Civil rights claim alleging discrimination against Asian-American high school students may proceed

 The Court of Appeals has reinstated a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by an Asian-American organization that challenges the admission policies of the specialized high schools in New York City. The plaintiff claims the policies discriminate against Asian-Americans. The Court of Appeals holds the plaintiff asserts enough allegations to allow this case to proceed to discovery.

The case is Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York v. Adams, issued on September 24. The specialized high schools in New York City are well-known, and admission to them can be the start of a productive academic and professional career. Plaintiff argues the admission policy for the Discovery Program at these high schools violates equal protection because they are intended to discriminate against Asian-Americans. As the Court of Appeals summarizes the case:

In June 2018, the New York City Department of Education (“DOE”) revised the admission policy at eight of its highly selective Specialized High Schools (“SHSs”), with the stated goal of creating a wider and more diverse pool of applicants for the SHSs.  In particular, the new policy made changes to the “Discovery Program”—a pre-existing path for admission to SHSs for high- performing, economically disadvantaged students who would not otherwise be admitted based solely on their scores on the standardized test for admission. The changes included:  (1) expanding of the number of SHS seats reserved for the Discovery Program from less than 5 percent to 20 percent of the overall SHS seats; and (2) adding a new admissions criterion for the Discovery Program, known as the “Economic Need Index” or “ENI,” that focused on the economic status of the student applicant’s community as a whole, rather than on an individual basis.

The Court of Appeals (Cabranes, Bianco and Reiss [D.J.]) states that there is no dispute that economically disadvantaged Asian-American students from certain middle schools would have been eligible for admission to the specialized high schools under the prior admissions program, but that they were ineligible under the new policy because their "Economic Needs Index" scores were too low. While the new policy is facially neutral, the parties dispute whether the City intended to discriminate against Asian-American student-candidates.While the district court held the disparate impact claim fails because plaintiffs have not alleged that the new policy negatively affects Asian-American students in the aggregate, that analysis was incorrect because the law actually holds that:

if the government enacts a law or policy with a proven discriminatory motive against a certain race (as we must assume here for purposes of this appeal given the bifurcation of discovery), a valid equal protection claim can be based on a showing that any individual has been negatively affected or harmed by that discriminatory law or policy based on race, even if there is no disparate impact to members of that racial class in the aggregate.

The Court of Appeals holds that the plaintiff-organization needs discovery to prove its claims. The case returns to the district court for that purpose.