Don’t Stop At College — End Race-Based Admissions In Public Schools
There’s an important battle brewing in our public schools between equity and treating students equally under the law.
Equitable treatment of one class of students always breeds inequitable outcomes for less fortunate students. This discriminatory new form of Affirmative Action is beginning to take hold of elite public schools in America. It used to be that all students were expected to receive equal treatment in our public education system, following Brown v. Board of Education (1954). But the reality shows that some students are treated more equally than others.
Instead of applying an equal set of standards to all students, some elite public schools in America are beginning to adopt selective admissions standards that favor certain student groups over others. Color-blind equality under the law is no longer a satisfactory benchmark, as administrators now seek to artificially control how their incoming classes will appear.
If one racial group is deemed to be too successful as a representative portion of an admitted class, policies are put in place to level the playing field by enabling less successful racial groups to expand their representative size at the expense of admitting less high-achieving students. This is often called “racial balancing.”
If one racial group is deemed to be too successful as a representative portion of an admitted class, policies are put in place to level the playing field by enabling less successful racial groups to expand their representative size at the expense of admitting less high-achieving students. This is often called “racial balancing.”
On behalf of the Coalition for TJ, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) filed suit against the Fairfax County School Board over their equity policy in 2021, scoring a victory to overturn the policy in the Eastern District Court of Virginia last February. Invoking Constitutional law, Judge Claude Hilton found that Fairfax County failed to satisfy the strict scrutiny test because their equity policy wasn’t narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling governmental interest. It was also clear, based on the data, that Asian Americans were disparately harmed as a result of the policy when compared to other racial groups.
The “set aside” portion of the policy allowed for only 1.5 percent of a qualifying middle school’s graduating class to apply. This forced Asian applicants to compete more vigorously against each other, pitting the most eligible and dedicated applicants against their less successful classmates. Those who failed to make the 1.5 percent selection were placed in the unallocated pool to compete for only 100 spots.
Judge Hilton points to an additional layer of disparate treatment for Asians, where the unallocated pool applicants are assessed based on whether they attended a “historically unrepresented” middle school. By TJ’s valuation, none of the six major Fairfax County feeder schools met this qualification, placing successful Asian applicants from these institutions at a severe disadvantage.
Read the full article on the Daily Caller.