Court throws out claim that selective NYC high schools discriminate against Asian American students in admissions
A federal judge in the Southern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit that accused city leaders of “gerrymandering” the city’s selective high school
A federal judge in the Southern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit that accused city leaders of “gerrymandering” the city’s selective high school admissions process in 2018, with plaintiffs claiming that a plan to increase enrollment of disadvantaged students discriminated against Asian American students.
Judge Edgardo Ramos on Wednesday denied the request from two Asian civil rights groups, a parent-teacher organization and Asian American parents to halt a diversity initiative that has since been instituted in New York City’s most selective high schools. The policy could not have been discriminatory, Ramos said, because on the whole, more students of Asian descent had been offered admission under the measure, not fewer.
The controversy began four years ago, when former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and former New York City Department of Education chancellor Richard Carranza announced an expansion of a city program mandated by a 1997 state law that aimed to increase the number of low-income students in the city’s most selective high schools. The “highly prestigious” schools, as the judge described them in the decision, typically admit students only through a high-stakes test or the Discovery program.
In 2018, only 10% of students enrolled in the selective schools were Black or Latino, despite Black and Latino students making up nearly 70% of all students in New York City, the mayor’s office said at the time.
To address that disparity, de Blasio and Carranza, in June 2018, increased the number of slots at the schools available to students through the Discovery program from 5% to 20% of each school’s incoming class. They also adjusted the eligibility criteria to specifically recruit from lower-income schools and recommended doing away with the Specialized High School Admissions Test, a plan that failed to materialize.
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