Last month, Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, reminded school administrators of their color-blind obligations following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in June 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Trainor rebuked American universities and K-12 schools for racially discriminating against white and Asian students and routinely using “race as a factor in admission.”
The Trump administration’s next righteous step should be to intervene in the interminable federal civil-rights lawsuit, Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York v. Adams, initiated in December 2018 against then-Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, for implementing racially-motivated changes to the admissions policy at the city’s prestigious exam high schools.
Previously, more than 96% of the 5,100 students accepted annually into Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Tech and five other schools were the highest scorers for their preferred school on the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT).
Fewer than 4% were admitted through the Discovery Program, designed for economically disadvantaged students who had just missed the cut-off scores, but successfully completed a summer academic program at their desired school.
But in June 2018, Mayor de Blasio massively expanded this alternative program to 20%, publicly proclaiming his intention was to increase the combined Black and Hispanic enrollment in the SHSAT schools from 9% to 16%.
In September 2022, Manhattan Federal Judge Edgardo Ramos granted summary judgment to defendant Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, who had succeeded de Blasio nine months earlier.
Judge Ramos reasoned that since the total number of successful Asian candidates for the eight SHSAT schools did not suffer an “aggregate disparate impact” between 2018 and 2020, their equal protection claim under the 14th Amendment was invalid.
But in September 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed and remanded the case to the district court for a full trial.
While agreeing with the lower court that no collective harm to Asian students occurred, the three judges wisely determined that individuals who were denied entrance to their preferred SHSAT high school under the expanded the Discovery Program, but would have been admitted under the earlier rules, have a valid constitutional claim.
Unfortunately, the 44-page decision from Judges Joseph F. Bianco, Jose A. Cabranes and Christina Reiss has serious deficiencies.
Acknowledging that the humongous expansion of the Discovery Program increased the number of Asian, Black and Hispanic students, they inexplicably devoted only a few anodyne sentences to the grievous harm inflicted on white applicants.
The three judges merely noted that between 2018 and 2020 successful Black and Hispanic SHSAT candidates jumped from 10% to 16.7%; Asians increased from 51% to 53%; but whites declined from 25.8% to 22.4%.
The second major flaw in the Second Circuit’s 2024 decision is using inadequate SHSAT demographics between 2018 and 2020.
But comprehensive enrollment data between 2017 and 2024 from the New York State Education Department documents that the total number of Asian-American students at the eight schools are mindbogglingly identical: 9,648 in 2017 and 9,654 in 2024.
Hispanic students increased by 22%, from 955 to 1,169.
Black students rose by 10%, from 654 to 725.
White students dropped by a very significant 8%, from 3,766 to 3,458.
Undoubtedly, the radical Discovery Program changes by Mayors de Blasio and Adams is entirely responsible for the blatantly unconstitutional discrimination against white students.
Of the 792 Discovery participants in 2024, only 9% were White, but they earned 26% of the seats based on their SHSAT scores.
Asian students received 56%, compared to 52% from the exam.
Hispanic students were granted 21% of Discovery seats, significantly higher than the 8% on the SHSAT.
Black students were awarded 12%, also much higher than the exam’s 5%.
The third serious flaw in Second Circuit’s opinion is citing a claim from Judge Ramos’ 2022 decision that SHSAT offers to Asian students dropped between 2018 and 2020 by only 0.7 percentage points for Stuyvesant and 1.4 percentage points for Bronx Science.
In fact, between 2017 and 2024, Asian students at Stuyvesant fell by 5%, from 2,466 to 2,346.
At Bronx Science, Asians declined 6%, from 1,965 to 1,838.
More egregiously, white students at Stuyvesant plunged by 12%, from 617 to 543.
At Bronx Science, whites declined by an even steeper 15%, from 700 to 595.
Since the results of the latest SHSAT were announced on March 6, 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi must immediately intervene to resolve this six-year-long, sclerotic federal lawsuit, which involves abominable racial discrimination not only against Asian students, but more severely against white students
She should argue for the permanent abolition of the Mayors de Blasio’s and Adams’ abhorrent Discovery Program and the return to pre-2019 protocols.
Mark Schulte is a retired New York City schoolteacher and mathematician who has written extensively about science and the history of science. Read Mark Schulte's Reports — More Here.
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