I'm at school now There may be Something like a roadmap: You are prohibited from considering race, but it may be okay to consider neighborhood, socio-economic, and other factors.
“This is a huge relief,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which advocates for school integration policies. “This means school districts across the country can continue to use a full set of socio-economic tools to create diverse school environments.”
This approach could also represent the future for universities seeking alternative routes to building diverse classes in the wake of the high court's affirmative action ruling.
“All these universities want to promote diversity, but they also don't want to be defendants in future lawsuits,” says Sonia Starr, a law professor at the University of Chicago who closely followed the Virginia lawsuit. .
Since 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled that school districts cannot use race as a factor in assigning students to schools, K-12 school districts have been prohibited from overtly using race. We are working on ways to promote diversity without But until last year, universities were allowed to consider race in admissions decisions.
Starr predicted that many universities will consider similar race-neutral policies that take into account socioeconomic considerations, as K-12 school districts do. This had the tacit approval of the Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, a court announced it would not consider a challenge to the admissions system used by Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology, a prestigious magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia, leaving the court open to review and potentially cancel the system. A missed opportunity. District efforts to diversify schools.
For many years, the school, known as TJ, offered admission based on a notorious entrance exam, with a student population overwhelmingly Asian, with few black or Hispanic students. In 2020, the district eliminated testing and admission fees and instituted a guaranteed seat for all Fairfax middle school students. This geographical diversity also led to further increases in racial diversity.
A parent lawsuit claimed the policy discriminated against Asian American students. A lower court judge sided with his parents, arguing that this was an illegal act of “racial balance.” However, the Court of Appeals reversed this decision. The parents' coalition then appealed to the Supreme Court.
The case was closely watched by school integration advocates across the country who feared that today's conservative courts would defeat diversity efforts, even if they did not openly consider race. It has been.
Professor Richard D. Kahlenberg, who has long urged schools to consider socio-economic factors rather than race in admissions exams, said he was relieved and encouraged by last week's court case. He said the decision not to allow racially neutral plans simply because one of the goals was racial diversity would have been a “disaster.” The impact could affect not only elite magnet programs like TJ, but also the 171 school districts nationwide that have been identified as considering socioeconomic factors in their student assignment policies.
“If you're going to have a true meritocracy, find the most talented students, you need to consider not just their test scores and academic performance, but also the hurdles they've had to overcome in life,” Kahlenberg said. There must be,” he said. He will testify on behalf of groups that successfully challenged race-based affirmative action policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. “It is more meritocratic to consider the social economy than to simply ignore the reality of how economic class affects opportunity.”
In recent years, especially amid racial unrest after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, school leaders from San Francisco to Boston have become concerned about the student body of elite education programs. But plans to change admissions rules face legal and political challenges from conservatives and others who argue that such a redesign amounts to an attack on merit and excellence.
Critics charge that even efforts to make these programs more economically diverse are actually aimed at racial diversity and are therefore unconstitutional.
Erin Wilcox, a Pacific Law Foundation attorney who filed suit challenging T.J.'s admissions policies, says that in many cases, “these are not actually race-neutral and are designed to change race relations at the school.” “We are aware of this,” he said. On behalf of our parent organization, the Coalition for TJ.
Wilcox said that despite the setback in the TJ case, her group will continue to file legal challenges to several other similar school policies. The court declined to hear the challenge to TJ's program, but did not rule on the merits of the case or explain its reasoning.
She was encouraged by Justice Samuel A. Alito's fierce dissent and joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. Alito called the court's action “a grave injustice to hardworking young people who aspire to a better future for themselves, their families, and their society,” and said TJ's program provides a roadmap for schools that want to unconstitutionally discriminate. Stated.
In recent years, conservative challengers to admissions policies have lost a series of decisions as these cases make their way through the courts.
In New York City, for example, the Pacific Law Foundation is experimenting with a program called the Discovery Program that offers alternative paths to admission to the city's popular vocational high schools.The group lost the case at the district court level. An appeal was filed in 2022.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, the school district's previous school poverty level plan was “intentionally discriminatory” against Asian American students, whose numbers declined after the change, the group said. is particularly assertive. That lawsuit was also dismissed by a federal district judge in 2022, a ruling the foundation is appealing.
