What good is the Supreme Court’s two-year-old ban on racial preferences in educational admissions if the high court lets other high-demand schools flagrantly flout it?
That’s what justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas asked their colleagues last year when SCOTUS declined to review a ruling that upheld an admissions scheme explicitly designed to change racial demographics in Boston’s most prestigious public high schools, several months after the duo scolded the court for declining a similar Virginia case across the river from D.C.
The plaintiffs in the Boston challenge have come back with a new 14th Amendment lawsuit claiming the mid-litigation pivot to a different admissions scheme for the so-called exam schools, based on socioeconomic “tiers” instead of the original zip codes, has created the “disparate impact” result required by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals: underrepresentation.
“Now, by clustering most white students together in one ‘tier’ where they compete only against each other for Exam School seats, the current Tier System ‘succeeded’ in reducing the proportion of white students admitted to the Exam Schools below the group’s share of the applicant pool three years in a row,” the suit says.
Filed by the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence on behalf of dozens of parents of white and Asian-American students denied and seeking admission to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy and John D. O’Bryant School of Science and Mathematics, the lawsuit includes data on the composition of the applicant pool from a public records request.
“Because these students were denied admission to their Exam School of choice due to their race, court-ordered admission to those schools is the only remedy for this race-based harm,” and a permanent injunction on the tier system is the only remedy for future applicants, the suit says.
“Boston Public Schools cannot launder racial quotas through socioeconomic labels” in the tier system, said the coalition’s lawyer, Chris Kieser of the Pacific Legal Foundation. “The Equal Protection Clause forbids government discrimination, whether done openly or by proxy.”
The defendants, Boston School Committee and Superintendent Mary Skipper, on Tuesday got an extension of time to file an answer until Sept. 11. The district’s lawyers didn’t answer queries by Just the News, and a district spokesperson referred the query to another office, which did not respond.
Northern Virginia’s prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the subject of Justice Alito’s first fiery rebuke of his colleagues for tacitly allowing “intentional racial discrimination … so long as it is not too severe,” continues facing political and regulatory scrutiny for alleged discrimination against Asian Americans.
The U.S. Department of Education opened a civil rights probe of Fairfax County Public Schools this spring, from a referral by state Attorney General Jason Miyares, into its admissions policy adopted in 2020 that eliminated standardized testing and implemented a “holistic” evaluation process for TJ, as it’s known, that includes personal experiences.
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