The Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to take up a case challenging a Virginia high school’s efforts to promote diversity in education, rejecting an appeal by a coalition of parents of students who say a Virginia public school’s admissions policy racially discriminates against Asian Americans.
Despite a forceful dissent by Republican-appointed Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the majority of the court left in place a lower court’s ruling rejecting the claim by the plaintiffs that admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee.
Alito and Thomas dissented from the decision to deny hearing the case.
“We should wipe the decision off the books,” Alito wrote of the lower court’s ruling that allowed the school’s admissions policy to remain in place.
The Virginia magnet school introduced a new admissions policy in 2022 that does not consider standardized test scores and ensures a place for top students from various middle schools across the country, which the school says is race neutral. However, the changes in the policy led to a drop in the number of Asian American students and an increase in other minority students.
A group known as Coalition for TJ argued the policy goes against the high court’s 2023 landmark ruling against the use of affirmative action on college campuses, and it filed a lawsuit citing evidence that the plan was implemented with an intent to “racially balance the freshman class by excluding Asian-Americans.” Asian Americans make up the majority of students at the school, which is located in Alexandria.
Alito said that the lower court’s ruling “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. That is indefensible.” He also noted that the school’s policy model has been “trumpeted” to potential replicators as a formula to evade the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against the use of affirmative action.
Pacific Legal Foundation senior attorney Joshua Thompson, who was leading the case, said the high court missed an “important opportunity to end race-based discrimination in K-12 admissions.” PLF is currently fighting similar cases in Boston, New York, and Maryland.
“Discrimination against students based on their race is not only ethically wrong but also a clear violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection,” Thompson said. “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.”
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The high court’s 6-3 Republican-appointed majority ruled last June that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill both exhibited race-based policies that were disadvantageous against Asian American applicants, while defenders of such policies have said they have helped a number of black, Hispanic, and other minority students in their pursuit of going to college.
Meanwhile, on Feb. 2, the Supreme Court rejected a conservative student group’s efforts to force the U.S Military Academy at West Point to cease its race-based admissions policies, saying that the case is still “underdeveloped” in lower court proceedings.
