US supreme court will not hear case on education diversity policies
The supreme court on Tuesday turned down a challenge to the admissions policy at a prestigious Virginia high school that could have restricted efforts to promote diversity in education.
In declining to take up an appeal by a group of students and parents challenging the admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson high school for science and technology, the court leaves intact a lower court decision upholding the admissions criteria that school officials argued was “race neutral” and designed to mitigate socioeconomic and geographic barriers for prospective students.
The coalition of parents and students had argued that the school’s admissions policy racially discriminated against Asian Americans when an admissions exam was replaced with an essay and it began admitting students from a broader cross-section of schools and gave weight to poorer students and those learning English.
Last May, a lower court ruled that the admissions policy had not been changed with discriminatory intent and that the school had a legitimate interest in “expanding the array of student backgrounds”. That in turn was a reversal of a 2022 decision that found the changes had disproportionately burdened Asian American students.
The conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from Tuesday’s supreme court’s decision to deny hearing the appeal.
In a 10-page dissent, Alito wrote that the lower court ruling was “flagrantly wrong” for holding that some discrimination against Asian Americans was legally tolerable so long as they were overrepresented at the school.
“The court of appeals decision in this case is based on a patently incorrect and dangerous understanding of what a plaintiff must show to prove intentional race discrimination,” Alito wrote, joined by Thomas.
“The holding below 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,” Alito continued.
Alito had previously voiced his opposition to the ruling, calling it “aberrant” and “a virus that may spread if not promptly eliminated”.
The court’s decision to not hear the appeal effectively pauses ongoing ideological battles over school and university admissions policies.
Last June, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority rejected race-conscious college and university admissions policies long used to raise the number of Black, Hispanic and other minority students on campus.
That ruling is predicted to force universities to find new ways to attract a diverse student bodies, including by relying on an application essays emphasizing discriminatory hurdles of race, gender and background that prospective students may have experienced. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by the court’s five other conservatives, held that giving some minority applicants a boost over others based on their race was a violation of the US constitution.
But Roberts also said admissions officers could consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise”, as long as it was done on an individual basis.
“A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote. “In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual – not on the basis of race,” he wrote.
Edward Blum, the founder of the group Students for Fair Admissions, which brought the cases against Harvard and University of North Carolina, said “the law will not tolerate direct proxies for racial classifications”.
But critics of the decision said it left in place discrimination against students of color by giving an unfair boost to the mostly white children of alumni.
In California, where voters banned affirmative action for public universities more than two decades ago, the state has spent more than $500m on alternative approaches, including the use of socio-economic status, geographic location and targeted recruitment at schools with high numbers of minority students.