Supreme Court Won’t Hear Virginia High School Admissions Race Case

The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear another case about race and education, rejecting a challenge brought against a Virginia public school’s admissions policy designed to encourage diversity among its students.

The decision comes after the court’s conservative majority struck down affirmative action in college admissions. It means that a lower court’s ruling will be left in place, rejecting a claim brought by a coalition of parents and students that the revamped admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology discriminates against Asian Americans.

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The elite public school, nicknamed “TJ,” maintains its approach is race neutral. Plaintiffs in the case, represented by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, argued that the revised 2020 policy was intended to reduce the number of Asian Americans at the school and that it violated the Constitution’s 14th Amendment which guarantees the law is equally applied to all.

Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision not to hear the case. “The court’s willingness to swallow the aberrant decision below is hard to understand,” Alito wrote in a dissent, joined by Thomas. “We should wipe the decision off the books, and because the Court refuses to do so, I must respectfully dissent.”

The plaintiff sued the Fairfax County School Board in 2021 after the admissions policy was revised over several members’ concerns about the lack of diversity at the school. The previous policy focused on standardized testing, while the new policy reserved spaces for the top students from each middle school in the area. One hundred spots were also set aside for the highest-rated applicants overall “regardless of where they attend middle school.”

Asian Americans fell from being over 70 percent of students at the school before the changes to 54 percent in 2021, before climbing again to 60 percent in 2022 and 62 percent last year. Female students, students from other racial groups, and kids from low-income households—including Asian Americans—all increased under the new policy.

U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton in 2022 ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, saying the process to change the admissions policy had been “infected with talk of racial balancing from its inception.” The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, later overturned Hilton’s ruling, finding that the school’s policy was not discriminatory.

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