Supreme Court STONEWALLS – They Are Refusing To Do Their JOBS

The nation’s most prestigious high school’s racial admissions practice was at the center of a lawsuit that the Supreme Court declined to take on a writ of certiorari.

Located in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a charter school. U.S. News and World Report named it the best public high school in the country in 2021 and 2022, and it currently holds the top spot nationally for graduation rates and college readiness. A group of parents and students sued the school in 2021, claiming that it had discriminated against Asian candidates with its new admissions policy. On Tuesday, the court declined to overturn a federal appellate court ruling that upheld the policy.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas objected to the court’s decision to reject certiorari, which calls for the approval of at least four justices. Alito chastised the majority in the court’s dissenting opinion from the decision to deny certiorari, citing an affirmative action case that the court had previously declared unconstitutional in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard in 2023.

In his dissent, which Thomas joined, Alito stated that “the Court of Appeals’ ruling in this case is premised on a clearly wrong and hazardous view of what a plaintiff must establish to prove deliberate race discrimination.” “In essence, the Fourth Circuit majority ruled that deliberate racial discrimination is permissible under the Constitution as long as it is not overly harsh. It begs for correction that this kind of thinking is insupportable.”

The lawsuit is based on the school’s 2020 decision to modify its admissions procedures by doing away with the standardized test and evaluating applicants using a “holistic” approach that included a middle school assessment and a points system for a number of variables, including the applicant’s past experiences. Upon the policy’s implementation, the proportion of Asian pupils at the school dropped to 54% from 73% before its adoption, as per the petition for certiorari.

“In this instance, the question is straightforward: Did the Board’s restructuring violate the Equal Protection Clause?” stated the Coalition for TJ in its petition, citing the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which forbids states from denying citizens “equal protection of the law.” Citing earlier court rulings on the matter, they said that the policy was “applied and administered by a public authority with an evil eye and an unfair hand, so as actually to produce unreasonable and illegal discriminations between individuals in comparable situations.”

On May 23rd of last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Fourth Circuit rendered a decision in support of the institution, holding that the admissions procedure was legitimate. Judge Robert Bruce King, a President Bill Clinton appointee, wrote for a divided panel whose ruling in the case will stand as law. “The challenged admissions policy does not impact Asian students, and  the Coalition cannot prove that the Board adopted its race-neutral policy with any such discriminatory intent,” King wrote.

Many state governments and other amici curiae had taken an interest in the issue, and they submitted numerous papers with the Court and the Fourth Circuit supporting and opposing the program.

Prior to modifications to the admissions procedure, the petition claims that Ann Bonitatibus, the school’s administrator, publicly declared in 2020 that the school would “enroll 180 black and 460 Hispanic kids, occupying approximately 22 classes.” The news came after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, which sparked nationwide demonstrations and requests for more ethnic diversity in public institutions.

The institution is one of the few high schools in the nation with a fully operational supercomputer and provides advanced courses in science and mathematics that are considered college-level. Several international leaders have visited the institution, and among its graduates are Republican Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, co-founder of Robinhood Markets Vladimir Tenev, and video game creator Chris Avellone from Fallout.

“We have long maintained that the revised admissions procedure serves the interests of all of our students and is lawful. The Fairfax County School Board chairman, Karl Frisch, made this assurance in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It ensures that all qualified children from all areas in Fairfax County have a fair opportunity at attending this great high school.” “11.64% of the freshman class admitted in the fall of 2023 were economically disadvantaged students in the most recent round of admission offers. 43.4% of the population was female, and 57.6% was male. Asian students made up 61.6% of the offers, followed by White students (19%), Hispanic and Black students (6.7%), and Asian students (6.0%).”