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On September 24, 2024, after nearly six years of litigation, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit delivered a significant victory for New York City parents in CACAGNY v. Adams. The court ruled that the plaintiffs had adequately demonstrated that a revised admissions policy for the City’s Specialized High Schools had a discriminatory effect on Asian students, overturning the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the City.

New York City’s Specialized High Schools are among the top public schools in the nation. The two most well-known—Stuyvesant and Bronx Science—are part of a network of nine schools whose alumni include Nobel Laureates, scientists, astronauts, actors, and lawyers. Admission to these schools is highly competitive and, under state law, is determined by student performance on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). This challenging standardized exam is central to the schools’ appeal and success: any New York City eighth grader can gain entry if they score high enough on the SHSAT.

Yet in 2018, Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote an op-ed calling the Specialized High Schools “a monumental injustice” due to what he saw as a “diversity problem.” He noted that the schools had disproportionately low numbers of black and Hispanic students compared to their representation in the broader public school system. Even though approximately two-thirds of students in City public schools were either Hispanic or black, only 10 percent of students in the Specialized High Schools were from these groups. Asian students, in contrast, were admitted at a higher rate than their representation in City public schools; they constitute a majority of admitted students despite making up just 16 percent of public middle school students.

Because scrapping the SHSAT would have required state legislative approval, de Blasio instead unilaterally expanded the “Discovery program,” which historically provided a path for disadvantaged students who narrowly missed the SHSAT cutoff to be admitted. De Blasio aimed to address the “diversity problem” by increasing Discovery program admissions to 20 percent of the seats at each Specialized High School instead of the historical1-2 percent rate. Additionally, the de Blasio administration changed the definition of “disadvantaged” so that eligibility for Discovery required attending a “qualifying” middle school where at least 60 percent of students were disadvantaged.

City modeling predicted these changes would increase black and Hispanic representation and decrease Asian representation. Statements from Education Chancellor Richard Carranza suggested the policy shift was motivated by his belief that Asian students were overrepresented at the Specialized High Schools. Carranza questioned “the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools,” and his deputy chancellor reportedly remarked, “I walked into Stuyvesant . . . and I thought I was in Chinatown!”

In response to the admissions policy changes, Asian-American parents, a parent-teacher organization at one of the excluded middle schools, and a Chinese-American advocacy organization, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY), sued City officials, arguing they had violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Represented by Pacific Legal Foundation, the plaintiffs argued that although the revised policy did not explicitly discriminate on the basis of race, a facially race-neutral law can still—under Arlington Heights—be unconstitutional if it is enacted for a discriminatory purpose.

The district court denied plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and restricted fact discovery into City officials’ purpose. It ruled that the plaintiffs needed to first show a clear discriminatory effect on Asian students in the aggregate before they could get discovery into the City’s racial purpose. This posed a challenge because the City’s earlier modeling had been significantly flawed such that, rather than dropping, the overall number of Asian students across all the Specialized High Schools increased slightly under the new policy. The City argued that this increase meant there was no discriminatory effect and no constitutional violation, plaintiffs’ evidence of harm to individual Asian students notwithstanding.

Plaintiffs argued that aggregate impact was not needed to state a claim under the Equal Protection Clause and that individual Asian Americans were affected in two ways. First, they noted the revised policy excluded identifiable students attending many of the City’s heavily Asian middle schools from the Discovery program—effectively barring them from 20 percent of Specialized High Schools seats. Second, plaintiffs’ expert analyzed admissions data and concluded that the policy changes had resulted in the exclusion of certain Asian students from Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, the two most competitive schools. Nevertheless, the district court agreed with the City and granted summary judgment in its favor, concluding that plaintiffs were required to show an “aggregate disparate impact” on Asians to sustain an equal protection claim.

CACAGNY appealed, and the Second Circuit reversed the district court’s ruling. Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, Judge Joseph Bianco held that because admission to the Specialized High Schools is a “zero-sum game,” the exclusion of economically disadvantaged Asian students from one-fifth of the admission slots, if “motivated by discriminatory intent towards Asian-American students, would set forth an equal protection claim under Arlington Heights.”

Judge Bianco noted that the recent Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College reaffirmed that a facially neutral law or policy violates the Equal Protection Clause when it causes the “loss of an opportunity based on race” and is “proven to have the same discriminatory motivation.” As the Supreme Court held in Students for Fair Admissions, “What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.”

Judge Bianco also emphasized throughout the opinion that the Equal Protection Clause protects individuals, not racial groups: 

When an individual of a certain race has been denied access to a program . . . by a facially neutral law or policy that is racially motivated, a viable equal protection claim exists even if the individual's racial group did not suffer an aggregate disparate impact from that law or policy. 

While the City treated students as representatives of racial groups, the Second Circuit’s decision recognizes them as individuals—none of whom should be denied opportunity based on race.

The case isn’t over. The City may seek rehearing en banc or Supreme Court review. And even under the panel’s ruling, the plaintiffs must still prove on remand that City officials acted with discriminatory purpose—which will require additional discovery into the motivation behind the admissions policy changes. However, the Second Circuit’s ruling reinforces that individuals, not racial groups, are at the heart of what the Equal Protection Clause protects. A facially neutral policy that is racially motivated and harms individuals based on race remains unconstitutional, even if the policy does not have an observable aggregate racial effect.