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The Right Coast
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Suit alleging admissions discrimination moves forward in Va. – The Washington Post

By Thomas A. Smith

ALEXANDRIA, Va. A federal judge ruled Friday that a parents group can move forward with a lawsuit alleging that new admissions policies at an elite public high school in northern Virginia discriminate against Asian Americans.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology was rated the best public high school in the country last month by U.S. News and World Report. Asian Americans constitute more than 70 percent of the student body, and for decades Black and Hispanic students have been woefully underrepresented there.

The Fairfax County School Board, seeking to increase diversity at the school, drastically overhauled the admissions process at the school, scrapping a standardized test that had been the linchpin of the process. The new system now allocates slots at the highly competitive school in a system that distributes the vast majority of slots to the top 1.5 percent of students at each of the county s middle schools.

via www.washingtonpost.com