The Supreme Court announced Monday it will decide a case out of Montgomery County Public Schools over the role race plays in public school admissions policies and how they are challenged in court.
The justices agreed to review a lawsuit from a coalition of Asian American parents, who said the reformed admissions process for magnet schools in the Maryland county benefitted enrollment for other minority students to the detriment of their children.
The court limited the case to just one question: whether challengers to a school admissions policy must prove that the policy disproportionately harms a racial group compared to its share of the applicant pool.
In the Maryland case, a federal appeals court ruled that the Association for Education Fairness, or AFEF, could not prevail in the challenge unless it showed that the share of Asian American students admitted under a lottery was lower than the Asian American share of the applicant pool for magnet programs, the group’s petition says.
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“Because the substantial drop in Asian-American enrollment did not meet that benchmark, the district court dismissed AFEF’s complaint,” the petition says.
But lower courts have split on that in cases involving some of the nation’s largest school districts, the AFEF lawyers say, meaning that the standard to show a policy is discriminatory depends on where the school is located.
The Supreme Court can use this case to “restore national uniformity to this fundamental area of constitutional law,” the group’s petition said. “As additional challenges to admissions policies continue to play out, the constitutional standard governing intentional discrimination claims increasingly depends on geography rather than law.”
The Maryland challenge at the center of the case started years ago. AFEF, which is represented by libertarian legal group Pacific Legal Foundation, argues the policies have disproportionately impacted Asian American students.
In 2021, the board adjusted the policy to factor in school and local averages when evaluating math and reading test scores, and used a lottery system where all fifth graders who met specific criteria in their grades, reading level and standardized test scores were placed in a pool for admission to magnet programs, the petition says.
A report filed by Metis, a consulting firm hired by Montgomery County Public Schools to study special academic programs, showed that admission for Asian American students in magnet schools fell while students of other races saw increased enrollment, the petition says.
Erin Wilcox, one of the attorneys representing AFEF, said the school system avoided directly using race in the admissions process by instead using “racial proxies” — factors that are strongly correlated to race — like peer grouping and local norms.
Wilcox said students at a lower-poverty school, which included a lot of Asian American students specifically, would’ve had to score in the 93rd percentile to even get into the lottery to get into a magnet middle school.
“Whereas if you went to a very high-poverty school, where there are very few Asian Americans, that score was only in the 60th percentile,” Wilcox told The Washington Sun. “This is what we call proxy discrimination, and it’s every bit as unconstitutional as if Montgomery County was saying, ‘Oh, you’re Asian American? Nope, sorry.’”
Montgomery County Public Schools had encouraged the Supreme Court not to take up the case. The school district said the appeals court dismissed the case for other reasons as well.
“Indeed, it is difficult to even conceptualize how a lottery-based admissions policy — adopted in response to an unforeseeable global pandemic — could intentionally discriminate on the basis of race,” a court filing in the case says.
A spokesperson for Montgomery County Public Schools and the board of education said the hearing will not specifically evaluate MCPS’s magnet school programs but instead “address a purely legal question” of how plaintiffs challenging facially race-neutral admissions criteria must demonstrate discrimination.
“Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) remains committed to providing equitable access to rigorous opportunities for all students. This commitment will continue uninterrupted as the judicial process proceeds,” the school system said in an email.
Multiracial coalitions of students, families and community organizations that had provided recommendations to the board on the policy said in a brief in the case that the changes were aimed at increasing enrollment for Black and Hispanic students, who are underrepresented in magnet schools.
In the first year of the lottery process, the organizations say, Black and Latino students together comprised about 33% and 41% of admittees to two of the magnet programs at issue, compared to previously having a “negligible” percentage of admittees in previous years.
“This lawsuit aims to deter school systems across the country from pursuing such beneficial measures — even when they are urgently needed to remedy the longstanding denial of equal educational opportunities to Black, Latino, and Asian American students,” lawyers for the organizations said in their briefing.
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