{"id":208205,"date":"2026-04-24T10:36:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T10:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/208205\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T10:36:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T10:36:07","slug":"how-nycs-elite-high-schools-discriminate-on-mayors-orders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/208205\/","title":{"rendered":"How NYC’s elite high schools discriminate \u2014 on mayor’s orders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yi Fang Chen\u2019s son certainly had the grades to get into New York City\u2019s prestigious Stuyvesant High School.<\/p>\n

Just one problem: He\u2019s the wrong race.<\/p>\n

Chen\u2019s son was the victim of the city\u2019s Discovery Program, which was meant to be a limited, optional back door into the city\u2019s specialized high schools<\/a> for disadvantaged students who failed to meet the test cut-off.<\/p>\n

But in 2018, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio vastly expanded Discovery admissions.<\/p>\n

He ordered these competitive schools<\/a> to offer 20% of all seats to Discovery students, with the explicit intent of admitting more black and Hispanic students at the expense of Asian teens.<\/p>\n

Under the state\u2019s Hecht-Calandra law, those schools \u2014 world-renowned for their 15 Nobel laureate alums \u2014 must admit students based solely on their scores<\/a> on the objective, anonymous Specialized High Schools Admission Test.<\/p>\n

And Chen\u2019s son scored so close to the Stuyvesant cutoff that he would certainly have been admitted \u2014 if not for the Discovery expansion.<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s discriminatory intent to exclude Asians worked exactly as it was meant to against him.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, the Pacific Legal Foundation filed a federal lawsuit in US District Court on behalf of the Chen family, seeking to overturn the Discovery Program\u2019s overt racial discrimination.<\/p>\n

My organization, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York, supports it wholeheartedly.<\/p>\n

And Chen\u2019s lawsuit is only the most recent attempt to halt this blatant anti-Asian educational bias.<\/p>\n

Another\u00a0lawsuit filed by Asian families<\/a>\u00a0against the city over this discriminatory Discovery expansion is working its way through the courts \u2014 and has been for seven long years.<\/p>\n

That case, originally filed in 2018 as\u00a0Christa McAuliffe Parent-Teacher-Organization, CACAGNY, et al. v. De Blasio, has had to be updated with two different name changes, as mayors have come and gone.<\/p>\n

How many more mayors\u2019 names will we need to swap in for this case?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an outrage that CACAGNY\u2019s lawsuit\u00a0still\u00a0sits in the US Court for the Southern District of New York.<\/p>\n

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The monumental and far more complex\u00a0SFFA v. Harvard\u00a0racial-discrimination case against affirmative action in college admissions made it out of Boston\u2019s district court in under five years.<\/p>\n

The revolutionary\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education\u00a0case that ended school segregation raced out of a Kansas district court in just five months \u2014 and for that matter, the United States won World War II in four years.<\/p>\n

Yet CACAGNY\u2019s case has languished, and is still gathering dust.<\/p>\n

To\u00a0double\u00a0the outrage,\u00a0the same Yi Fang Chen now suing the city was an original plaintiff\u00a0in CACAGNY\u2019s 2018 suit.<\/p>\n

Back then, the district court removed her from the case on the grounds that her \u200cson, then a first-grader, was \u201ctoo young\u201d to challenge anti-Asian discrimination in high school admissions.<\/p>\n

Now her son has grown up \u2014 and has been denied admission by the very same racially discriminatory policy that Chen was prescient enough to challenge nearly eight years ago.<\/p>\n

In effect, she was punished for being able to see the future.<\/p>\n

So Chen has returned to district court \u2014 proving, painfully, that justice delayed is justice denied.<\/p>\n

Every year for the past seven years, hundreds of Asian-American students just like Chen\u2019s son have been harmed.<\/p>\n

New York City and the well-funded NAACP \u2014 which volunteered its own members as co-defendants in the case \u2014 have erected one delay after another.<\/p>\n

They know such tactics can wear out authentic grassroots associations like CACAGNY.<\/p>\n

Groups can change membership and become inactive; students can \u201cage out,\u201d or families can move away.<\/p>\n

The wear-them-down tactic worked exactly as intended: Of the six original plaintiffs in the 2018 lawsuit, CACAGNY stands as the last remaining active plaintiff.<\/p>\n

As well, the city is probably hoping to wait out this current Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because its justices ruled in\u00a0SFFA v. Harvard that\u00a0\u201cthe only way to stop discrimination by race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race\u201d \u2014 exactly CACAGNY\u2019s position.<\/p>\n

This is not how our legal system is meant to work.<\/p>\n

This time around, Chen\u2019s son deserves his chance to be\u00a0justly\u00a0served by the court.<\/p>\n

As for CACAGNY\u2019s case, the district court\u2019s slow-walking, unfair maneuvers must end.<\/p>\n

They harm hundreds of students each year \u2014 and make a mockery of justice.<\/p>\n

Wai Wah Chin is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yi Fang Chen\u2019s son certainly had the grades to get into New York City\u2019s prestigious Stuyvesant High School.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[12680,9894,11182,2850,9,24,56,63,65,64,299,209,47162,82544],"class_list":{"0":"post-208205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-asian-american","9":"tag-bill-de-blasio","10":"tag-high-schools","11":"tag-lawsuits","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-ny","15":"tag-nyc","16":"tag-nyc-headlines","17":"tag-nyc-news","18":"tag-opinion","19":"tag-public-schools","20":"tag-racial-discrimination","21":"tag-stuyvesant-high-school"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}