WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a case about the role race plays in middle school admissions, three years after a majority on the high court struck down affirmative action in college.
The case involves admissions to four selective middle schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, a diverse suburb of Washington, D.C. A group of parents said in a lawsuit that the district's admissions policy for four magnet schools, while race-neutral on its face, is designed to boost the admission of Black and Latino students while disadvantaging Asian American kids.
The high court said Monday it will weigh whether the parent group has enough evidence of discrimination for the case to move forward. Lower courts had dismissed the case because Asian American students were not underrepresented at the magnet schools compared with the pool of students that applied. If the Supreme Court rules for the parent group, the Association for Education Fairness, it could revive the lawsuit.
The case originates from a change in admissions policy that began a decade ago, when a consulting group was hired to evaluate how the school system chose students for its middle school magnet programs. The district then changed its admissions policies, factoring in the poverty levels of the schools the students attended. The share of Asian American students, who were clustered in more affluent, high-performing schools, subsequently fell.
The parent group sued in 2020. Not long after, the school system, which educates more than 150,000 students, changed its admissions practices to eliminate an extra in-person exam. Now, students qualify for a lottery according to their performance on standardized tests. But students in more affluent schools, where Asian American students are concentrated, must perform better on the standardized exam to enter the lottery.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's decision to dismiss the case. In its ruling, the court said the parent group had failed to show Asian American students were harmed, because they were still being admitted at higher rates than the applicant pool. The Fourth Circuit was relying on a recent ruling in a different case, where parents challenged admissions practices at a highly selective magnet high school in Virginia. Those parents lost in part because Asian American students were still overrepresented relative to the applicant pool.
Supreme Court justices will now consider whether a group claiming to be targeted by a race-neutral policy must show it was disproportionately harmed to prove intentional discrimination.
The attorneys for the Montgomery County parents argued it's not enough to compare whether a targeted racial group is represented fairly compared with the group of students who apply. Other evidence of discrimination should also be considered, they wrote.
“Under the applicant pool benchmark, the government can set specific racial targets, hit them, and avoid even an inquiry into discriminatory intent," so long as it hasn't explicitly called out race in its process, they wrote in their appeal to the Supreme Court.
The school system has consistently argued the new admissions policy, called the Pandemic Plan due to the timing of its release, is race-neutral.
“The Pandemic Plan is a colorblind lottery,” attorneys wrote in a brief asking the Supreme Court not to take up the case. “Nothing about the Pandemic Plan, its history, or its purpose is offensive to the Constitution.”
The court is expected to hear arguments in the coming months.