Supreme Court to hear case on affirmative action in education three years after striking it down in college admissions News
Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Supreme Court to hear case on affirmative action in education three years after striking it down in college admissions

The US Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would revisit the issue of race as a factor in school admissions, often called affirmative action, three years after striking down affirmative action in higher education admissions. This time, the Court will hear a challenge to the admissions policies at a competitive “magnet” middle school in Montgomery County, Maryland.

In Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education, the court will weigh whether a plaintiff challenging a facially neutral admissions policy as racially discriminatory must establish that the targeted racial group suffered an aggregate disparate impact relative to its share of the applicant pool.

The petitioners argue that the Board of Education’s admissions policy for selecting students for magnet middle schools unconstitutionally discriminates against Asian American students, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In an unpublished opinion, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a district court’s dismissal of the original case in February. The appeals court held that the parent group failed to show that the admissions policy harmed the students, because they were still being admitted at higher rates than the applicant pool.

In its ruling, the Fourth Circuit Court applied aggregate benchmarks, or a statistical drop across an entire racial group, to prove that an admissions policy has a discriminatory intent against a specific racial group. The First Circuit Court has also upheld the aggregate benchmark standard, in Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp. v. School Committee for the City of Boston (2023).

In contrast, the Second Circuit and Third circuit courts have rejected aggregate benchmarks. This leaves conflicting federal rules depending on the location of a complaint.

The Supreme Court last considered affirmative action in Students For Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. In that case, the Court held that affirmative action violates the
Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The ruling essentially prohibited colleges and universities from considering race in admissions.

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