CNN
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The Supreme Court declined Monday to decide whether three elite Boston public schools violated the Constitution with an admissions policy based on a ZIP code. intended to ensure racial diversity.
The appeal was filed with the High Court more than a year after a historic 6-3 ruling. end affirmative action in universities and urged school officials to experiment with “race-neutral” policies — such as those based on geography — to promote diversity while avoiding legal challenges.
Two conservatives – Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas – disagreed with the decision not to hear the case.
Alito wrote that the court was refusing “to correct a blatant constitutional error that threatens to perpetuate race-based affirmative action, in defiance” of its major affirmative action ruling last year.
In handing over the case, the justices left in place a ruling from a Boston-based federal appeals court siding with the school district.
Boston school officials abandoned an admissions policy based on tests and grades in 2020 for three top schools, among the nation’s most prestigious public high schools, which together enroll nearly 6,000 students. Instead, the school adopted a ZIP code-based model that reserved spots for students with the highest GPA from each Boston neighborhood.
A coalition of parents and students filed a lawsuit on behalf of more than a dozen Asian American and white students. The group said the proportion of admitted students who were white or Asian had fallen from 61% to 49%, claimed the policy was racially motivated, and argued it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment.
“This problem will not go away,” the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence told the Supreme Court in its appeal in April. “If the court were to dismiss this case, it would only embolden government officials to continue targeting disadvantaged racial groups – particularly Asian Americans.” »
A U.S. district court sided with the school, finding that the ZIP code admissions policy was not adopted with a discriminatory purpose. The Boston-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld that decision in December, noting that the proportion of Asian American and white students admitted was still higher than their share of the applicant pool.
The school board countered that its admissions policy had changed since the end of the pandemic and therefore the parents’ challenge was moot. The new admissions policy is based on a combination of grades, performance on a standardized exam and census tract.
School officials also stressed that their plan did not use an individual student’s race to determine admissions.
“Nothing in this court’s precedent requires a public agency to ignore whether its race-neutral policies will have a disparate impact on historically disadvantaged groups, or even help reduce past disparate impacts,” the school board said to the Supreme Court.
Boston’s appeal was similar to one a Virginia parent brought to the Supreme Court last year. The selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology admitted a small portion of the highest-performing students from each middle school in the county. The parents in both cases were represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law group.
The Supreme Court refused to hear Virginia case in February.
The judges last year rejected the policies used by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina, which considered race as one of several admissions factors, a standard that had been endorsed by previous precedents. But the ruling does not clarify whether schools can consider socioeconomic or geographic factors as an indicator of race.