Photo Credit: Alejandro A. Alvarez, Students Await the Start of Their Day at Masterman in May 2022, (2022), https://www.inquirer.com/education/school-bus-safety-late-overbrook-education-center-blind-children-philadelphia-school-district-20230914.html.
Authored by: Sloane Saxon
A school admissions policy can make no mention of race and still be accused of engineering a race-based outcome. That is exactly what happened to the School District of Philadelphia. In Sargent v. School District of Philadelphia, a unanimous panel vacated summary judgment in favor of the District reviewing a challenge to a 2022 Admissions Policy for its most competitive criteria-based schools.[1] The decision does not resolve whether Philadelphia discriminated; rather, it holds that a jury, not a judge, should decide.[2]
- Background
The School District of Philadelphia operates three types of high schools: neighborhood schools, citywide schools, and criteria-based schools.[3] The four most competitive criteria-based schools, the Academy at Palumbo, Georgia Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science, and Julia R. Masterman High School, make up the subject of the appeal.[4] In 2022, each school ran its own admissions process, weighing grades, attendance, and sometimes requiring interview, writing samples, and recommendation letters.[5]
That changed after a 2017 Pew Charitable Trusts report identified geographic underrepresentation in the schools’ enrollment.[6] In 2020, the District issued an “Anti-Racism Declaration,” pledging to “center[] our work through the lens of racial equity.”[7] Months later, the Board’s “Goals & Guardrails” policy document established an quantifiable student body target: grow the share of “qualified” Black and Hispanic applicants from 33.8% to at least 52% by 2026.[8] The Board believed this target “ma[de] progress towards being proportional to [the] population as a whole.”[9]
The District’s 2022 Admissions Policy eliminated interview, recommendation letters, and individual writing samples in place of a computer-scored essay exam, raised grade requirements and attendance thresholds.[10] Most consequently, however, the Policy created six preferred zip codes.[11] Qualified applicants living within one of the six zip codes received automatic admission, while all other applicants entered a lottery.[12] Of the six zip codes, five of them had majority Black and Hispanic populations, with Asian and White representation as low as 1.15% and 2.5% respectively.[13]
- Procedural History
Three parents of students residing outside of the preferred zip code sued under Title VI, the Equal Protection Clause, and applicable Pennsylvania law.[14] “Each of the children resided outside the six preferred zip codes and met the new criteria but were not admitted to their first-choice schools.”[15] The parents’ allege that the District’s policy “chang[ed] its selection process for criteria-based schools from a race-neutral process to a racially discriminatory process.”[16] The Eastern District of Pennsylvania, disagreed, granting summary judgment in favor of the District.[17] The District Court found that no reasonable factfinder could find discriminatory purpose or impact and thus applied rational basis review.[18]
- The Third Circuit’s Holding
Under the Third Circuit’s framework established in Lower Merion, facially neutral policies that are “applied evenhandedly” only trigger strict scrutiny if the challenging party shows discriminatory purpose or impact.[19] To prove purpose, the Court identified the Anti-Racism Declaration, the 52% Black and Hispanic population target, and District officials’ testimony as evidence of a race-based purpose.[20] Taken together, the Third Circuit found that the 2022 Admissions Policy’s purpose was “racial equity,” and held that a “reasonable factfinder could find that the School District adopted the Admissions Policy to change the racial makeup of the four most selective schools.”[21]
On impact, the court broke from the Fourth and First Circuits, which had required plaintiffs to show declining “success rates” for a disfavored group rather than mere enrollment changes.[22] The panel called that framework “indefensible,” borrowing Justice Alito’s language from his dissent from denial of certiorari in Coalition for TJ, and aligned instead with the Second Circuit’s approach in Chinese American Citizens Alliance, which allows individualized proof of harm to satisfy the impact prong without requiring aggregate statistical proof.[23] The court vacated and remanded for trial, expressing no view on whether the Policy would ultimately survive strict scrutiny.[24]
- Sargent’s Impact
In practice, many Equal Protection challenges to admissions policies die at summary judgment or get resolved as a matter of law on appeal.[25] For Sargent, the case never reached a jury after all. On July 21, 2026, less than six months after the Third Circuit remanded the case, the School District of Philadelphia agreed to pay $650,000 in a settlement agreement.[26] Whether the Admissions Policy survives strict scrutiny was never answered.
