This week, the Supreme Court let stand a decision to allow continued use of a new admissions process for a highly-selective magnet school, while a contentious lawsuit on the matter moves forward.

The original case was brought by a group of parents and community members who argue that changes in the admissions at Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology, or TJ, are discriminatory towards Asian-American students.

Administrators can’t see student races on applications, but the new admissions criteria — including the end of standardized testing — have resulted in increases in Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students in the class of 2025, the first class to be admitted under the policy.

Total class size has also increased. While Asian-American students are similarly likely to get in, their share of the new class was smaller. TJ is widely regarded as one of the best high schools in the country.

A district judge ruled in favor of the parents — the Coalition for TJ — and ordered Fairfax County Schools to stop using the new admissions policy. However, an appellate court said the schools could continue with the policy while it decides the lawsuit. The parents appealed to the Supreme Court for emergency help, but the high court declined to intervene.

The Supreme Court ruling isn’t the end of the road for the case. It will now head back to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which will consider the original decision and may choose to overturn it. From there, it could be appealed back to the Supreme Court again, as the Coalition for TJ pointed out in a statement on Twitter reacting to the decision.

“We are not at all dissuaded,” the group wrote. “If the Fourth Circuit of Appeals overturns Judge Hilton, we will be before the Supreme Court of the United States again, and we are confident our fight for justice will ultimately prevail — for our students, our families, and the nation we love.”

Fairfax County schools said the Fourth Circuit has agreed to hear the case on an expedited schedule.

“We continue to believe our new plan for TJ admissions is merit-based and race-blind,” said Fairfax County School Board Chair Stella Pekarsky. “We are confident that after considering the facts and the law, the appeals court will decide that our plan meets all the legal requirements and guarantees every qualified student will have the chance of being admitted to the finest public science and technology high school in the country.”

The case has significant implications for national questions about affirmative action and other government attempts to seek diversity in public school admissions and other programs. In Fairfax, it’s been a focal point of outrage at school board meetings, and Republican candidates in races across Virginia used the debate as a part of their schools-focused, anti-equity message on the campaign trail last year.

Here’s a closer look at what’s happened so far in this consequential legal dispute.

What’s the case about in the first place? 

In late 2020, the Fairfax County School Board, which administers TJ, made a series of changes to the admissions process at the school, with the goal of making the process fairer and subsequent incoming classes more diverse. Historically, Black and Hispanic students have made up a tiny proportion of the student population at TJ, particularly by comparison to Fairfax County schools as a whole. Discussion of the changes came as communities nationally and in the D.C. region grappled with the murder of George Floyd and resulting racial justice protests. School leaders at the time expressed concerns that Black students were underrepresented at TJ.

The school board got rid of a standardized admissions test and a $100 application fee (the fee could previously be waived if a student demonstrated financial need). They raised the minimum GPA and set aside seats for students in the top 1.5% of the eighth grade class in each middle school across the district, if they met certain course requirements. The school board said the district would conduct more thorough outreach to students across the county to encourage them to apply to TJ. They also said they would review “experience factors” behind an applicant’s school record, including socioeconomic disadvantages, English language learners, special education students, and students currently enrolled in middle schools that rarely send students to TJ.

The changes had a noticeable impact on admissions for the high school’s class of 2025, which was expanded in total size by 15%, to 550 students. The proportion of economically disadvantaged students rose from 0.62% the previous year to 25% in the new class. The share of Black and Hispanic students in the new class increased too, from 1.2% and 3.3% respectively to 7% and 11%. White students increased from 17.7% to 22.4%. Asian students remained the majority of the class, but their share decreased, from 73% to 54%.

Fairfax superintendent Scott Brabrand said in a statement at the time that the results indicated “when we truly center our work on equity, all of our students have an opportunity to shine.”

But not everyone was pleased with the changes. In March 2021, the Coalition for TJ – a group describing itself as “concerned parents residing in and around Fairfax County,” many from Asian-American families – filed a complaint against Fairfax County Public Schools. The complaint argued that the recent changes in the admissions policy “were specifically intended to reduce the percentage of Asian-American students who enroll in TJ, with the ultimate goal of racially balancing the school according to the racial demographics of Fairfax County.”

