On Monday, December 9th, the United States Supreme Court rejected two appeals by parents of students. One was from Boston parents appealing the city’s elite high schools’ temporary admissions policy that they claimed discriminated against white and Asian students. The other was from Wisconsin parents appealing the Eau Claire public school district’s support for transgender student guidance.
In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Boston School Committee temporarily canceled entrance exams for three competitive “exam schools” due to safety concerns of students sitting for the exams. These three schools are Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and O’Bryant School of Math and Science. Instead, the committee used students’ daily performance and zip codes to determine admission qualifications.
This overhaul of admissions standards shifted the committee’s reliance away from standardized tests to reserving seats for the highest-achieving students in terms of grade point average (GPA) in each community in Boston. The number of seats available depended on the population of school-age children in the community. The plaintiffs argued that the reform of admissions standards violated the equal protection promise of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The nonprofit organization Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence has been advocating for the Boston exam schools to admit students based on merit. They argued that the “zip code quotas” were aimed at reducing the number of Asian American and white students admitted.
However, the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the coalition failed to demonstrate disproportionate harm to Asian and white students from the “zip code” system, as these groups still “won a greater share of seats than their share of applicants.”
The coalition appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the First Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling amounted to “proxy racial balancing,” but the Supreme Court refused to intervene.
However, Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the First Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling. Alito stated that Boston’s policy amounted to “another form of disguised racial balancing, unquestionably unconstitutional.”
Alito called the First Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling “a clear constitutional error that could ignore last year’s Supreme Court decision, perpetuating race-based affirmative action.”
In June 2023, the Supreme Court made a ruling overturning race-conscious university admissions policies.
Alito and Thomas together wrote that they were well aware that when the committee adopted the new policy, racial issues were “paramount and central.”
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch also expressed concerns about the “zip code” policy.
Additionally, on Monday, the Supreme Court also rejected an appeal by a group of student parents in Wisconsin who questioned the Eau Claire public school district’s support for transgender student guidance. These parents challenged the district’s policy supporting student gender identity on grounds of religious liberty and other reasons.
These parents received support from two conservative legal groups, arguing in the lawsuit that the district’s policy violated constitutional protections for parental rights and religious freedom.
However, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the parents lacked standing or legal right. The court stated that no parent provided evidence to show that the policy affected their children.
But Justice Alito stated that this case raised “an increasingly important national issue,” whether public school districts encouraging students to identify as transgender without parental consent or knowledge infringed on parental rights.
The “Gender Identity Support Administrative Guidelines” encourage transgender students to raise concerns with staff and instruct employees to be careful when discussing a student’s gender identity with others, as not all students express their sexual orientation to family members.