Supreme Court rejects challenge to Boston’s school admissions policy

The Supreme Court has declined to review an elite public school admissions process based on zip codes. The court’s action was the second time the justices declined to intervene in an admissions program based on geography since their 2023 ruling invalidating affirmative action in higher education.

Monday’s case involved the 2021 overhaul of the admission criteria for Boston’s three competitive “exam schools.” Instead of relying on standardized tests, as the school committee had done in the past, the committee instead reserved seats for students with the highest GPA in each Boston neighborhood. The number of seats depended on the neighborhood’s population of school-age children.

The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence, a nonprofit organization designed to promote “merit-based” admissions to Boston’s exam schools, sued. They argued that this “zip code quota” was designed to reduce the number of Asian American and white students who were admitted. As proof of discrimination, the coalition pointed to instances of school committee members ridiculing Asian students’ names and leaked text messages in which committee members expressed animus toward white residents of West Roxbury in Boston.

The First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Coalition failed to successfully establish that the “zip code” system disproportionately harmed Asian American and white applicants because those groups still “earned more seats than their share of the applicant pool would suggest.”

The coalition appealed to the Supreme Court, contending that the lower court ruling amounted to “racial balancing by proxy.” But the justices refused to intervene.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Alito said the Boston policy was tantamount to “racial balancing by another name and is undoubtedly unconstitutional.”