The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether a school district can write admissions rules that shrink one racial group’s share of seats, then escape a lawsuit because that group still comes out ahead. The case is Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education.
I’m a husband, a father of three, a small business owner, and a youth coach of many seasons. I worked full time through college, so I know what a study schedule is worth when every hour is spoken for. Call it reverse discrimination if you like, though Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts settled the vocabulary in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” When officials engineer outcomes by race, the bill lands on families who did the quiet work, the nightly reading, and the checked homework.
In March 2016, Montgomery County Public Schools released a consultant’s report that found racial and socioeconomic disparities in magnet enrollment and recommended group-specific norms. The district then field-tested “local norming,” which scores a child against classmates in the same school or poverty band instead of the whole county. The parents’ petition says Asian American students’ share of invitations to the Takoma Park STEM magnet fell from 45.6% to 31.5% during the test, and quotes a board member warning, “If we expand blindly we are going to end up in the same place ten years from now.” The district’s spokesman rejects the claim that any group was targeted. No court has found intent, and the Fourth Circuit affirmed dismissal in February 2026.
The Fourth Circuit never reached motive. It required the parents to plead that Asian American students fell below their share of the applicant pool, and because the group still received offers above that share, the case ended there. In 30 years of institutional investing and expert witness work, I’ve watched benchmark selection decide cases. Measure a fund against a friendly index and nearly any manager looks competent. The Fourth Circuit chose a friendly index. (Nobody in my business gets to pick the index after the returns come in.)
Precedent points the other way. Arlington Heights held that disproportionate impact “is not the sole touchstone of an invidious racial discrimination.” Impact is a clue, weighed with history, sequence of events, and official statements. The Fourth Circuit turned a clue into a toll booth. When the Court passed on a related Thomas Jefferson High School case in 2024, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote, “This reasoning is indefensible, and it cries out for correction.”
As the parents describe it, local norming measures a child against his strongest peers, whatever his race, and the households that built the habit pay for it. The research on families is suggestive. As of 2020, census data showed Asian children were the most likely to live with two married parents, and Scott Winship, citing a review of 47 causal studies, reports that “children living with two married parents have higher test scores and educational aspirations.” Montgomery County’s own figures show how structure and resources travel together: 3.2% of married-couple families with children live below the poverty line, against 22.2% of families headed by a woman with no spouse present. Winship cautions that causation is hard to prove, and I agree. My claim is narrow. A policy that discounts a score because the school is strong punishes the preparation we ask every parent to provide.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron imagines a Handicapper General who hangs weights on the gifted so nobody outruns anybody. It was satire. The parents allege that Montgomery County’s weights come in spreadsheets.
LETITIA JAMES HAS A HABIT OF SPEAKING BEFORE THE EVIDENCE. CASE IN POINT: CORNELL
Districts do have a legitimate interest in finding talented children that old screens miss, and the court limited review to a narrow question: whether plaintiffs must show aggregate disparate impact. It hasn’t said local norming or lotteries are unlawful. Arguments will likely come in 2027. Districts that want wider access have honest tools. Universal testing finds talented children whose parents never opted in. Enrichment funding builds the pipeline in under-resourced schools. More magnet seats shrink the waiting list, and one published countywide standard lets any parent check the math.
Aristotle grasped the stakes of habit more than 2,000 years ago. “It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth,” he wrote in the Ross translation of the Nicomachean Ethics. Parents spend a decade forming those habits, one unglamorous evening at a time. A government that discounts that work because results come out unevenly penalizes the thing it should want to reproduce. The court should say so, and Montgomery County can then try to prove it did nothing of the kind.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.