The Supreme Court will not hear a new case on race and school admissions

The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a challenge to new admissions criteria at an elite public high school in Virginia that eliminated standardized testing, paving the way for the use of a policy intended to diversify the school's student body.

As usual, the court gave no reasons for dismissing the case. Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. issued a dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, which sharply criticized an appeals court's ruling in the case that upheld the new criteria and rejected the challengers' argument that they had unfairly disadvantaged Asian Americans .

The Supreme Court's “willingness to accept the dissenting decision below is difficult to understand,” Justice Alito wrote. “We must wipe the decision from the books, and because the court refuses to do so, I must respectfully dissent.”

The Supreme Court in June struck down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, but left open the constitutionality of admissions standards that do not directly consider race in diversifying enrollment. Still the majority opinion, by Chief Justice John. G. Roberts quoted an earlier statement that said, “What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.”

The court's decision not to hear the Virginia case, along with an order this month to block West Point's race-conscious admissions program, suggests that most justices are reluctant to take immediate steps to expand the limits of their ruling. explore. June.

The revisions to Virginia's admissions program followed protests over the 2020 killing of George Floyd. Amid concerns about how few Black and Hispanic students attended the school, one of the nation's top public high schools, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, adopted what he says are race-neutral admissions standards. The school board abolished a strict entrance exam and offered admission to the best students from every high school in the area, rather than to the best applicants from any school.

Admissions officers were also instructed to consider “experience factors,” such as whether students were poor, learned English or attended a high school that was “historically underrepresented.” But the officers were not told the applicant's race, gender or name.

A group of parents, many of them Asian-American, objected to the plan, calling themselves the Coalition for TJ., sued to stop it.

But a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Virginia, reigned in May that Thomas Jefferson did not discriminate in his confessions. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian legal group representing the parents, asked the Supreme Court to hear their appeal, saying the new eligibility plan was “intentionally designed to achieve the same results as overt racial discrimination.”

The Supreme Court ruling in June Students for fair admissions against Harvard, the coalition's petition said, “it would mean little if schools could achieve the same discriminatory outcome through race-neutral proxies.”

Attorneys for the school board responded that the new admissions criteria had nothing to do with race and was instead aimed at removing socioeconomic and geographic barriers.

“The new policy is both race-neutral and race-blind,” order of the school board said. “It was not designed to, and has not, produced a student population that approximates the racial demographics of Fairfax County or any other predetermined racial balance.”

After the changes took effect in 2021, the percentage of Asian American students gaining admission dropped from 73 percent to 54 percent. The percentage of black students grew from just 2 percent to 8 percent; the percentage of Spanish students grew from 3 percent to 11 percent; and the percentage of white students grew from 18 percent to 22 percent.

In the Fairfax County School System in 2020, about 37 percent of students were white, 27 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Asian and 10 percent black.

Writing for the majority in the May appeals court decision: Judge Robert B. King, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, said the before and after numbers were not the right starting point. That would, he said, quoting from the school board's order, “change the previous status quo into an unchangeable quota.”

He added that the school had a legitimate interest in “expanding the range of student backgrounds.”

Justice Alito questioned this reasoning in a dissent on Tuesday. “What the Fourth Circuit majority essentially held is that intentional racial discrimination is constitutional as long as it is not too severe,” Judge Alito wrote. “This reasoning is indefensible and cries out for correction.”

He explained this, quoting from an earlier decision. “Although the new policy placed 'heavier' weight on Asian American applicants (because it reduced their chances of admission while improving the chances of every other racial group), the majority of the panel felt there was not a disparate impact because they were still overrepresented in the group. the TJ Student Organization,” Judge Alito wrote.

He added: “That is a clear misunderstanding of what it means for a law or policy to have a disparate effect on members of a particular racial or ethnic group. Under the old policy, every Asian American applicant had a certain chance of admission. The new policy has significantly reduced that opportunity, while increasing the likelihood of admission for members of other racial and ethnic groups.”

In dissent in the Fourth Circuit, Judge Allison J. Rushing, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, made a similar point. The majority, she wrote, had refused to “see beyond the neutral veneer of policy” and instead considered “an unquestioned racial motivation and an undeniably racist outcome.”

The decision was reversed a statement from 2022 Through Judge Claude M. Hilton in Federal District Court in Alexandria, which ruled that the changes made by the school board had placed a disproportionate burden on Asian American students and were “racially motivated.” The discussion about the planned changes, he wrote, was “tainted from the start by talk of racial balance.”

“It is clear that Asian American students are disproportionately harmed by the board's decision to review admissions to TJ,” Judge Hilton wrote. “Currently and in the future, Asian American applicants are disproportionately deprived of an even playing field.”

The Supreme Court has already dealt with the case once, Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, No. 23-170.

The court will do so in April 2022 rejected an urgent request of the coalition to block the new eligibility criteria while the case progressed. That was before the court's ruling in June on the ban on race-conscious admission to higher education.

Still, the court's three most conservative members — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch – that they would have granted the request.