Second Circuit Rules Intent To Racially Balance NY High Schools Is Unconstitutional
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that an alternative admissions program to New York City’s competitive high schools is unconstitutional if it intended to achieve racial balancing. Although the program does not prescribe racial quotas or favor candidates directly on the basis of race, a criterion was added in 2018 to achieve a higher representation of black and Hispanic students, according to the plan’s announcement.
In Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York v. Adams (CACAGNY), the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) won a decision in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal that could roll back the expanded Discovery Program to New York City’s specialized high schools (SHSs). The decision has broader constitutional implications for facially neutral discrimination—policies that are applied equally and superficially neutral but intended to produce disparate outcomes for individuals on the basis of immutable characteristics.
In December 2018, plaintiffs filed a motion for preliminary injunction against New York City’s Department of Education’s (DOE) Discovery Program. The complaint alleged that the program’s facially neutral selection process disparately impacted Asian-American applicants to the SHSs.
New York’s SHSs are described as “prestigious, highly competitive institutions that are among the best high schools in the country,” by the editorial board of The New York Times. In 1972, the Hecht-Calandra Act legally enshrined regular admissions to the SHSs as “solely and exclusively by taking a competitive, objective and scholastic achievement examination.”
Civil rights groups have long complained that the SHSs do not reflect the demographics of New York’s high school student population and regard the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT)—the admissions process established by Stuyvesant in 1934—as racially discriminatory, reports The New York Times. In 2018, the Office of the Mayor reported that only 9 percent of SHS offers that year went to black and Latino students, despite 68 percent of NYC’s high school students belonging to these racial groups.
To address these racial disparities, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and NYC DOE Chancellor Richard Carranza announced the expansion of the Discovery Program in June 2018. Per the Hecht-Calandra Act, the Discovery Program offers SHS admission to students who do not meet the SHSAT cutoff score and are certified as disadvantaged by their local school. Carranza added the requirement that a student must attend a school with an Economic Need Index (ENI) of 0.6 or above.
CACAGNY plaintiffs alleged the DOE instituted the ENI requirement as a proxy for race to en
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