Zohran Mamdani and city Democrat leaders stand accused of “racially engineering” New York City’s elite public high schools, according to a Brooklyn mom who last week brought a federal lawsuit against the mayor and the Department of Education.
Yi Fang Chen, 45, is challenging the admissions process for the city’s nine Specialized High Schools (SHS) after her eldest son was denied admission to Stuyvesant High School, despite scoring in the top five percent on the admissions exam, which he took in November.
Some 26,000 students take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test each year, competing for around 5,000 places.
Chen told The Post her 13-year-old son scored 558 in the rigorous exam and Stuyvesant requires a score of 561, but he was still rejected. Her lawsuit challenges revisions to the admissions for the 2019 school year, which allocate 20 percent of all available seats for students who specifically got lower test scores but meet other criteria, such as coming from a lower-income background.
“Starting in 2020, the City began reserving 20 percent of its SHS seats for a separate admissions pathway — the Discovery program — that excludes students based on criteria the City purposefully selected to change the racial composition of those schools,” according to the lawsuit.
“The City adopted and continues to enforce that policy in an effort to reduce the number of Asian-American students and increase the number of black and Hispanic students admitted to the SHSs.
Chen says her son did not meet any of the qualifications for the Discovery Program.
“Any student who scored a 495 or above is not eligible for the Discovery program,” states the NYC public school website.
Chen told The Post students who scored up to 100 points below her son will be granted admission to Stuyvesant instead. “It’s very upsetting,” the data scientist and mother of three added.
The criteria were “deliberately designed” to reduce Asian American enrollment, according to the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that filed the suit on her behalf.
“The City inverted the purpose of the Discovery Program by making certain disadvantaged kids categorically ineligible for Discovery through middle-school screens calculated to exclude heavily Asian-American schools.
“So rather than expand opportunity for disadvantaged students generally, the City rewrote the program in an effort to engineer a different racial result,” a representative for the foundation told The Post.
The Discovery program was started long before Mamdani became mayor this year. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio had expanded it, with the explicit intent of admitting more black and Hispanic students.
To qualify, students must attend and be recommended by a “high-poverty public school,” and come from a family who receive welfare or food stamps, be in foster care, or classed as an “English language learner,” according to the schools department.
The Pacific Legal Foundation says the change in the rules violates the federal Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The Department of Education did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Chen arrived in the US in 1996 as a teenager from China with limited English skills. She eventually earned a PhD in statistics from Stanford University, says she filed the lawsuit in order to help hundreds of other Asian-American students stuck in the same predicament.
She said she wanted to ensure that her other two children — a son and a daughter — would not face the same discrimination.
“Yi Fang Chen…has lived and worked in New York City for decades and raised her family with the expectation that merit — not race — would determine their opportunities in public education,” says the lawsuit, which also names the city’s Department of Education Chancellor, Kamar Samuels, as a defendant.
Chen was also a plaintiff in a similar suit against the city and de Blasio in 2018. The case was dismissed in 2022, but that decision was reversed in 2024 by the Second Circuit Court, which said the city acted with “discriminatory intent,” according to the Pacific Legal Foundation.
Chen said that she consulted with her son before she filed the second lawsuit, and said that he understood what she was doing and supported it.
“Regardless of outcome, I have to do this because it’s not just my son but each year there are hundreds of students who are victims of racial discrimination,” said Chen. “I don’t understand Mamdani. He went to Bronx Science, and he benefited from that experience.”
The Bronx High School of Science is one of the SHSs in the city.
Chen said she would continue to fight for as long as it takes to change the policy.
“As a mother, I do what I think is the right thing to do,” she said.
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