Asian parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, are asking the Supreme Court to hear their argument that the public schools system’s “racial balancing” policy illegally excludes their high-performing children from middle school STEM programs.

Racial Balancing Policy

The Association for Education Fairness, a group of concerned Asian-American parents, insists in a writ filed this month that Maryland’s largest school district misused “facially-neutral admissions criteria” to purge “undesirable racial enrollment patterns.”

The writ singles out a post-pandemic mandate that “students in the band of lowest-poverty schools (where Asian-American students are disproportionately clustered) had to achieve a 93rd percentile score” to enter the lottery to enroll at a science, technology, engineering and math campus.

By contrast, it notes that Black and Hispanic elementary “students from the highest-poverty band only had to achieve a 60th percentile score” to become eligible for the district’s two selective STEM middle schools.

Constitutional Concerns

Attorney Christopher Kieser of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm representing the parents in court, called on the high court to “restore a uniform constitutional standard” for enforcing the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

The clause says that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

“The Equal Protection Clause protects individuals from intentional racial discrimination, not just racial groups in the aggregate,” Mr. Kieser said.

Original reporting: WMAL (Washington DC) — read the source article.