MARYLAND
October 19, 2026 · 15:17 UTC
Supreme Court will hear Maryland school admissions case next year
The Supreme Court has heard cases on whether public schools can consider race when they choose students for selective programs.
On October 16 the court added Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education to its docket for argument early next year.
In the 2021-22 school year it replaced that system with a lottery drawn from a pool of fifth graders who cleared set grade, reading, and test-score floors.
The case now turns on whether the parents’ complaint supplies enough facts to let the claim proceed past the motion-to-dismiss stage.
Constitutional analysis
The Supreme Court agreed on October 16 to hear oral argument early next year in Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education. A group of mostly Asian-American parents in the Maryland county outside Washington challenged the county school board’s lottery-based admissions process for selective public magnet middle schools. The parents say the plan, adopted in 2021 after the pandemic and nicknamed the Pandemic Plan, was drawn up to cut the share of Asian-American students even though it does not name race on its face. The case now puts before the Court the question whether a public school district’s deliberate effort to alter the racial makeup of its top academic programs violates the equal protection owed every child under state law and the Fourteenth Amendment.
Thinking ahead
The Supreme Court added Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education to its docket after the Oct. 16 conference. The case challenges the lottery-based admissions policy for four selective magnet middle schools in Montgomery County, Maryland. That policy pools fifth-graders who clear grade, reading, and test-score thresholds then selects by random draw; the parent group says it was shaped to cut Asian-American enrollment even though the plan reads race-neutral on paper. Lower courts tossed the suit after finding no clear proof of both disparate impact and discriminatory intent.
The dispute sits two years after the justices declined to hear parallel suits from Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia and Boston exam schools. The county switched to the current lottery version in 2021.
How long this runs depends on the briefing schedule and how many amicus filings pile up. Next concrete step is the filing of written briefs, then the argument itself. The situation changes only if the justices dismiss the case, send it back down for more fact-finding, or issue a ruling that draws a new line on what counts as intent in facially neutral school selection rules.