Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Challenge To Race-Based Admission Policy By Elite Boston Schools

The U.S. Supreme Court decided on Dec. 9 that it won’t consider whether three Boston public schools violated the Constitution with a purported racial diversity policy that admitted students based on their zip codes.

As Matthew Vadum reports for The Epoch Times, the new decision was made after the court’s landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. Harvard struck down the use of racially discriminatory admissions policies at U.S. colleges. After that ruling, schools began using supposedly racial-neutral admission policies such as geography to attempt to make student bodies more diverse.

Two conservative justices – Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas – dissented from the court’s decision not to grant the petition in Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence v. The School Committee for the City of Boston.

Represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Boston Parent Coalition filed its petition on April 17.

The school committee changed its admission criteria for its competitive “exam schools” effective from the 2021–22 school year, replacing the usual standardized test with a quota based on applicants’ zip codes “that reserved seats for students with the highest [grade point average] in each Boston neighborhood.”

Although “the number of seats allocated to each neighborhood was based on the neighborhood’s population of school-aged children,” school officials “spoke openly of their intent to racially balance the Exam Schools at the expense of Asian American and white students,” the petition said.

A federal district court dismissed the lawsuit in 2021. In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed the ruling, finding that even though the zip code-based quota “was chosen precisely to alter racial demographics,” it did not violate students’ equal protection rights.

Alito said in his dissent, which was joined by Thomas, that the new ruling is the court’s second refusal “to correct a glaring constitutional error that threatens to perpetuate race-based affirmative action in defiance of [the] Students for Fair Admissions [decision].”