Diversity, Equity, or Exclusion?

Lawsuit Alleges that Stuyvesant High School Illegally Considers Race in Admissions Decisions

The City’s Department of Education (DOE) is being sued over allegations that the admissions process at Stuyvesant High School (at Chambers and West Streets) discriminates against Asian-American students by creating a pathway to entry for Black and Hispanic applicants.

At Stuyvesant and seven other New York City “specialized high schools,” including Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, admission is determined by a competitive exam, rather than academic history, geographic zones, or preferences, as is the case for most other DOE high schools. In a citywide school system that is more than 60 percent Black and Hispanic, and where Asians are fewer than one in five students, the specialized high schools are populated by more than 50 percent Asians, while Black and Hispanic applicants receive fewer than 10 percent of admissions offers.

At Stuyvesant, this contrast is especially stark. Among the 781 students in the freshman class that entered last September, there were eight Black students (approximately 1.02 percent) and 27 Hispanic pupils (roughly 3.45 percent). Offers to Asian and white students were 422 and 155 seats, respectively.

The legal case, filed with the U.S. District Court in Lower Manhattan in April, was brought by Yi Fang Chen, mother of an applicant (identified in court papers only as “M.P.”), who took the admissions exams for the specialized high schools last fall. He was notified in March that his score was 558. This score was slightly higher than the Stuyvesant cutoff for the last September (when the minimum was 556), but it was three point below this year’s threshold.

At issue is the DOE’s Discovery Program, which sets aside 20 percent of seats at the specialized high schools for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. At Stuyvesant, that translates into 160 seats for Discovery students, who are eligible for admission with exam scores lower than the cutoff for other students. For the freshman class that will enter Stuyvesant next September, Discovery Program students will be admitted with exam scores as low as 495, while other students needed to score at least 559.

Ms. Chen’s attorneys, who are affiliated with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, argue in court papers that the Discovery Program has the effect of excluding some students from the specialized high schools “based on criteria the City purposefully selected to change the racial composition of those schools.”

The lawsuit relies upon a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College) which held that, “government officials may not manipulate admissions systems… to produce race-based outcomes.”

The Pacific Legal Foundation attorneys allege that the DOE designed the Discovery program “to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment at the specialized high schools at the expense of Asian students.” The lawsuit “seeks to end the use of admissions criteria designed to produce racial outcomes. A victory would prohibit public schools from engineering admissions to achieve those results.”

Glenn Roper, a senior attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, says, “New York City rewrote admissions criteria to change the racial makeup of its schools. That violates the Equal Protection Clause. The government cannot rig admissions rules to disadvantage students based on race.”

The racial composition of the specialized high schools has long been a citywide flashpoint, with Stuyvesant’s demographics a persistent source of local debate. Mariama James, an elected District Leader representing Lower Manhattan, weighed in. “Historic racial biases in standardized testing are a well-documented reality that warrants serious structural attention, but framing elite school admissions as a zero-sum conflict between Asian and Black students is a counterproductive road we have traveled before,” she says.“Historically, when minority groups are forced to compete for limited educational access rather than expanding opportunity, it creates a fracture where everyone loses—including, as past data on shifting affirmative action policies has shown, groups like white women. Admissions policies must be firmly rooted in individual merit, but they must also holistically reflect the vast diversity of New York City’s public school population. We need solutions that elevate educational standards across all neighborhoods rather than policies that pit communities against each other.”

Asked to respond, a spokesman for the DOE said that the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

The demographic imbalance at the City’s specialized high schools is perhaps a reflection of the larger status quo in New York City’s public school system, which multiple sources describe as the most segregated anywhere in the United States. Throughout the five boroughs, the 14 percent of white students mostly attend schools with pupils who are statistically very similar to them, while the 23 percent and 43 percent of students who are Hispanic or Black overwhelmingly attend schools that are correspondingly homogeneous.

For example, a 2024 analysis by the non-profit advocacy group Education Trust-New York notes, “in one of the most diverse cities in the world… school segregation continues to be the worst in the nation.” Citing the case of Manhattan’s District 3, which covers the Upper West Side, the report documents, “while the [local] demographic makeup… is diverse, schools do not reflect this diversity. Of the District’s 40 schools, 16 have 35 percent or more Black students with an average of 4 percent white students. And 11 schools have over 35 percent white students, with an average eight percent or less of Black students.”