https://www.city-journal.org/article/did-scotus-green-light-racial-discrimination
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it would not hear Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, a case concerning revised admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, an elite magnet school in Alexandria, Virginia. The school has adopted a new admissions policy that, while race-neutral on its face, effectively penalizes Asian American applicants. The Court’s denial of certiorari practically endorses efforts to discriminate against Asian American students and may lead other schools to follow suit.
Before 2020, TJ’s admissions process was strictly merit-based. Any student who had completed or was enrolled in Algebra I and held at least a 3.0 grade point average was eligible to apply. Applicants were required to take a standardized test, similar to the SAT/ACT, and those with the highest scores advanced to the process’s second round, in which they had to submit two teacher recommendations and complete three writing prompts and a problem-solving essay. TJ’s class of 2024 (the last admitted under the old, merit-based system) is 73 percent Asian, 17.7 percent white, 3.3 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent black.
The high number of Asian American students at TJ—and the correspondingly low number of black and Hispanic students—troubled education officials in Fairfax County. TJ principal Ann Bonitatibus, for example, said in October 2020 that she wanted a student body that “more closely aligns with the representation in Fairfax County Public Schools.” One school board member wrote in an email that she was “angry and disappointed” with TJ’s racial makeup. Other education officials in Fairfax County stated that TJ’s entrance exam had led to too many “students who had been in test prep since second grade.”
Apparently in response to these objections, the school board crafted a new admissions policy in December 2020. The new scheme limits how many students each area public middle school can send to TJ (the equivalent of 1.5 percent of its eighth-grade enrollment). It also calls for applicants to be evaluated on several criteria, including GPA; a “portrait sheet” where they must demonstrate “graduate attributes” and “21st century skills”; a problem-solving essay; and “experience factors.” These “experience factors” include whether a student is economically disadvantaged, an English language learner, participating in a special-education program, or attending an underrepresented middle school. Notably, the school board struck the standardized-testing requirement.