By Sean Salai (The Washington Times)
Asian parents in Montgomery County are asking the Supreme Court to hear their argument that the public schools system’s “racial balancing” policy illegally excludes their high-performing children from middle school STEM programs.
The Association for Education Fairness bills itself as a group of “concerned Asian-American parents” supporting merit-based admissions. It insists in a writ filed this month that Maryland’s largest school district misused “facially-neutral admissions criteria” to purge “undesirable racial enrollment patterns.”
The writ singles out a post-pandemic mandate that “students in the band of lowest-poverty schools (where Asian-American students are disproportionately clustered) had to achieve a 93rd percentile score” to enter the lottery to enroll at a science, technology, engineering and math campus.
By contrast, it notes that Black and Hispanic elementary “students from the highest-poverty band only had to achieve a 60th percentile score” to become eligible for the district’s two selective STEM middle schools.
The petition asks the nine justices to direct the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a February ruling that sided with Montgomery County Public Schools.
The appeals court ruled that the parents could not argue the policy’s discriminatory intent without first proving Asian enrollment dropped below the share of Asian applicants — a metric the parents say clashes with other circuit court rulings and hides a broad reengineering of racial demographics.
Attorney Christopher Kieser of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm representing the parents in court, called on the high court to “restore a uniform constitutional standard” for enforcing the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
The clause says that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
“The Equal Protection Clause protects individuals from intentional racial discrimination, not just racial groups in the aggregate,” Mr. Kieser said Monday. “Right now, whether families can even present evidence that school officials intentionally discriminated depends on where they live.”
Christopher Cram, the school district’s deputy communications chief, pledged to challenge the claims in court.
“MCPS remains committed to providing equitable access to rigorous academic opportunities for all students,” Mr. Cram said in a Wednesday email. “The district rejects the characterization that its admissions process is designed to disadvantage any racial or ethnic group. Admission to middle school criteria-based programs is conducted through a centralized review process that considers multiple academic measures.”
’Discriminatory Motive’
The Association for Education Fairness first filed the lawsuit in 2020, targeting an income-based “field test” the school district implemented to boost minority enrollment in gifted programs.
The suit came four years after the consulting firm Metis reported to county officials that “significant racial and socioeconomic disparities in the enrollment and acceptance rates to academically selective programs … suggest a need to revise the criteria and process used to select students for these programs.”
A federal judge found the lawsuit “makes plausible that the County acted with a discriminatory motive” but tossed it out when the district replaced the field tests with a lottery system.
The parents refiled their case in 2024, hoping to capitalize on a 2023 Supreme Court decision to strike down race-based college admissions.
Constitutional law experts say it remains unclear whether the justices will heed their request to make the appeals court revisit its decision.
The high court declined in February 2024 to hear an appeal from Northern Virginia parents challenging a similar admissions change at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology.
“The justices do not seem interested in enforcing the [university admissions] decision for other schools,” said Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston. “The chief justice said his piece, and will let other issues fester.”
The Montgomery County writ filed this month noted that Virginia parents insisted in their complaint that Fairfax County Public Schools “disproportionately deprived” Asian American applicants “of a level playing field in competing for” seats at Jefferson High.
Attorney Ilya Shapiro, a libertarian constitutional law expert at the Manhattan Institute, said the Supreme Court could still build on language in its 2023 ruling that forbids schools from using illegal proxies for race to control enrollment demographics.
“Perhaps now enough time has passed that they’re willing to jump back into this pool,” Mr. Shapiro said in an email.
This article was made available to WMAL via The Washington Times.
