The Supreme Court will take up a case regarding alleged racial discrimination in the admissions policy for magnet middle schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, marking the latest lawsuit against the county’s schools to reach the high court in recent years.
The high court announced in an orders list on Monday that it will take up oral arguments in Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education later this term. The case deals with the admissions policy for magnet middle schools in the county, which a group claims is unlawfully discriminatory. The justices granted review of the case and limited the issue at hand to whether a person 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 Association for Education Fairness, represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, sued over Montgomery County’s magnet school admissions standards, which were changed in 2020 after a report was critical of the racial makeup of the schools. The new admissions policy included “peer grouping and local norming,” which the group claims caused Asian American enrollment in the schools to “tank” by moving away from basing admissions strictly on merits and standardized test scores.
The admission policy is a lottery system in which the only students eligible to be entered are the top students from each school based on test scores. However, the system does not weigh how students perform on their tests relative to everyone in the county. The group alleges that the program intentionally harms Asian American students at high-performing schools because it keeps out high-scoring students who would have qualified for eligibility if the student scores were compared district-wide rather than school-by-school. The school board has been successful in tossing the lawsuit at a pair of lower courts by pointing to how Asian American students still have higher acceptance to the schools relative to their percentage among students in the system.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had affirmed a lower court’s decision to toss the lawsuit, claiming that the group must show a clear statistical threshold to make allegations of racial discrimination regarding a policy. The Supreme Court will review whether a statistical threshold is necessary for the lawsuit to continue.
“The Constitution protects students as individuals, not as members of a racial group,” Chris Kieser, a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, said in a statement after the Supreme Court granted review of the case. “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.”
The Montgomery County Board of Education defended the system as a “race-neutral, race-blind lottery to select students for admission” in a brief to the high court, claiming that the group had “failed to plead facts sufficient to establish that the lottery disparately impacts Asian-American students.”
Montgomery County was at the Supreme Court in 2025, after its board of education enacted a policy barring parents from opting their children out of LGBT curriculum. The Supreme Court sided with the parents to strike down the policy 6-3, finding that it violated the religious rights of the parents who didn’t want their children to have to read controversial books.
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The Supreme Court also granted review in one other case on Monday, Department of Justice v. Scott McNutt, which will examine if a nearly 160-year-old federal law barring the distilling of alcohol at home is unconstitutional.
The court is set to hear arguments in both the Montgomery County and McNutt cases in early 2027, likely sometime between February and April 2027, with a decision expected by the end of June 2027.