By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-09-29 15:36:58 | Updated at 2026-09-29 16:16:09
42 minutes ago
The Supreme Court declined to order that New York City admit a student to a selective high school while his mother sues over its admissions policy, which she says discriminates against Asian Americans.
Brooklyn parent Yi Fang Chen had asked the high court to seat her son at Stuyvesant High School pending a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Sept. 28
deniedthe emergency application in Chen v. Mamdani. She did not explain her ruling.
Chen’s case takes aim at how the city allocates seats at its exam schools, which reserve a portion of seats for high-scoring students from certain economically disadvantaged schools instead of by neighborhood of residence. Students with the highest scores from the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test are seated first.
But a second consideration was introduced through the city’s Discovery Program, which requires that 20 percent of score-based seats be reserved for students who score below the cutoff in a “Discovery score band” and meet other eligibility rules. Chen
arguesthis policy was designed to cut Asian American enrollment while raising black and Hispanic enrollment.
Her son, identified in court papers as M.P., scored 558 on the admissions test, three points below Stuyvesant’s cutoff this year. Chen says the Discovery Program raised that cutoff by reserving seats that otherwise would have gone in test-score order.
“Yi Fang Chen’s son was denied a seat at Stuyvesant because the City turned a program meant to help economically disadvantaged students into a tool for racial engineering—one that actually excluded disadvantaged children throughout the city,” said Dean McGee, an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, a public-interest law firm that represents Chen.
“Equal protection means treating kids as individuals, not as demographic statistics.”
Chen sued in April and asked U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos of the Southern District of New York to direct Stuyvesant to admit her son for this school year. She argued the Discovery Program intentionally discriminates, in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans race discrimination by programs that take federal money.
She said city officials limited the program to students from middle schools with an Economic Need Index of 60 percent or higher because internal modeling allegedly showed that limit would reduce Asian American offers and increase black and Hispanic offers.
City officials denied that the 60-percent floor was adopted to discriminate against Asian Americans.
Several advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, intervened to defend the Discovery Program. They argued the program serves as a race-neutral way to open seats to disadvantaged students, that large racial gaps at Stuyvesant remain, and that blocking the program would freeze those gaps in place.
After a July 21 hearing, Ramos denied Chen’s request for the preliminary injunction, finding, among other things, that the program’s written rules do not mention race. He applied rational basis review instead of the tougher strict scrutiny standard, holding that expanding opportunity for poor students was a legitimate goal.
Chen appealed to the Second Circuit, where a three-judge panel on Sept. 8 denied her request for a temporary injunction pending appeal, saying she had not met the higher bar that applies to emergency relief while an appeal is still pending. On Sept. 15, the panel also declined to order the accelerated briefing schedule Chen sought for the case.
Her appeal of the July 21 injunction denial remains pending in the Second Circuit. The underlying lawsuit continues in the Southern District of New York.
Neither the district court nor the Second Circuit has ruled on the merits of the case itself.
Under Supreme Court rules, because the application was denied by a single justice, it may be presented to another justice. But such renewals rarely succeed.
