CNN
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The Supreme Court on Monday declined to rule on whether three elite Boston public schools violate the Constitution with zip code-based admissions policies aimed at ensuring racial diversity.
The appeal marks a landmark 6-3 decision ending affirmative action in colleges and universities, allowing school officials to experiment with geography-based “race-neutral” policies to fend off courts while promoting diversity. The case was brought to the High Court more than a year after the request was made. assignment.
Two conservatives, Justices Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented from the decision not to hear the case.
Alito wrote that the court, contrary to last year’s landmark affirmative action decision, refuses to “correct clear constitutional errors that threaten to perpetuate race-based affirmative action.”
By forgoing the lawsuit, the justices left in place a ruling by a Boston-based federal appeals court that sided with the school district.
In 2020, Boston school officials eliminated test-and-grade-based admissions policies at three of the nation’s most prestigious public high schools, Premier Schools, with a combined enrollment of about 6,000 students. Instead, the school has adopted a zip code-based model that reserves seats for students with the highest GPAs in each area of Boston.
A coalition of parents and students filed the lawsuit on behalf of more than a dozen Asian American and white students. The group says the percentage of admitted students who are white or Asian has dropped from 61% to 49%, and claims the policy is racially motivated, citing the Constitution’s amendment. It was argued that this violates the equal protection clause of Article 14.
“This issue is not resolved,” the Boston Parent Federation of Academically Achieving Parents wrote in an appeal to the Supreme Court in April. “If the court dismisses this case, government officials will continue to target disadvantaged racial groups, especially Asian Americans.”
The U.S. District Court sided with the school, holding that the zip code admissions policy was not enacted with discriminatory intent. The Boston-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the ruling in December, noting that the proportion of admitted Asian American and white students remains higher than their proportion of applicants. .
The school board countered that the parents’ objections were meaningless because the admissions policy was changed after the pandemic subsided. The new admissions policy is based on a combination of grades, performance on standardized tests, and census results.
School officials also stressed that their plan does not use individual students’ race to determine admissions.
“This court’s precedent requires that public entities be blind to whether their race-neutral policies will disparately impact historically disadvantaged groups or help alleviate past disparate impacts. “There is nothing that requires that,” the school board told the Supreme Court.
Boston’s appeal was similar to one brought to the Supreme Court by Virginia parents last year. The selective Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology enrolls some of the highest performing students from each middle school in the county. The parents in both cases were represented by the Pacific Law Foundation, a liberal law organization.
The Supreme Court declined to hear the Virginia case in February.
Last year, the justices struck down policies adopted by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that considered race as one of many factors in admissions, setting a standard that had been recognized in previous case law. But the decision does not address whether schools can consider socioeconomic or geographic factors as proxies for race.
