Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology—known to students, parents, and alumni as TJ—is the top-ranked public high school in the nation and a magnet school for gifted STEM students in Northern Virginia. In 2020, 73% of the admitted students were classified as Asian American. Many of these students come from immigrant families from a variety of cultures, representing at least thirty different countries in all.
In the summer of 2020, the Fairfax County School Board decided that TJ’s student body was not “diverse” in the way that board members wanted. To that end, the Board decided to drastically overhaul TJ’s admissions process. After extensive racial modeling in which plans were proposed that would cut Asian American enrollment while increasing white, Black, and Hispanic students, the Board ultimately selected a plan that itself did not mention race, but used geography as a “neutral” proxy. Subsequently, the share of Asian American students in the admitted class dropped from 73% to 54%—as the Board had predicted.
This case has important implications for public and government-funded schools seeking to continue racial preferences in some form after the Supreme Court deemed Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s race-conscience admissions programs unconstitutional. Our brief points out that prominent public university officials have urged schools to implement racial preferences covertly and university presidents have issued statements indicating that they want to find ways to circumvent SFFA. Government officials—from state governors to President Biden—are encouraging universities in these efforts. The Supreme Court should grant certiorari to clarify that public schools cannot use proxies to continue engaging in racial balancing.