As a result, the group argued the new policy violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It further suggested Fairfax school officials had rushed the final decision on the new admissions process without hearing public comment, and that some had voiced racist stereotypes about Asian-American and immigrant parents.

Lawyers for the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative group behind multiple challenges to elite school admissions practices designed to increase diversity, are representing the Coalition for TJ. Some leaders of the coalition are also affiliated with Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit that advocates against social-emotional learning in schools and curricula that emphasizes “students’ group identities.”

Critics of the lawsuit, including the TJ Alumni Action Group, which formed to push for a more inclusive admissions process, have also suggested that focusing primarily on the decrease in the percentage of Asian-American students in the class of 2025 is misleading. An analysis of the admissions data by the group points out that the acceptance rate of Asian-American students — 19.48% — is within the historical range (the number has hovered between 16.8% and 25% for the classes of 2008 to 2024).

What have judges said so far in the case? 

The TJ case arrived at the Supreme Court after consideration by two other federal courts — the federal district court in the Eastern District of Virginia, where the case started, and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In February, Judge Claude Hilton, a Reagan appointee, ruled in favor of the Coalition for TJ and ordered Fairfax County to stop using the new admissions policy.

“The discussion of TJ admissions changes was infected with talk of racial balancing from its inception,” Hilton wrote, noting exchanges of emails and meeting communications among school officials who talked about the desire to correct demographic disparities between TJ enrollment, the wider Fairfax student population, and the community as a whole. Hilton also called the process “remarkably rushed and shoddy,” though he acknowledged that Fairfax officials didn’t appear to have broken any procedural rules in putting the new admissions process in place.

Fairfax County Schools appealed Hilton’s decision to the Fourth District Court of Appeals in Richmond, and further requested a stay of Hilton’s order to allow TJ to continue admissions for the class of 2026 while the court battle carries on.

Three judges on the appellate court — Judge Toby Heytens, Judge Robert King, and Judge Allison Jones Rushing — considered the schools’ request and granted it in a 2-1 decision (Judge Rushing dissented).

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that it is constitutionally permissible to seek to increase racial (and other) diversity through race-neutral means,” Heytens wrote in a concurring opinion. “Indeed, it has required public officials to consider such measures before turning to race-conscious alternatives.”

Heytens suggested that Hilton’s initial decision was premised on the wrong figure — namely, the year-over-year comparison of the percentage of Asian-American students in TJ classes under the old and new policies. He said the acceptance rate for Asian-American applicants would have been a more appropriate measure of disparate impact, and he found no evidence that Fairfax school officials had established specific racial quotas or targets in the new admissions policy.

Heytens also noted the “significant logistical difficulties and time constraints” of replacing the challenged admissions policy with a new one in the midst of the class of 2026 admissions cycle.

“Taking all this into account, it seems the more prudent course is to allow the current admissions cycle to proceed according to settled expectations and require a change, if any, beginning with the next class,” he concluded.

The Coalition for TJ appealed that decision up to the Supreme Court, but the high court declined to intervene. It upheld the stay from the appellate court in a 6-3 majority, with conservative justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissenting. The order was unsigned and supplied no rationale for the decision or for the dissent. That’s standard practice for so-called “shadow docket” cases, emergency decisions that the court rules on without hearing oral argument.

What happens now? 

For now, Fairfax County Schools can continue to use the new admissions process to admit the TJ class of 2026.

Meanwhile, now that the question of the stay has been dealt with, the Fourth Circuit will consider the case itself. The court’s preliminary decision in favor of the school district is a possible indicator the schools could win there again.

Either way, the case could wind up back at the Supreme Court in the future.

The court will be grappling with other admissions policies and affirmative action law soon, too. It is already set to consider challenges to admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, which plaintiffs argue are biased against Asian students, this fall. Those policies explicitly consider the race of applicants, while TJ’s policy does not. But the court’s decision in the university case could significantly impact the legal landscape on promoting diversity in admissions in general.