The Supreme Court decided against hearing a legal challenge to the admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School Of Science and Technology, a top Northern Virginia magnet school.
The challenge argued that changes to the school’s admissions policy are biased against Asian American students, who make up a majority of students at TJ. The current admissions policy does not explicitly consider race, but was created with the intent of increasing diversity through things like socioeconomic factors and a student’s feeder school.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court declined to review an appellate court’s ruling upholding the admissions policy, which the Fairfax school board put in place in 2021 after years of concerns about a lack of diversity at the school. That ruling will now stand, effectively ending a three year legal battle.
The Fairfax school board hailed the decision.
“We have long believed that the new admissions process is both constitutional and in the best interest of all of our students. It guarantees that all qualified students from all neighborhoods in Fairfax County have a fair shot at attending this exceptional high school,” said Karl Frisch, who chairs the school board and represents the Providence District.
The case was brought by the Coalition for TJ, a group of parents affiliated with or formerly affiliated with the high school. They were represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative legal advocacy group that has been involved in a series of cases challenging diversity policies in competitive high school admissions.
“Today, the American Dream was dealt a blow, but we remain committed to protecting the values of merit, equality, and justice — and we will prevail for the future of our children and for the nation we love and embrace,” said Asra Nomani, co-founder of Coalition for TJ and a former parent at the school, in a statement.
TJ’s revamped admissions policy got rid of the school’s high-stakes admissions test and a $100 application fee, and instead considered students’ grades, an essay, middle school class rank, and GPA. It also took into account race-neutral factors like socioeconomic status, whether students were English language learners, and whether they attended a public middle school that tended to be underrepresented at TJ (previously, the majority of students came from about eight ‘feeder’ middle schools).
Those changes resulted in what The Washington Post called “the most diverse class in recent history.” The class of 2025, the first admitted under the new policy, featured a much higher percentage of low-income students, English language learners, and girls, and for the first time included students from all public middle schools in the county.
But the Coalition for TJ argued the policy — while neutral on its face — had the intent of promoting diversity at the expense of Asian American students. The legal case argued that the declining share of TJ admissions offers given to Asian American students in incoming classes was evidence of discrimination (Asian American students still received the highest total number of offers). It also cited text messages and comments from members of the Fairfax school board and TJ’s principal discussing the need for the admissions policy to produce classes broadly reflective of the Fairfax community as a whole. That logic, the Coalition argued, constituted “race balancing,” and demonstrated anti-Asian bias.
The Fourth Circuit found in favor of the school last year.
“Expanding the array of student backgrounds in the classroom serves, at minimum, as a legitimate interest in the context of public primary and secondary schools,” Judge Robert B. King, a Clinton appointee, wrote in the majority opinion at the time. “And that is the primary and essential effect of the challenged admissions policy.”
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from their colleagues’ decision letting the lower court’s decision stand.
“What the Fourth Circuit majority held, in essence, is that intentional racial discrimination is constitutional so long as it is not too severe,” Alito wrote. “This reasoning is indefensible, and it cries out for correction.”
The decision to allow the Fairfax admissions policy to stand comes less than a year after the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, in a case that also featured charges of bias against qualified Asian American students. The TJ case was widely seen as a barometer for how much further the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court might be willing to go in reversing schools’ attempts to promote diversity in their student populations.
The legal wrangling over the admissions policy at TJ put the school at the center of conservative political pushback against Northern Virginia schools, along with disputes over teaching about race and inclusive policies for transgender students.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin brought the issue up on the campaign trail in 2021 as part of his focus on “parents’ rights.” Early last year, Attorney General Jason Miyares launched an investigation into TJ after parents complained of a delay in distributing National Merit letters of commendation to students, and he promised an investigation into the admissions policy at the same time. Both issues, he said, were possible indications of anti-Asian American sentiment at the school, though there was no immediate evidence of racial animus. A law firm hired by FCPS to assess the delay in the commendation letters found no evidence that the school had purposefully withheld them.
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Published Date : 2024-02-20 19:10:00
Source : dcist.com
