Today, the Supreme Court decided to hear Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education, a challenge to "facially neutral" discrimination against Asian applicants to selective public magnet schools in Montgomery County, Maryland. The admissions criteria are, on their face, racially neutral. But evidence indicates they were likely adopted for the purpose of reducing the percentage of Asian students in entering classes. More specifically, the case addresses the issue of "[w]hether a plaintiff challenging a facially neutral admissions policy as racially discriminatory must establish that the targeted racial group suffered an aggregate disparate impact relative to its share of the applicant pool." This issue is increasingly important since the Supreme Court banned most explicit racial discrimination in college admissions (and, by extension, school admissions) in SFFA v. Harvard (2023).
The lower court ruled that, even if there is evidence that a facially neutral admissions policy was enacted for the specific purpose of reducing the number of admitted students from a specific racial or ethnic group, it must still be upheld so long as the percentage of admitted students from that group is as high or higher than the percentage of applicants from that group.
