Pacific Legal Foundation’s attorney, Mr. Favin Chung, briefs New York Chinese Parents and advocacy groups on their lawsuit against the mayor for “discrimination against Asians in special high school admissions. (Video screenshot)
The left is engaged in “equal outcomes” racial balancing programs everywhere, including rigged lotteries, classroom quotas, and the elimination of standardized tests. In order to ensure fair admissions to good schools in the future, parents from Jefferson High School, New York Special High School, Boston, and Montgomery County, Maryland, have filed lawsuits against the racial balancing program. The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which represents the plaintiffs in these lawsuits, held a web conference on the evening of the 16th to present the progress of the case.
Asian students make up a large portion of the student body at New York’s special high schools. Pictured is New York’s Stevenson High School.
The Pacific Legal Foundation is currently representing four lawsuits in the Education sector. The most recent is a lawsuit against Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ High School), one of the top-ranked public schools in the country, for changing its admissions rules late last year to reduce Asian enrollment. The new admissions rules eliminate the entrance exam and the merit test, and the new racial balance plan is “downright hostile and discriminatory against Asians,” according to attorney Erin Wilcox, who took the school to federal court on March 10.
The second case is Association for the Advancement of Educational Equity (AFEF) v. Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). MCPS is the largest public school district in Maryland and one of the best public schools in the state, and after MCPS adopted new admissions practices that replaced objective considerations with subjective ones, the percentage of Asian students admitted plummeted by 50 percent, and many Asian children who excelled on district criteria were turned away while admissions for all other racial groups trended upward. Pacific Legal Foundation took the MCPS school board to court last September on behalf of AFEF.
The third case was a 2018 lawsuit by Chinese parents and advocacy groups against the mayor for “discrimination against Asians in special high school admissions,” in which an unfortunate judge denied the plaintiffs’ motion for an injunction to prevent the city from implementing the “Explorations” expansion program, allowing Mayor Whitehouse to challenge The first step in the reform of the special high school entrance exam can move forward. After appealing to the Second Circuit, the Appellate Division judge upheld the ruling that the plaintiffs were “unlikely to succeed in showing (the defendants’) discriminatory intent,” said attorney Favoncong. The case is ongoing and the battle continues in the courtroom, said attorney French.
The fourth case is a 2018 lawsuit by African-American and Hispanic parents in Connecticut against racial quotas. The background of the case is that Connecticut law requires that at least 25 percent of the student slots in its high-quality magnet schools (MAGNET schools) be divided between white and Asian students and limits enrollment of African-American and Hispanic students to a 75 percent cap. The failure of Hartford’s magnet schools to meet the 25% white and Asian enrollment target has resulted in hundreds of classroom seats in the schools being left vacant, wasting public education resources while many African-American and Hispanic students are being denied a good education.
Participants also discussed cases and situations including the Boston Latin School, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM), and New York’s new admissions method of switching to a combination of teacher recommendation and lottery for this year’s Gifted and Talented test, among others. George Lee of the New York Synod shared that critical race theory (CRT) was introduced in Loudoun County, Virginia public schools, that the school administration threatened to fire teachers who were skeptical of CRT, and that far-left supporters of the theory even created blacklists of parents and teachers and prepared to infiltrate and disrupt the websites of groups that opposed it. The battle between conservatives and the far-left is expected to be an uphill battle, as they threaten to fire teachers who are skeptical of CRT.
Lawyers for the Pacific Legal Foundation say that the government’s use of color or race to benefit one group of students over another, in whatever form, is unconstitutional and must be stopped, and they will challenge the programs in court.
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