But that outcome does not make the Third Circuit’s ruling inconsequential. In 2020 and 2021, a number of school districts adopted similar equity-driven, facially neutral admissions changes.[27] For those districts, Sargent’s settlement may be a more instructive outcome than a verdict would have been: it suggests that surviving summary judgment carries real leverage, even without a final ruling on the merits.
- Conclusion
Sargent deepens an existing circuit split over how court’s measure discriminatory impact after the Supreme Court’s holding in Students for Fair Admissions,[28] and it leaves every school district that altered its admissions criteria in 2020 or 2021 vulnerable to strict scrutiny. Whether Philadelphia’s policy and zip-code preferences would have survived strict scrutiny is a question we will never get answered, as the case ended not with a verdict, but with a check.
[1] Sargent v. Sch. Dist. of Phila., 165 F.4th 727,732 (3d Cir. 2026)
[2] Id.
[3] Id. at 732.
[4] Id.
[5] Id.
[6] Id. at 733.
[7] Id.
[8] Id. at 734.
[9] Id.
[10] Id.
[11] Id. at 734–35.
[12] Sargent, 165 F.4th at 735.
[13] Id.
[14] Id. at 737
[15] Id.
[16] Id. (quoting App. 1786).
[17] Id. (discussing Sargent v. Sch. Dist. Of Phila., No. 22-1509, 2024 WL 4476555 at *16 (E.D. Pa. Oct. 11. 2024)).
[18] Id. at 738 (discussing Sargent,
[19] Id. (quoting Doe ex. Rel. Doe v. Lower Merion Sch. Dist., 665 F.3d 524, 543 (3d Cir. 2011)).
[20] Id. at 742–43.
[21] Id. at 743.
[22] Id. at 754-55 (declining to follow Coal. For TJ v. Fairfax Cnty. Sch. Bd., 68 F.4th 684 (4th Cir. 2023), and Bos. Parent Coal. For Acad. Excellence Corp. v. Sch. Comm. For Bos., 89 F.4th 46 (1st Cir. 2023)).
[23] Sargent, 165 F.4th at 758–60 (discussing Chinese Am. Citizens All. Of Greater N.Y. v. Adams, 116 F.4th 161 (2d Cir. 2024)).
[24] Id. at 761–62.
[25] See e.g., Coal for TJ v. Fairfax Cnty. Sch. Bd., No. 21-cv-00296, 2022 WL 579809, at *11 (E.D. Va. Feb. 25, 2022) (granting partial summary judgment for plaintiff), rev’d, 68 F.4th 864 (4th Cir. 2023) (reversing and directing entry of summary judgment for school board); Bos. Parent Coal. for Acad. Excellence Corp. v. Sch. Comm. for Bos., 89 F.4th 46 (1st Cir. 2023) (granting summary judgment for school district).
[26] Kirsten A. Graham, Philadelphia School District Settles Lawsuit with Three Families That Claimed Discrimination in Special Admissions Process, Phila. Inquirer (July 22, 2026), https://www.inquirer.com/education/philadelphia-school-district-special-admissions-lawsuit-payout-20260722.html.
[27] See e.g., Mark Walsh, Court Backs Race-Neutral Criteria in Selective K-12 Schools, Educ. Week (Dec. 2023), https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/court-backs-race-neutral-criteria-in-selective-k-12-schools/2023/12 (describing Boston’s shift to a GPA and zip code admissions system for its exam schools in 2021).
[28] Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Presidents & Fellows of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181, 206 (2023); see Sargent 165 F.4th at 758-60 (declining to follow the Fourth and First Circuits’ ‘success rate’ framework for discriminatory impact); compare Chinese Am. Citizens All., 116 F.4th at 165 (permitting individualized proof of harm to satisfy the impact harm, with Coal. For TJ, 68 F.4th at 879–82 (holding that a group’s success rate is the proper measure of disparate impact), and Bos. Parent. Coal for Acad. Excellence Corp., 89 F.4th at 57–58 (applying the same success-rate framework).