US Supreme Court to hear Maryland case involving race in school admissions

The ​US Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider reviving a lawsuit ‌against ​a Maryland county's lottery admissions policy for four elite public middle schools that some parents claim unlawfully discriminates against Asian American applicants.

Delving again into the contentious issue of race in student admissions, the justices took up an appeal by a coalition of parents of a lower court's decision rejecting their claim that Montgomery County's policy ‌violates the US Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law. The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case and rule by the end of June.

The parents sued to challenge the entrance policies for the county's academically rigorous "magnet" schools, which provide enrichment programs in math and science, or the humanities, for high-achieving students in sixth through eighth grades. They include Takoma Park Middle School in Silver Spring and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School ‌in Germantown. The case represents the latest legal attack on entrance policies at certain highly selective public schools that challengers critique for continuing to pursue "racial balancing" with the aim of boosting diversity.

The Supreme Court issued ‌a landmark 2023 ruling that rejected race-conscious college and university admissions policies long used to raise the number of Black, Hispanic and other minority students on campuses. Plaintiffs in these new legal challenges claim that admissions to these prestigious programs, though race-neutral on the surface, use proxies such as socioeconomic status to achieve the same unlawful, race-based result in pursuit of diversity.

The legal challenges coincide with President Donald Trump's policies, implemented since he returned to office last year, against diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs in education, as well as ⁠in the US ​government and military, and in private companies. At issue in the ⁠Maryland case is whether lower courts may dismiss claims of intentional racial discrimination if the policy has not disproportionately harmed that racial group, in this instance Asian American students.

Montgomery County is a wealthy suburb of Washington, DC. The parent coalition, called the Association for ⁠Education Fairness, is represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian legal group that has pursued similar challenges in Virginia and Massachusetts. The Supreme Court rejected those cases in 2024.

ENRICHED INSTRUCTION The Montgomery County school district's selection process was introduced in the 2021-2022 ​school year, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It screens all students for academic potential, and then implements a lottery to randomly assign students from that pool to receive enriched instruction at either a magnet ⁠school or a local school.

The lawsuit said that the lottery system led to a lower number of Asian American student placements at the magnet schools. The suit alleged that the screening process makes it harder for Asian American students, who the challengers said are clustered in "high performing, low-poverty ⁠elementary ​schools" to enter the lottery pool. Part of the process ranks a student's performance by comparing the student's test scores against those of other students whose family incomes are at a similar level.

US District Judge Paula Xinis threw out the case in 2022, finding that the policy did not place a disproportionate burden on Asian American students. The judge noted that the percentage of admitted Asian American students exceeded the percentage ⁠of Asian Americans among all applicants to the magnet schools. Xinis also found that there was no evidence that the lottery policy was implemented with discriminatory intent. The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld ⁠the dismissal, agreeing that the lawsuit "does not plausibly allege ⁠that the challenged policy disparately impacts Asian American students."

"Racial balancing is racial discrimination," lawyers for the parents told the Supreme Court in a filing. The 4th Circuit's ruling permits "some racial discrimination so long as it is done through a proxy," they added.

The Supreme Court's 2023 affirmative action ruling upended decades of precedent, striking down ‌programs used by Harvard University and the ‌University of North Carolina that took race into account as one of many factors in student admissions evaluations.