Supreme Court Asked to Weigh In on Prestigious Virginia School’s Allegedly Race-Conscious Admissions Policies

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian legal group, asked the Supreme Court on Monday to overturn a lower court’s ruling that a prestigious Virginia high school’s admission policies were not racially biased.

“The longer this question is not resolved,” the court filing reads, “the more incentive school districts (and now universities) will have to develop workarounds that enable them to racially discriminate without using racial classifications.” The new policies were “intentionally designed to achieve the same results as overt racial discrimination.”

In 2020, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., overhauled its admission standards following the murder of George Floyd. Among the policies enacted at the time were the removal of standardized entry tests and the allocation of admissions evenly across the system’s feeder schools, rather than taking the top applicants across the entire district. Consequently, Asian-American student enrollment nosedived from 73 percent to 54 percent the first year the changes went into effect while Hispanic and black representation grew exponentially.

In May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the new admissions guidelines were constitutionally permissible. The case was brought by the Coalition for TJ, a local group representing concerned parents and community members.

The ruling overturned a Federal District Court in Alexandria’s ruling that found the new rules were “racially motivated,” discriminated against Asian Americans, and were “infected with talk of racial balancing from its inception.”

In June, the Supreme Court overturned the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, finding they violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

“The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the six-justice majority.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the nation’s top-ranked high schools according to U.S. News & World Report, had earlier found itself in hot water for reportedly delaying the distribution of National Merit certificates to students as part of a broader strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.”

“We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” the school’s director of student services admitted on a call with a concerned parent.

The incident drew Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin to appoint the state’s attorney general Jason Miyares to launch an investigation into allegations of academic discrimination.

“I am stunned by news reporting alleging that information about National Merit Awards, as determined by student PSAT scores, was withheld from students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology until after important deadlines for college scholarships had passed,” Youngkin wrote in an official statement released in early January.

“I believe this failure may have caused material harm to those students and their parents, and that this failure may have violated the Virginia Human Rights Act.”