Maryland parents win Supreme Court review of magnet school admissions

Washington, DC; October 19, 2026: The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about public school admissions rules that cut Asian American enrollment in Montgomery County’s magnet middle schools. The Association for Education Fairness (AFEF) asked the Court to decide whether families alleging intentional racial discrimination must first clear a statistical threshold before a judge will consider their evidence.

The court granted the petition, limited to the following question: Whether 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.

“The Constitution protects students as individuals, not as members of a racial group,” said Chris Kieser, a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. “A school district should not be able to defeat a discrimination claim by showing that its policy did not harm enough Asian American children. Every family deserves admissions rules that judge their child on their own merit.”

Montgomery County Public Schools rewrote its magnet admissions criteria in 2016 after a consultant’s report derided the racial makeup of the programs. The new rules measure students against classmates at their own elementary schools, a change that intentionally falls hardest on Asian American students, who are clustered in a handful of high-performing schools. As anticipated by the school district, Asian American enrollment immediately dropped under the new criteria. Aggrieved parents formed AFEF shortly thereafter and sued in 2020.

The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed dismissal of the case in February, holding that binding circuit precedent required the parents to show the policy drove Asian American admissions below the group’s share of the applicant pool—even if the policy was intended to be racially discriminatory. The Second and Third Circuits have rejected the aggregate benchmark approach.

Pacific Legal Foundation represents the Association for Education Fairness free of charge. The case is Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Public Schools.