The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case on the role race plays in admissions to selective middle schools in Maryland. A group of parents says the policies discriminated against Asian students in favour of Black and Latino students.
On Monday, the court agreed to take up the parents’ appeal concerning four academically demanding “magnet” schools in Montgomery County, a suburb on the edge of Washington, DC. The justices said they would examine whether the parent group, the Association for Education Fairness, has enough evidence of discrimination for the lawsuit to move forward.
Lower courts dismissed the challenge earlier
Lower courts had previously dismissed the case, finding that Asian-American students were not underrepresented at the specialised-curriculum schools compared with the pool of students who applied. If the Supreme Court rules in favour of the parents, the lawsuit could be revived.
The court is expected to hear arguments in the coming months and issue a ruling by June. In 2022, US District Judge Paula Xinis threw out the case, noting that the share of admitted Asian-American students was higher than their share among all magnet school applicants.
How the Montgomery County admissions process works
The district introduced its selection process in the 2021-2022 school year, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It screens all students for academic potential, then uses a lottery to randomly assign students from that pool to enriched instruction at either a magnet school or a local school.
The challengers argue that the screening makes it harder for Asian-American students to reach the lottery pool. They say many of those students are clustered in “high-performing, low-poverty elementary schools”. Part of the process also ranks a student’s performance by comparing test scores with those of students from families with similar incomes.
Parents and school system dispute the policy’s intent
In their appeal, the parents wrote that “the government can set specific racial targets, hit them, and avoid even an inquiry into discriminatory intent” under the applicant pool benchmark, so long as race is not explicitly named in the process. The school system has consistently said its admissions policy, nicknamed the “Pandemic Plan” because of when it was released, is race-neutral.
In a brief urging the Supreme Court not to take up the case, lawyers for the school system wrote that “The Pandemic Plan is a colorblind lottery.” The justices will now consider whether a group claiming to be targeted by a race-neutral policy must show it was disproportionately harmed in order to prove intentional discrimination.
