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The Supreme Court Is Coming for Affirmative Action—Again

The high court has just accepted a case that takes aim at efforts to increase diversity at high-performing public schools.

The US Supreme Court at dusk.

One might think that mediocre white folks and the minority of AAPI parents who have decided to join forces with them would be happy after their victory over affirmative action in the 2023 case known as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. They succeeded in their goal of reinterpreting the 14th Amendment as “color blind”—notwithstanding the fact that the 14th Amendment was a direct response to over 200 years of slavery and oppression of Black people in the New World—and with it ushered in a new era of “white makes right” hiring practices.

The SFFA case has been extremely effective at limiting opportunities for Black and Latino students. Enrollment at the top 50 most selective colleges and universities plummeted for Black students during the year after the Supreme Court’s decision, falling by 27 percent. Enrollment for Latinos fell 10 percent. These people have won.

And yet, the winners are not happy or satisfied. They feel they haven’t won enough, especially the people on the Supreme Court who are primarily responsible for making it harder for Black and Latino students to get into school. Having succeeded in cratering enrollment in colleges and universities, the court has moved onto its next target… fifth graders. Apparently, some Black and Latino fifth graders dared to get accepted into a few middle schools in Maryland and, well, parents of white and AAPI children can’t have that, now can they?

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case called Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education. The case arose when a group of mostly Asian American parents sued a Maryland school district over its admissions process for four highly selective magnet schools.

The policy, adopted in 2021, during the Covid pandemic, involved placing all fifth graders who met a set of criteria—grades, reading comprehension, and, yes, the beloved standardized test scores—into a pool. The kids’ scores were compared with other kids’ scores at similar elementary schools (for instance, children who came from schools with high poverty rates were compared with other children from schools with high poverty rates). From within that pool, students were then chosen randomly to attend one of the four magnet schools. It makes sense that kids should be compared with other kids from similar schools in order to get into the pool of potential lottery winners, since how you do relative to the educational environment you find yourself in should be the thing that matters when we’re talking about freaking elementary school. But if you think like that, then you’re not thinking like a parent who is sure that any opportunity that goes to a kid who is not their own is an affront to the natural order of racial supremacy and the Constitution.

In any case, during the time period this plan was active, AAPI enrollment actually went up at two of the four schools, and AAPI students were overrepresented in the magnet schools relative to their population in Montgomery County.

So you have ostensibly “race-neutral”........

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