The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a challenge to admissions policies at four selective magnet middle schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., brought by a group of parents who say the policies discriminate against Asian American students.1,4,5,7
The parent group, the Association for Education Fairness, said in its lawsuit that the district's admissions policy is race-neutral on its face but is designed to boost the admission of Black and Latino students while disadvantaging Asian American applicants. The high court said it will weigh whether the group has enough evidence of discrimination for the case to move forward. If the justices rule for the group, the lawsuit could be revived.1,4
Lower courts dismissed the case. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis threw it out in 2022, noting that the percentage of admitted Asian American students exceeded the percentage of Asian Americans among all applicants to the magnet schools. She also found no evidence that the lottery policy was implemented with discriminatory intent. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision, relying in part on a recent ruling involving a highly selective magnet high school in Virginia, where Asian American students were also still overrepresented relative to the applicant pool.1,4
The district's selection process, which it calls the Pandemic Plan, was introduced in the 2021-2022 school year during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Al Jazeera. It screens all students for academic potential and then uses a lottery to randomly assign students from that pool to enriched instruction at a magnet school or a local school. Part of the process ranks a student's performance by comparing his or her test scores against those of students whose family incomes are at a similar level.1
ABC News gave a different account of how the change began, saying it grew out of work that started about 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 to factor in the poverty levels of the schools students attended, and the share of Asian American students, who were clustered in more affluent, high-performing schools, subsequently fell. The challengers, for their part, said Asian American students are clustered in "high-performing, low-poverty elementary schools" and that the screening makes it harder for them to enter the lottery pool.1,4
The parent group sued in 2020. Not long afterward, the school system, which educates more than 150,000 students, eliminated an extra in-person exam. Students now qualify for the lottery based on their performance on standardized tests, but students in more affluent schools, where Asian American students are concentrated, must perform better on that exam to enter the lottery.4
The parents' attorneys argued that it is not enough to compare whether a targeted racial group is represented fairly against the students who apply, and that other evidence of discrimination should also be considered. "Under the applicant pool benchmark, the government can set specific racial targets, hit them, and avoid even an inquiry into discriminatory intent," they wrote in their appeal to the Supreme Court, so long as it has not explicitly called out race in its process.1,4
The school system has consistently argued that the policy is race-neutral. In a brief asking the Supreme Court not to take up the case, its lawyers wrote, "The Pandemic Plan is a colorblind lottery." They added, "Nothing about the Pandemic Plan, its history, or its purpose is offensive to the Constitution."1,4
The justices will now consider whether a group claiming to be targeted by a race-neutral policy must show that it was disproportionately harmed in order to prove intentional discrimination. Reason, which described the case, framed the question as "[w]hether a plaintiff challenging a facially neutral admissions policy as racially discriminatory must establish that the targeted racial group suffered an aggregate disparate impact relative to its share of the applicant pool."1,5
The case comes three years after a majority of the court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. The Hill noted that the 2023 decision left open questions about how far school districts may still go to promote diversity, and this case is seen by its parties and commentators as a test of that ruling.4,7
The court has not yet scheduled arguments. ABC News said the justices are expected to hear the case in the coming months, and Al Jazeera reported that a ruling is expected by June.1,4