Supreme Court may strike down school policies that limit Asian students

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider outlawing school diversity policies that limit Asian American students at magnet programs and selective high schools. Three years ago, the court ruled that Harvard and other universities may not discriminate on whom they admit based on the race of their applicants. Evidence in that case showed that Asian applicants with very high test scores were often turned down.

But the justices have been divided over admissions rules for highly selective high schools in Boston, New York and Fairfax County, Va., as well as magnet programs for gifted middle school students. In most instances, judges have said school officials may use “race-neutral” policies to achieve racial diversity. For example, giving an automatic admission to the top 5% of the students in all of a big city’s high schools or its middle schools could achieve greater racial and ethnic diversity.

But the court’s conservatives, led by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito, have condemned such policies as thinly disguised racial discrimination. Magnet programs exist across the country, including in California and Los Angeles, and were conceived as a form of voluntary integration — a way to get white students to attend the same schools as nonwhite students, without having to resort to forced busing.

The idea was that a special school program would be attractive enough to serve as a “magnet” for white students to enroll at a school they might not otherwise attend. A mix of white and nonwhite students was seen as a benefit to the nonwhite students, because white students would be sharing the fate of the nonwhite students. Asian students were frequently part of that original equation on the nonwhite side of the ledger and counted with other students classified as nonwhite, such as Black or Latino students.

But in terms of student achievement, Asian students have performed more like white students, frequently surpassing white students academically. One subset of magnet schools requires a selective admissions process, and these are at the center of the current dispute. The court agreed to hear an appeal from parents in Montgomery County, Md., who were upset by a sharp drop in Asian students at its four magnet schools for gifted students.

For a decade, the school board had been troubled that fewer than 15% of the students at its magnet schools were Black or Latino, even though they made up about half of the student population. In contrast, Asian students were less than 15% of the county’s student population but made up about half of the enrolees at the magnet programs. After several years of debate, school officials dropped the use of a countywide competitive test and chose top performing students at all of its middle schools using a lottery.