New York City, NY – The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) has filed a new federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, challenging the city's 2019 changes to specialized high school admissions criteria. The lawsuit, filed on April 23, 2026, by Yi Fang Chen, alleges that the revised rules, which reserve 20% of seats for students from specific middle schools, were intentionally designed to reduce Asian American enrollment, violating the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. This action follows a significant Second Circuit ruling in 2024 that allowed challenges to facially race-neutral policies with discriminatory intent.
The 2019 policy expanded the Discovery Program, historically offering a small number of seats to low-income students just below the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) cutoff. Under the new criteria, 20% of seats at each of the city's eight specialized high schools are reserved for students from middle schools where at least 60% of students are economically needy. PLF argues that these eligibility rules were "surgically selected to exclude Asian American students," as many majority-Asian middle schools, despite having low-income students, fall below the 60% threshold.
According to PLF, Yi Fang Chen's son, who scored near the SHSAT cutoff, would have been admitted to Stuyvesant High School under previous rules but was denied due to the expanded Discovery Program. Glenn Roper, a senior attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, stated, "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." This new lawsuit builds upon years of litigation, including a 2018 case also involving Yi Fang Chen, which was initially dismissed on the grounds that her son was too young to be impacted.
The lawsuit seeks to end the use of admissions criteria designed to produce racial outcomes, aiming to prohibit public schools from engineering admissions to achieve specific demographic results. Critics of the 2019 changes, including the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York, contend that the policy undermines merit-based admissions mandated by the 1971 Hecht-Calandra Act, which requires admission solely by the SHSAT. Proponents of the changes, including former Mayor Bill de Blasio, aimed to boost diversity, citing the disproportionately low enrollment of Black and Hispanic students in these elite schools compared to their representation in the broader public school system.
