Judges Uphold Racial Selection of Pupils : Education: In 2-1 ruling, federal jurists hold that facility on UCLA campus is engaged in testing methods to improve teaching.

A panel of federal circuit judges ruled Thursday that a UCLA-run elementary school may continue to select its students by race because it is a research-oriented laboratory school dedicated to improving the quality of education in California.

The 2-1 ruling issued by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is fairly narrow legally, upholding a U.S. District Court judge’s opinion that to do credible research the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School must assemble a student body that reflects California’s racial and economic diversity.

But the ruling could have wider implications as universities take a greater interest in helping reform primary and secondary education and get in the business of running lab and charter schools.

UC San Diego, for instance, launched an elementary school this fall to help poor and minority students become academically competitive for top universities.

Cal Poly Pomona and Cal State Dominguez Hills have high schools on their campuses, and Cal State L.A. works closely with the Accelerated School, a charter school in South-Central Los Angeles.

“This case has a lot to do with academic freedom and the right of researchers to establish the subject matter of their research without excessive governmental interference,” said Joseph D. Mandel, UCLA’s vice chancellor for legal affairs.

Sharon Browne, an attorney with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, said the opinion could open the door to “more classrooms set up as educational experiments and racial quota systems set up to determine who is allowed in the classroom.”

The foundation joined Brentwood attorney James K.T. Hunter as co-counsel in the 1995 lawsuit against the UC Board of Regents, filed after Hunter’s daughter was denied admission to the school.

Hunter said he will ask for a majority of the 9th Circuit Court judges to review the case. Failing there, he will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. His daughter, Keeley Tatsuyo Hunter, who identified herself as Japanese and Caucasian on an application form, is a third-grader at the private Echo Horizon School in Culver City.

Parents covet the limited seats at Seeds Elementary, which is on the UCLA campus and enrolls about 440 students from preschool through sixth grade. Although subsidized by the university, it is not a public school and charges tuition of up to $8,500 a year depending on parental income.

Deborah Stipek, a UCLA education professor, runs the school, and all teachers are on the UCLA staff. “We are there to test out innovative instructional approaches so we can help public schools,” she said. “We try to use race at a very minimum,” she said, to assemble a student body that “reflects the racial makeup of the state.”

The elementary school operates in sharp contrast to all other programs at UCLA and other UC campuses, which have banned the use of race, ethnicity or gender in admissions to its undergraduate, graduate and professional schools.

The federal lawsuit falls outside the reach of Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action by all state-supported agencies. Hunter has filed a separate lawsuit in state courts, citing Proposition 209. That suit is on hold, awaiting the outcome of his federal case.

The federal lawsuit charges that the school’s racial preferences violated Keeley’s constitutional rights to equal protection under the law.

In the majority opinion, Judge Harry Pregerson wrote that the school’s racial practices were sufficiently narrow to pass judicial scrutiny and benefit the compelling state interest of “providing effective education to its diverse, multiethnic, public school population.”

In a lengthy rebuttal, Judge Robert R. Beezer wrote that the majority opinion violates the central purpose of the Equal Protection Clause “to purge racial classifications from public life.”

He also suggested it could have wide implications: “Every stratum of a state’s public education system . . . may now, in the name of ‘research on effective educational strategies,’ implement a racially classified admissions system.”