Supreme Court Won’t Hear Challenge to Admission Policy for Elite Boston Schools

Two justices dissented, saying the high court’s ruling contradicts its decision last year striking down affirmative action in college admissions.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in Washington on April 23, 2021. Erin Schaff/Pool via Reuters

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.

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 based on factors 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 to not 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 2021–2022 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].”

The first refusal to which Alito was referring was the high court’s decision in February to deny the petition in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board.

Litigants claimed in that appeal that the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia altered its admission policy in 2020 “to racially balance the freshman class by excluding Asian Americans.”

In the Boston case, the committee members “worked to decrease the number of white and Asian students at the exam schools in service of ‘racial equity.’”

“That is racial balancing by another name and is undoubtedly unconstitutional,” Alito wrote.

Pacific Legal Foundation senior attorney Chris Kieser said he was disappointed by the ruling.

“Every student should have an equal opportunity to succeed based on their merit, not where they live or the color of their skin,” he said in a statement.

“Boston Public Schools’ use of a ZIP Code quota as a naked proxy for race violates the Constitution’s promise of equal protection. Regardless of today’s disappointment, the government’s use of skin color or ethnicity to choose who can attend public schools is a critical constitutional question that must be settled.”

The Epoch Times reached out for comment to the school committee’s attorney, Douglas Hallward-Driemeier of Ropes and Gray in Washington, but did not receive a reply by publication time.