Ending Discrimination in K-12 Education
Education is often the key for students to unlock their potential, but discriminatory policies are denying students the chance for a quality education.
Discrimination has no place in our nation’s schools.
Racially discriminatory policies are insidious and just the latest iteration of the long-rejected idea that race and sex ought to determine opportunity in America. All men are created equal, and every person is guaranteed equal protection of the laws.
As Chief Justice John Roberts rightly said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Pacific Legal Foundation fights to ensure that students aren’t denied a quality education because of their race or sex.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology—commonly referred to as TJ—is the top-ranked public high school in the nation. For decades, admission to TJ was merit-based and race-blind, which meant TJ provided many low-income, minority, and immigrant students an opportunity they didn’t have elsewhere: the opportunity to attend a top school regardless of their family’s income, race, or status. But even though the majority of TJ’s student body were minorities, the school board and superintendent decided they were the wrong kind of minority. TJ scrapped the admissions test and implemented a system designed to admit fewer Asian American students and more black and Hispanic students. Represented by PLF, TJ students and families are fighting to end the new discriminatory admissions system and re-implement race-blind admissions. Read more.
Parents, backed by a legal foundation, say admissions standards at Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia are not truly “race neutral.”
Even before the Supreme Court’s landmark June ruling that Harvard and the University of North Carolina were guilty of discriminating against Asian-Americans, some were confident schools would find a…
We’ve all checked the boxes on race and ethnicity questionnaires, a staple of most government applications and surveys, and they have never made much sense. On ethnicity, they ask whether you are “His…
The Supreme Court has ended affirmative action as we knew it with its decision in the Students for Fair Admissions cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
Coauthored by Asra Q. Nomani, vice president of the grassroots organization Parents Defending Education and cofounder of Coalition for TJ, which advocates for diversity and excellence at Thomas Jeffer…
It’s a brave new world out there for college admissions officers. Gone are the days when they could use racial stereotypes as a stand-in for an applicant’s personal qualities or deduct points for being Asian American. When the Supreme Court finally put an end to these racist and unconstitutional admissions practices in June, it left …
The following is a transcript from Wai Wah Chin’s speech at Pacific Legal Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala. National Portrait Gallery, March 23, 2023. All our lives matter. But what matters in life? Let me speak about one life, that of Roald Hoffman. Roald was a Jewish boy in Poland during the Holocaust. Most of his …
Envy: a feeling of resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities, or luck “I walked into Stuyvesant High school and I thought I was in Chinatown,” Milady Baez, then-deputy chancellor of the Department of Education in New York City, complained to colleagues at a 2018 meeting. Baez’ point was clear: There were, in her …
For Northern Virginia families hoping to send their kids to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology—the top-ranked public high school in the country—today (September 16) is a big day. That’s when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board to determine whether …
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 …
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 …
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 from a merit- …
Today, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear the case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The crux of the case rests in the question: Should racial preferences in university admissions be legal? Harvard officials think so, as is evidenced by its own admissions …
**This article appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of Pacific Legal Foundation’s quarterly magazine, Sword&Scales** The large auditorium was mostly empty when the Fairfax County School Board held its public hearing in May. Schools had been closed for much of the school year and Fairfax’s indoor mask mandate was still in effect. Seven …