The Supreme Court will not review a challenge to the admissions system for a prestigious Northern Virginia magnet school, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which administrators said opened the program to a wider socioeconomic range of students but opponents claimed discriminated against Asian American applicants.
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The high court’s decision Tuesday not to take the case drew a sharp dissent from two conservative justices and follows its ruling last term rejecting race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. That historic ruling rolled back decades of precedent and has dramatically changed how the nation’s private and public universities select their students.
The legal battle in Virginia is between a group of parents, called the Coalition for TJ, and the Fairfax County School Board over an admissions policy designed to encourage diversity at the school without explicitly considering race. Thomas Jefferson, locally known as TJ and often ranked the best high school in the country, changed its admissions process in 2020 in part to boost racial diversity at the school, which had long enrolled single-digit percentages of Black and Hispanic students.
The revised admissions process at TJ used a more holistic review of applicants by considering what admissions experts call “race-neutral” factors, such as what neighborhood a student lives in and their socioeconomic status. The new process also removed a notoriously difficult admissions test and $100 application fee and reserved a set number of seats for students from each of Fairfax County’s middle schools. Applicants must have an unweighted grade-point average of at least 3.5 while taking higher-level courses, complete a problem-solving essay and submit a “Student Portrait Sheet.”
The first admitted class saw boosts in Black and Latino enrollment, as well as more low-income students, English-language learners and girls. The percentage of Asian American students dropped from around 70 percent to 50 percent, sparking accusations that the changes were designed to drive down Asian American enrollment.
A parent group that opposed the changes filed a lawsuit against the district, alleging that the new process was discriminatory.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/educa...agnet-affirmative-action_inline_collection_18
As is common in court orders, the high court majority did not provide a reason for allowing the appeals court’s decision upholding the new policy to stand. The two dissenting justices, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, said the lower court was wrong to uphold the school’s new admissions policy and that they would have reviewed the case.
What the lower court “held, in essence, is that intentional racial discrimination is constitutional so long as it is not too severe. This reasoning is indefensible, and it cries out for correction,” wrote Alito, joined by Thomas.
A District Court judge initially sided with the parent group in 2022, calling the new admissions process “racial balancing” and “patently unconstitutional.” Then, in May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision, ruling in favor of the Fairfax County School Board and stating that the process did not discriminate against Asian American students.
Coalition for TJ, the group formed in opposition to the new system, asked the Supreme Court to intervene in August.
“Local school boards in these cases have enacted policies designed to balance the racial composition of their schools at the expense of Asian Americans,” the coalition wrote in its petition for the Supreme Court to take up the case.
Similar legal challenges to admissions-based high schools have been filed around the country and have been watched as a possible next frontier of admissions challenges after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard and UNC cases in June.
Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.
The high court’s decision Tuesday not to take the case drew a sharp dissent from two conservative justices and follows its ruling last term rejecting race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. That historic ruling rolled back decades of precedent and has dramatically changed how the nation’s private and public universities select their students.
The legal battle in Virginia is between a group of parents, called the Coalition for TJ, and the Fairfax County School Board over an admissions policy designed to encourage diversity at the school without explicitly considering race. Thomas Jefferson, locally known as TJ and often ranked the best high school in the country, changed its admissions process in 2020 in part to boost racial diversity at the school, which had long enrolled single-digit percentages of Black and Hispanic students.
The revised admissions process at TJ used a more holistic review of applicants by considering what admissions experts call “race-neutral” factors, such as what neighborhood a student lives in and their socioeconomic status. The new process also removed a notoriously difficult admissions test and $100 application fee and reserved a set number of seats for students from each of Fairfax County’s middle schools. Applicants must have an unweighted grade-point average of at least 3.5 while taking higher-level courses, complete a problem-solving essay and submit a “Student Portrait Sheet.”
The first admitted class saw boosts in Black and Latino enrollment, as well as more low-income students, English-language learners and girls. The percentage of Asian American students dropped from around 70 percent to 50 percent, sparking accusations that the changes were designed to drive down Asian American enrollment.
A parent group that opposed the changes filed a lawsuit against the district, alleging that the new process was discriminatory.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/educa...agnet-affirmative-action_inline_collection_18
As is common in court orders, the high court majority did not provide a reason for allowing the appeals court’s decision upholding the new policy to stand. The two dissenting justices, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, said the lower court was wrong to uphold the school’s new admissions policy and that they would have reviewed the case.
What the lower court “held, in essence, is that intentional racial discrimination is constitutional so long as it is not too severe. This reasoning is indefensible, and it cries out for correction,” wrote Alito, joined by Thomas.
A District Court judge initially sided with the parent group in 2022, calling the new admissions process “racial balancing” and “patently unconstitutional.” Then, in May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision, ruling in favor of the Fairfax County School Board and stating that the process did not discriminate against Asian American students.
Coalition for TJ, the group formed in opposition to the new system, asked the Supreme Court to intervene in August.
“Local school boards in these cases have enacted policies designed to balance the racial composition of their schools at the expense of Asian Americans,” the coalition wrote in its petition for the Supreme Court to take up the case.
Similar legal challenges to admissions-based high schools have been filed around the country and have been watched as a possible next frontier of admissions challenges after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard and UNC cases in June.