Supreme Court Takes Up Maryland Magnet School Case in New Fight Over Race and Admissions

WASHINGTON. The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider reviving a lawsuit against Montgomery County, Maryland, over admissions to four elite public middle schools, returning the justices to the fight over race in student admissions three years after they struck down affirmative action in college admissions.

Parents in the case say the county lottery admissions policy unlawfully discriminates against Asian American applicants and violates the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection. The appeal was brought by the Association for Education Fairness, a coalition of parents represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation.

The justices did not agree to decide whether the policy itself is constitutional. They granted review on a narrower question: whether a plaintiff challenging a facially neutral admissions policy as racially discriminatory must first show that the targeted racial group suffered an aggregate disparate impact relative to its share of the applicant pool. Arguments will be heard in the coming months, and a ruling is expected by the end of June.

Four schools and a lottery

The county magnet schools offer enriched programs in math and science, or in the humanities, for students in sixth through eighth grades. They include Takoma Park Middle School in Silver Spring and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Germantown.

The selection process under challenge was introduced in the 2021-2022 school year, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It screens all students for academic potential, then uses a lottery to assign students from that pool to enriched instruction at a magnet school or a local school. Part of the screening ranks a student against other students whose family incomes sit at a similar level.

The parents say that screening makes it harder for Asian American students to reach the lottery pool, because they are clustered in high performing, low poverty elementary schools, and they say placements of Asian American students at the magnet schools fell after the system began.

Two courts said no

US District Judge Paula Xinis threw out the case in 2022. She found that the policy did not place a disproportionate burden on Asian American students, noting that the share of admitted Asian American students was higher than their share of all applicants, and she found no evidence that the lottery was adopted with discriminatory intent.

The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Virginia, upheld the dismissal, agreeing that the lawsuit "does not plausibly allege that the challenged policy disparately impacts Asian American students."

In their filing to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the parents wrote that "racial balancing is racial discrimination," and they argued that the 4th Circuit ruling permits "some racial discrimination so long as it is done through a proxy."

"The Constitution protects students as individuals, not as members of a racial group," Chris Kieser, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, said in a statement on Monday. "A school district should not be able to defeat a discrimination claim by showing that its policy did not harm enough Asian American children."

The district and its supporters push back

Montgomery County Public Schools has rejected the claim that its process was designed to disadvantage any racial or ethnic group. Spokesperson Chris Cram said in July that admission is decided through a centralized review of multiple academic measures, and that the district has since reviewed its programs to ensure equitable access for all students.

Local groups that backed the process in the lower courts, among them the county NAACP branch, CASA and Asian American LEAD, said the reforms opened doors for many students. Byron Johns, who chairs the county NAACP education committee, told Bethesda Today the case was "meritless" and the criteria are race neutral.

Why the ruling will travel

The case arrives after the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling struck down the Harvard University and University of North Carolina programs that took race into account in admissions. The Pacific Legal Foundation has brought similar challenges to selective school admissions in Virginia and Massachusetts, and the Supreme Court turned those cases away in 2024. A ruling for the parents would lower the barrier for discrimination claims against selective public schools across the country, whatever the court ends up saying about this one lottery.