WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily approved new eligibility criteria at an elite Virginia public high school that eliminated standardized tests, paving the way for using a policy designed to diversify students in choosing the class that will come in the fall.
The court’s ruling rejected an emergency aid request from a group objecting to the new rules, saying they harmed Asian-American students.
The court’s brief injunction was unsigned and contained no grounds, which is typical when the court acts on urgent requests and asks the judges to intervene while appeals are pending. The three most conservative members of the court – Judges Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — said they would reinstate a trial judge’s ruling that blocked the new criteria. They also did not explain their thinking.
The school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, better known as TJ, has changed its admission requirements in 2020 in response to protests over the murder of George Floyd.
The school, one of the best in the country, is located in Fairfax County, outside of Washington, and accepts students from the county and several surrounding counties and cities. Like admission criteria at other elite public high schools across the country, school policy has been at the center of fierce debates between politicians and parents about whether and how to diversify enrollment.
A related matter is already before the Supreme Court, which will hear the challenges against admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina in the fall. Those programs explicitly consider race as one of many factors.
The new high school program, on the other hand, uses race-neutral criteria. In addition to abolishing standardized testing, the program reserves places for the top 1.5 percent of students at any public high school in the area, leaving about 100 openings for everyone else, including private school applicants and home-school students. been. educated.
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Admissions administrators also consider “experience factors,” such as whether students are poor or learning English or attending a high school that was “historically underrepresented” in high school. The custodians are not told about an applicant’s race, gender, or name.
After the changes took effect in 2021, the percentage of Asian-American students dropped from 73 percent to 54 percent. The percentage of black students grew from a maximum of 2 percent to 7 percent; the percentage of Hispanic students grew from 3 percent to 11 percent; and the percentage of white college students grew from 18 percent to 22 percent.
At all public schools in Fairfax County, approximately 37 percent of students are white, 27 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Asian, and 10 percent black.
The changes were challenged by a group called the Coalition for TJ, which includes some American parents of Asian-American students and is represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative legal organization that claims to defend Americans against governmental force majeure.
The group argued that the new admissions process amounted to racial discrimination targeting Asian-American students.
Judge Claude M. Hilton of the federal court in Alexandria ruled for the challengers, saying the changes were “racially motivated.” Discussion about the planned changes, he wrote, was “contaminated with rumors of racial balancing” from the start.
“Clearly, Asian-American students are being disproportionately disadvantaged by the board’s decision to review TJ’s admission,” he wrote. “Currently and in the future, Asian-American applicants are disproportionately deprived of a level playing field.”
A divided panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Virginia, overturned Judge Hilton’s decision while an appeal from the school board was filed. The practical effect of this was that the new procedures for a second authorization cycle were maintained.
In a concurring opinion, Judge Toby J. Heytens wrote that the new high school admissions program was legal.
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that it is constitutionally permissible to increase racial (and other) diversity through race-neutral means,” he wrote. “Indeed, it has requires government officials to consider such measures before turning to race-conscious alternatives.
Judge Heytens added that it would be impractical to go back to the old criteria so late in the cycle, with fall admission decisions due this month. “None of the current applicants was required to take the previously mandatory standardized tests, two-thirds of which are no longer commercially available,” he wrote.
School board lawyers told the Supreme Court that a ruling for the challengers would threaten race-neutral means of achieving diversity that the court had at least tacitly approved. For example, in Fisher v. University of Texas in 2016, the court dismissed a challenge to an admissions program that included guaranteed admission of top students to every high school in the state.
The school board letter added that the percentage of Asian-American students who received an offer of admission under the new program “was significantly greater than their share of the candidate pool,” adding that “Asian Americans were the only racial group to was substantially overrepresented compared to the share of the candidate pool.”
In addition, the Asian-American admission rate under the plan was 19.48 percent, well within the historic range of 16.8 percent to 25 percent for 2004-2020, the letter said. “These facts alone preclude the coalition’s claim that Asian Americans were disadvantaged in the admission process.”