Equality Under the Law

A federal district court recently struck down the Fairfax County School Board’s (FCSB) revamped admissions scheme at the highly selective magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Alexandria, Va., as racially discriminatory against Asian American students. Although a 2-1 Fourth Circuit panel stayed the Coalition for TJ v. FCSB judgment ...

Is it legal to penalize top-performing Asian American students to help students of other ethnicities? Legal or not, it is happening all around the country. In February, a federal judge sided with the Pacific Legal Foundation and ruled that Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County adopted a test-free admission proces ...

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, which banned the use of race, sex or ethnicity in public employment, education and contracting. Things have changed drastically since then. In 2020, a California ballot measure sought to repeal Prop 209 and revive discrimination in government decision-making. And in 2022, the state legislature prop ...

My colleagues and I have written many times about our Thomas Jefferson High School admissions case, but nothing we could write better captures what’s at stake in the case than what Coalition for TJ member Hung Cao just wrote in The Washington Post. Cao is a TJ alum. A Vietnamese refugee who later became a … ...

Schoolchildren are not known for their patience. But sometimes they have good reason to want something not next year, not next month, but now. Such as when their futures are on the line before the Supreme Court.   The slow Supreme Court process  In normal circumstances, it takes more than a year for the Supreme … ...

On March 31, the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to stay a February 25 district court ruling that the Fairfax County School Board violated the law in changing admissions requirements at the nation’s top public high school. The district court judge had agreed with a coalition of concerned parents and community members … ...

Will 2022 be the year we finally see an end to discriminatory racial preferences in education? There are welcome signs of change in the air. In February, parents of students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in northern Virginia racked up an important win in a federal lawsuit challenging the school’s … ...

In a ground-breaking decision, federal judge Claude Hilton ruled last Friday that Fairfax County school officials violated the law by changing admissions requirements at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), the nation’s top public school. In 2020, administrators decided to change the school’s admissions policy f ...

Imagine being taught from an early age to reduce a person’s identity or worth to immutable characteristics over which they have no power, particularly race and gender. This is a trend rapidly taking hold of the public education system. But PLF is helping state lawmakers craft legislation that will stop the worst type of harmful … ...