic achievement) predictably and wrongly postulated that more state spending is a big part of the fix. More constructively, SPS Chief Academic Officer Carla Santorno plans a two-week summer "boot camp" for principals because they can make such a big difference. Good. But even the best efforts of principals aren't enough in too many instances.

Neither they nor the legislature nor race-fixated Seattle school administrators and school board members can fill the crucial role of parents. It is parents - especially those of under-achieving and sometimes highly disruptive minority kids - who must nourish the spirit of their children to aspire, to learn and to behave. It is also parents who must actively manage their childrens' K-12 education. And most deleteriously in Washington state, parents must do that without the option of either public charter schools or tuition vouchers for use in non-denominational private schools.