And in Philadelphia, another conservative group — America First Legal, founded by former Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller — filed a lawsuit in 2022. They are challenging changes that would give people who live in areas that have historically had fewer children attending these schools a chance to choose schools through a lottery. The lawsuit charges that the new process is a “clearly unconstitutional race-based system.” The case is pending in federal district court.
Wilcox said her group is undeterred by previous losses. “We need to keep trying to find the right case,” she said. “This is not an issue we can give up on just yet.”
Elsewhere, school leaders have settled on plans that fall somewhere between a sole focus on recognizing excellence and promoting racial and other diversity. Some of the controversy surrounding these changes is fading.
In San Francisco, the school board faced backlash after changing the admissions process at popular Lowell High School. The city has long relied on grades and entrance exams, but like other districts, it pivoted in the middle of a pandemic when it could not administer the exams in the same way.
In fall 2020, the district announced that starting next school year, it would use the same rank selection lottery system used at other high schools in the city. The move has appealed to those concerned about the lack of racial diversity at the school, and the board made the change following high-profile racist incidents at the school in early 2021. said it would be permanent. The move was welcomed by many in the black community, but not by the city's Chinese American community, which felt targeted, and by many Lowell alumni and parents who said it would come at the expense of excellence. This caused a huge outcry from the public.
After the Board of Education changed, The lottery was abolished and a meritocratic system was reinstated. But last fall, Superintendent Matt Wayne proposed a middle ground — a lottery among students who earned a certain grade point average — that he said could help diversify schools.
It also attracted opponents. But others who fought the change earlier seem to have accepted it.
“If done right, this could be promising,” said the man who led a successful effort to remove three school board members in 2022, citing in part their handling of this and other racial issues. Shiva Raj said.
Raj said details need to be discussed, such as what the cutoff for eligibility will be and whether it should be based on grades or test scores. And he said the district still has work to do to rebuild trust with parents. But the general idea can work, he says.
“There seems to be an openness to this,” he said. “There's actually a lot more consensus here than people realize.”
In Boston, there have also been several policy changes affecting the district's three popular “admission schools,” which traditionally admit students based on grades and entrance exam scores.
In 2021, the test was eliminated and applicants were evaluated based on a combination of grades and neighborhood, with high-scoring students from all zip codes admitted. The system was upheld by the First Circuit Court of Appeals in December. The Pacific Law Foundation is seeking review from the Supreme Court.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals said in its decision that even if the plan was motivated by racial diversity, that does not mean the plan is unconstitutional. It is a face-neutral plan. ”
In the meantime, the district has relaxed its policies, brought testing back into the process and changed how neighborhoods are considered.
New York City is also seeing the push and pull back of efforts to diversify popular schools. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio's effort to change the way most students get into the city's prestigious vocational high schools has failed. But amid the pandemic, his administration made changes to how students are selected at about 100 other selective high schools in the city.
Before the change, each of these schools was allowed to set its own admissions criteria, which included test scores, grades, attendance records, and other measures. The de Blasio administration introduced a standard system in which all students with an average score of 85 or higher on a 100-point scale were entered into a lottery, from which admissions were randomly selected.
About 60 percent of eighth-graders qualified under that system, but critics said it wasn't selective enough. And he said that in fall 2022, the new administration would maintain the same approach but raise the standards so that students had to average an A and be in the top 15 percent within their school or citywide.
“What I'm trying to do is respond to what the community wants,” Chancellor David C. Banks said at the time.
Nia Berg, executive director of New York Appleseed, which has advocated for inclusion and diversity programs, said she's pretty happy with the current state of high school admissions despite Banks' changes.
“It’s been a huge change from where we started and I’m very happy about that,” she said. She said she doesn't want anyone to feel like the job is done, but that “these compromises are good, and the consistency and stability is especially good for students and families. This is definitely sustainable.” “It's becoming a model of excellence,” he added.
