CV NEWS FEED // The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a case regarding a Virginia school that revised its admissions process in the name of “diversity.”
The case’s plaintiffs argued that the new admissions policy discriminated against Asian Americans.
The proportion of students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”) of Asian descent fell dramatically – by around 20 percentage points – after the new policy was instituted.
In declining to hear Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, the Court allowed a May 2023 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to stand.
The Fourth Circuit then upheld TJ’s pro-“diversity” admissions process and overturned a federal district court’s prior ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.
Associate Justice Samuel Alito wrote a scathing dissent against the Court’s decision not to hear the case. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas joined Alito in the dissent.
Alito stated that the Fourth Circuit’s “decision in this case is based on a patently incorrect and dangerous understanding of what a plaintiff must show to prove intentional race discrimination.”
“A group representing applicants for admission to a highly competitive public magnet school brought suit, claiming that changes in the school’s admissions requirements violated the Equal Protection Clause,” Alito explained. “They alleged that the changes were made for the purpose of discriminating on the basis of race, to the detriment of Asian-American applicants.”
The justice explained that the Fourth Circuit “held that the plaintiff’s claim failed simply because the challenged changes did not reduce the percentage of Asian-American admittees below the percentage of Asian-American students in the schools in the jurisdictions served by the magnet school.”
“What the Fourth Circuit majority held, in essence, is that intentional racial discrimination is constitutional so long as it is not too severe,” Alito emphasized. “This reasoning is indefensible, and it cries out for correction.”
The Economist’s Steven Mazie called the court’s decision “a major development.”
“The question after last year’s decision banning race-based affirmative action was whether SCOTUS would go after affirmative action substitutes,” Mazie wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Only two justices seem to want to go that route.”
On June 29, 2023, CatholicVote’s Erika Ahern reported that the Court ruled 6-3 that “racial preferences in admissions programs for colleges and universities violate the ‘equal protection’ clause of the 14th Amendment.”
“The decision reigns in unchecked ‘affirmative action’ for institutions of higher education in the United States,” Ahern noted.
In the majority opinion last year, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that it “is far from evident… how assigning students to … racial categories and making admissions decisions based on them furthers the educational benefits that the universities claim to pursue.”
On Tuesday, however, Roberts reportedly voted with the majority of the Court in declining to hear the TJ case.
>> SUPREME COURT ENDS UNCHECKED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION <<
The Washington Post reported that TJ, “often ranked the best high school in the country, changed its admissions process in 2020 in part to boost racial diversity at the school, which had long enrolled single-digit percentages of Black and Hispanic students.”
The Post explained that TJ’s “revised process” used
a more holistic review of applicants by considering what admissions experts call “race-neutral” factors, such as what neighborhood a student lives in and their socioeconomic status. The new process also removed a notoriously difficult admissions test and $100 application fee, and reserved a set number of seats for students from each of Fairfax County’s middle schools.
Per the Post, the first class of students admitted under the new policy “saw boosts in Black and Latino enrollment, as well as more low-income students, English-language learners and girls.”
“The percentage of Asian American students dropped from around 70 percent to 50 percent,” the Post added.
