The U.S. Department of Justice has forced Jersey City to dismantle the race-based admissions system at Dr. Ronald E. McNair Academic High School, one of New Jersey's top-ranked public schools, in one of the first federal settlements targeting K-12 admissions under the Trump administration.
The settlement, announced on July 9, ends a federal civil rights investigation into how McNair, a competitive magnet school, chose its students. For years, the school divided applicants into groups of Black, white, Hispanic, and "other" applicants and aimed to admit 25% from each group. But the policy did not produce the racial balance it was designed to achieve.
The Numbers the Quota Produced
Last year, of the 692 students who attended McNair, 42.6% were Asian, 21.5% were white, 17.8% were Hispanic, and 13.3% were Black, according to state data. A little over 35% of its students were economically disadvantaged, compared with 54% districtwide. The school weighed grades and PSAT scores in its admissions process, and it ranks 11th in New Jersey for highest SAT scores, with a combined average of 1,364.
Under the agreement, the Jersey City Board of Education must adopt a new admissions policy before the 2027-28 school year, train staff, and keep reporting on its progress to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division through 2029. The full terms of the settlement have not yet been published.
What the Justice Department Said
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division framed the case as a straightforward application of long-settled law. "Quota systems that define students by their race or national origin have been illegal since the 1970s," she said in a statement. The department described the school's admissions policies as an example of "illegal DEI," and said that under the settlement the district "will no longer provide any preference or benefit to a McNair applicant based on his or her race or national origin."
District officials and the office of the New Jersey Attorney General did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Jersey City had once weighed changing the policy on its own, floating a 2021 plan to consider socioeconomic status instead of race, but that plan stalled and was never passed.
Part of a Broader Enforcement Shift
The McNair case is an early example of a change in how the federal government handles education civil rights cases. In June, the Trump administration moved much of the Education Department's civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department, which brought this settlement under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act.
That shift drew sharp criticism. Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center, said the administration "has turned civil rights enforcement in education on its head." He added that the McNair action should be read "within the broader context of Trump policies and actions to radically scale back civil rights enforcement and channel any remaining enforcement toward reducing, instead of expanding, equal educational opportunity for students of color and poor students."
McNair Academic is named for Ronald Erwin McNair, the physicist and NASA astronaut who became the second African American to fly in space before dying at 35 in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The school it anchors remains one of the highest-scoring in the state. What changes now is not its selectivity but the rules it may use to decide who gets in, and by the settlement's terms, the district has until the 2027-28 school year to write them.
Sources
NJ.com: Trump's DOJ just forced a top-ranked NJ school to scrap its race-based admissions system
U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division
