The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to hear a case on a public magnet high school's admissions policy that plaintiffs say discriminates against Asian Americans. The request comes less than two months after the high court overturned race-conscious admissions for higher education.
Parents who originally sued Virginia's Fairfax County School Board and appealed on Monday to the Supreme Court claim the district's 2020 decision to change its admissions process into a holistic one targets Asian American students, who — prior to the policy change — made up 73% of the incoming class of 2024 at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. White students made up 17.7%, Hispanic students 3.3%, multiracial/other 6%, and the number of admitted Black students were too few to report separately.
Thomas Jefferson is a highly competitive STEM school ranked No. 1 in the nation by U.S. News and World Report. The admissions process in 2020, prior to its policy change, included an entrance exam, as well as teacher recommendations and an essay, among other things.
In an effort to diversify later classes, the Fairfax County School Board changed its admissions policy, including no longer requiring an entrance exam or teacher recommendations, and instead evaluating "experience factors." The latter can include being economically disadvantaged, English language learners, or special education students, per FCPS.
Parents asking the Supreme Court to review the case, however, claim the change intentionally led to a drop in enrolled Asian American students. That student group made up 54% of the incoming class of 2025, admitted in 2021 — right after the policy change — compared to the 73% in 2020. The breakdown for the class of 2025 also included 22% White students, 11% Hispanic, 7% Black and 5% multiracial/other.
After the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of FCPS in May, parents now are appealing to the Supreme Court saying "a new species of racial discrimination has been spreading through some of our largest public school systems."
The parents specifically invoked the Supreme Court's controversial June decision overturning race-conscious admissions for colleges, in the suit brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"Like the discrimination this Court invalidated in SFFA, it primarily targets Asian-American students," petitioners said in their appeal filed Monday "But unlike that discrimination, it takes the form of facially race-neutral admissions criteria intentionally designed to achieve the same results as overt racial discrimination."
The high court's decision this summer upended decades of policies that universities and colleges have used to admit students in efforts to diversify their campuses. Experts predicted the ruling would potentially have a trickle-down effect on other areas of education, including K-12 policies and college scholarship.
Now, petitioners in the Virginia high school admissions case say their lawsuit "presents a question of national importance that the Court has yet to answer directly."
"Coming as it does on the heels of last Term’s decision curtailing racial discrimination in higher education admissions, this is one of several ongoing challenges to competitive K-12 admissions criteria that seek to accomplish a racial objective 'indirectly' because it 'cannot be done directly,'" they said.
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