For Immediate Release
March 10, 2021
Livingston, New Jersey: Asian American Coalition of Education (AACE) highly commends Coalition for TJ and Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) for filing a timely and significant federal lawsuit against Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) regarding its race-based admissions. Not only does FCPS’s revamped race-based selection unconstitutionally manipulates admissions into Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology— America’s No.1 high school, it but also disproportionately and intentionally harms the county’s Asian-American students without proven benefits to other students.
This morning, PLF submitted the legal filings to the U.S. District Court in Eastern Virginia, on behalf of the plaintiff Coalition for TJ, “a group of over 5,000 parents, students, alumni, staff, and community members who advocate for school diversity and excellence through race-blind, merit-based admissions”. During the following press conference announcing the lawsuit, members of Coalition for TJ joined PLF to slam FCPS for violating the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, egregiously penalizing Asian-American students whose parents are mostly immigrants, and counterproductively marginalizing gifted black and Hispanic students.
Under TJ’s previous merit-based and race-blind admissions system, the school rose up to the nation’s top-ranked high school. FCPS’s overhaul of TJ’s academic selection, a decision made by the school board and superintendent last fall, has been implemented with a sole and unlawful intent to discriminate against Asian-American students. This purely politically motivated act but also serves as an ineffective bandage over the mayor’s failure to provide quality K-8 education for underrepresented communities.
AACE supports the courageous effort of Coalition for TJ to defend equal education rights for Asian-American children. “What is happening in Thomas Jefferson is just a tip of iceberg. Nationwide, the Radical Left is cancelling standard admission tests in various top high schools in San Francisco, Boston and more. They also tried and failed in New York,” commented Yukong Zhao, President of AACE.
Mr. Zhao continued: “Racial balancing is a shameful cover-up of politicians’ failures to uplift K-12 education in too many black and Hispanic communities. Instead of addressing root causes of the racial achievement gap, they have launched a systematic assault on American meritocracy and scapegoated Asian Americans, most of whom are hardworking immigrants. The Asian-American community stands firmly with Coalition of TJ for their courageous fight against this racist act!”
Asian American Coalition for Education
MEDIA CONTACT:
Dr. Wenyuan Wu, telephone: (786) 393-8028, email: [email protected].
Ms. Swann Lee, telephone: (617) 651-1328, email: [email protected].
About the AACE: www.asianamericanforeducation.org
Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE) is a non-political, nonprofit, grassroots national organization, the proven leader in fighting for Asian-American children’s equal educational rights. On May 15, 2015, the founders of AACE united 64 Asian-American organizations and jointly filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Education (DOE) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to request that they conduct investigations into Harvard University’s discriminatory admissions practices against Asian-American applicants. As the largest joint action taken by Asian-American communities over the last few decades, this complaint is now being investigated by the Justice Department. Over the years, we have advanced the cause of equal education rights for the Asian-American community.