Main Street: America’s top public high school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, shows us what discrimination looks like today. Images: Coalition for TJ Composite: Mark Kelly The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

When Jeannie C. Riley released “Harper Valley P.T.A.” in 1968, her hit single mocked a parent-teacher association for telling a school mom she was wearing her dresses way too high. Today the real-life sequel is playing out at the Virginia Parent Teacher Association and its chapter at a high-performing public school in Fairfax County. This time, however, parents are complaining about the PTA—that it’s in cahoots with those watering down entrance standards with the aim of reducing the school’s Asian-American population.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a school for gifted students ranked No. 1 among all public high schools nationwide by U.S. News & World Report. In December the county school board changed its admissions process, replacing a rigorous, race-blind entrance exam with a “holistic” (read: subjective) formula that includes grades but also puts caps on the number of students each middle school could send to TJ—a de facto limit on middle schools with high numbers of Asian-American students.

The desired result has been achieved. The percentage of Asian-Americans admitted to TJ dropped to 54% this year from 73% last year. Whites, blacks and Latinos all saw their numbers go up. No doubt this is only the beginning.

In March, a group of concerned parents called the Coalition for TJ sued, claiming the new policy violates equal-protection rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. In May they won a victory when a federal judge refused to dismiss their lawsuit. “Everyone knows the policy is not race-neutral, and that it’s designed to affect the racial composition of the school,” Judge Claude Hilton said. “You can say all sorts of beautiful things while you’re doing others.”

This was quickly followed in early June by the election of four of the coalition’s parents to the local PTA’s seven-member executive board. Incredibly, the Virginia state PTA responded by trying to dissolve the TJ chapter—on preposterous charges including the claim that the victorious candidates have created “a climate that discourages parental involvement.”

One of these coalition candidates is Harry Jackson, a retired Navy officer. In a March 10 piece for the Washington Post, he explained his position this way:

“When I see the effort to water down the admissions standards to TJ—and let’s be clear, that effort is largely led by paternalistic White liberals who are determined to ‘help’ minority victims at any cost—I see it for what it is: a tacit admission that they don’t think Black and Hispanic students have what it takes to compete on merit.”

A graduate of the Naval Academy, Mr. Jackson is African-American. His son is a TJ sophomore. The pro-merit coalition members elected with him include two Chinese-Americans (one has since resigned) and one Indian-American.

Their fight is a familiar story at elite public schools today, where Asian-American families are being punished for their hard work and achievement. Progressives resent them because they refute the narrative that America can be reduced to two classes of people: white oppressors and the nonwhite oppressed. When this progressive construct bumps up against reality, what do progressives do? Either they pretend that Asian-Americans (who are an incredibly diverse community) aren’t a racial minority, or dismiss them as “white-adjacent.”

Asra Nomani is a Bombay-born newswoman who previously worked as a reporter for this newspaper. She is also the mother of a recent TJ grad, a member of the local PTA and a co-founder of the Coalition for TJ. She describes what’s happening this way:

“The mostly-white Virginia PTA is trying to hijack our all-minority TJ victory because we are an inconvenient minority for them. The woke warriors are so afraid of our mostly immigrant, mostly Asian parents because we defy their narrative of oppressed minorities in a racist America. We’re unapologetic, and that scares them so much they don’t even realize how they are now perpetrators of a systemic racism and tyranny they claim to oppose.”

It’s certainly not bringing out the best in people who pride themselves on racial sensitivity. Virginia’s education secretary, Atif Qarni, likened Asian-American kids taking test preparation to athletes taking illegal performance-enhancing drugs. A member of the Fairfax County school board called the majority Asian-American TJ culture “toxic” for African-American students. When principal Ann N. Bonitatibus, who is white, sent out a note in June 2020 to parents and students raising the “equity gap,” she asked them, in the name of fighting racism, to check their privilege.

Apparently no progressive thinks the real answer might be to do as Mr. Jackson suggests: Improve the pipeline by giving black and Latino families better grade schools and better alternatives to lift achievement. This, of course, would require a hard conversation about how so many of our public schools are failing black and Latino children. Over and over, the answer instead is to eliminate elite guilt and embarrassment over racial achievement gaps by eliminating the tests that expose them.

Today’s targeting of successful Asian-American kids lacks the crudity of a Jim Crow lunch counter or a whites-only drinking fountain. But it is no less ugly—and no less racially discriminatory—for being more genteel.

Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.