Supreme Court Allows School Policy That Whites and Asians Say Is Biased

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case to decide whether three elite Boston public schools violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by trying to ensure racial diversity with an admissions policy based on zip codes of applicants.

By refusing to review the case, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court decision saying there is no evidence of an intent to discriminate in the admissions policy.

A group of parents claimed the policy demonstrated bias against White and Asian students, as evidenced by a drop in their enrollment at the schools.

The Boston case is the latest example of schools experimenting with race-neutral admission policies after the Supreme Court ended university affirmative action programs last year in the case of Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College.

The policies are intended to reduce racial disparities in elite schools.

Instead of basing admissions largely on entrance exam scores, the Boston schools also consider family incomes and the neighborhoods where applicants live in an effort to give them equal opportunities.

The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence argued the policies might not explicitly mention race as a factor but they had the effect of discriminating.The group sued on behalf of five unidentified students.

A federal judge ruled the admissions policies of the Boston Latin Academy, Boston Latin School and John D. O’Bryant School were justified under the Supreme Court’s ruling abolishing affirmative action. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, which brought the case on appeal to the Supreme Court.

The schools changed their admissions policy in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic prevented them from administering entrance exams. Instead, they set quotas to select applicants from certain zip codes and then ranked them based on family incomes and grade point averages.

The percentage of White and Asian students fell at the three schools from 69% to 41% after the policy was adopted, according to undisputed plaintiffs’ court filings. 

In ruling for the schools, U.S. District Court Judge William Kayatta wrote, “And the Coalition offers no evidence that geography, family income, and GPA were in any way unreasonable or invalid as selection criteria for public-school admissions programs.”

He added that White and Asian students still remain overly represented in the student populations even after the admissions policy change.

Conservative Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented in the decision to let the lower court ruling stand.

Alito wrote in his dissent that there was “overwhelming” evidence of racial discrimination in an apparent violation of the 14th Amendment.

“As the committee members made ‘explicit,’ they worked to decrease the number of White and Asian students at the [schools] in service of ‘racial equity.’ That is racial balancing by another name and is undoubtedly unconstitutional,” the dissent said.

The case bears strong similarities to a case in Alexandria, Virginia, in which the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology revamped its admissions policy in 2020. 

The new policy dropped standardized test requirements and put a higher emphasis on “experience factors.” They included applicants’ household income and whether they come from middle schools that were historically underrepresented at the high school.

Parents of Asian American students sued, saying the policy had a disparate impact that excluded some of their children from the school.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the policy. The Supreme Court declined to review it.

The relevant case is Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp v. The School Committee of the City of Boston in the U.S. Supreme Court.

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