US Supreme Court rejects Virginia case over race in high school admissions

[February 21, 2024]  By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined a chance to further restrict efforts to promote diversity in education, turning away an appeal by a coalition of parents and students who argued that an elite Virginia public school's revised admissions policy racially discriminates against Asian Americans.

The justices left in place a lower court's ruling rejecting the claim by the plaintiffs that the admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology violates the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment equal protection guarantee. Asian Americans make up the majority of students at the school located in the Washington suburb of Alexandria.

Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision not to hear the case, calling the ruling by the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals "patently incorrect" in what it takes to "prove intentional race discrimination."

The court's 6-3 conservative majority last June in a landmark ruling rejected race-conscious college and university admissions policies long used to raise the number of Black, Hispanic and other minority students on campuses.

The highly selective Thomas Jefferson, a magnet school nicknamed "TJ" that is focused on math, science and technology, consistently is rated as one the best U.S. public high schools.

"We have long believed that the new admissions process is both constitutional and in the best interest of all of our students. It guarantees that all qualified students from all neighborhoods in Fairfax County have a fair shot at attending this exceptional high school," Karl Frisch, who chairs the Fairfax County School Board, said after Tuesday's decision.

The Supreme Court previously declined the coalition's bid to block the policy during the litigation.

The court's 2023 affirmative action ruling upended decades of precedent, striking down programs used by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that took race into account as one of many factors in student admissions evaluations.

Represented by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, the plaintiffs in the Virginia case - a coalition that has said it includes parents, students and school staff - sued the school board in 2021. They accused the board of adopting an admissions policy for Thomas Jefferson that, while appearing race-neutral on the surface, was intended to reduce the number of Asian American students at the school - a claim the board denied.

View of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, U.S., January 8, 2024. REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson

The board revised the policy in 2020 after several of its members and others expressed concern about the lack of socioeconomic, geographic and racial diversity at the school.

The school previously took most of its students from a small number of "feeder" middle schools in more affluent parts of the county. But it ended a standardized testing requirement and moved to a system that reserved seats for top students from each public middle school in the area, giving extra points to those from underrepresented schools and those who qualify for free school meals, while raising its minimum grade-point average.

Asian Americans dropped from 73% of the students offered admission in the year before the revised policy to 54% in 2021, 60% in 2022 and 62% in 2023. Students from other racial groups, female students and those from low-income households, including Asian American ones, all increased.

"Schools should evaluate students as individuals, not as groups based on racial identity. That kind of group stereotyping is morally wrong and undermines the American promise of opportunity for all," Pacific Legal Foundation lawyer Joshua Thompson said, adding that by rejecting this appeal the Supreme Court missed an opportunity to end what he called race-based discrimination in kindergarten through high school admissions.

U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, highlighting statements by board members lamenting the low numbers of Black and Hispanic students. The 4th Circuit reversed Hilton's decision, finding no disparate impact on Asian American students or discriminatory intent by the board.

Alito, in his dissent, called the 4th Circuit's decision "a virus that may spread if not promptly eliminated," adding that it "effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups."

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)

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