Mother’s Warning Comes True: Son Pays the Price of NYC Schools’ Racial Engineering

The cruelest time to be proven right is after the damage is done.

Yi Fang Chen lived this cruel irony for eight long years as New York City engineered school admissions around race. She predicted her children would pay the price. When she sued to stop it, she was tossed from the case because her warning hadn’t yet come true.

Now it has.

Yi Fang knows the power of merit because it opened doors in her own life. She arrived in America from China as a teenager speaking very little English. But numbers were a universal language that gave her confidence, helped her earn a Ph.D. in statistics, and formed her career as a data scientist.

They also forged her believe in an American Dream built on merit, not race or ethnicity.

“That your hard work will take you somewhere is one of the only opportunities that one has as a new immigrant to this country,” she explains.

That belief guides how she and her immigrant husband—both now American citizens—raise their three children.

“Both of us are from average families, not privileged. So we believe education will enable a lot of opportunities,” she says.

The city’s eight specialized public high schools have long offered exactly that kind of opportunity. Students competed for seats at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science—Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s alma mater—and the others almost entirely by their Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) scores. The few remaining seats went to low-income students through the Discovery program for those who narrowly missed the cutoff.

In 2018, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio changed the rules. His administration quadrupled Discovery to twenty percent of seats at each specialized high school while slashing eligibility to only those students whose middle schools had a minimum 60 percent low-income enrollment.

By Yi Fang’s calculations, these numbers added up to trouble.

“By setting aside 20 percent of the seats, you’re making the cutoff of each school go up by at least ten points. It’s going to take away someone else’s earned opportunity right off the bat,” she had warned. “A functional, healthy society should not be like that.”

The income threshold also fooled no one. De Blasio and other officials explicitly set out to admit fewer Asian American and white students and more black and Hispanic students.

Race was the real goal.

Nearly three-quarters of Asian students citywide are low-income, yet few attend schools that clear the new threshold. If helping these students were really the point, the city wouldn’t shut out so many of them.

More importantly, the Constitution protects every child’s right to equal treatment before the law. The government cannot sacrifice that right to achieve preferred racial outcomes.

Yi Fang fought back, joining Pacific Legal Foundation and the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York to challenge the policy. The court dismissed her, however, because harm to her first-grade son was still years away.

The lawsuit wound through the courts and mayors came and went, yet the policy remained. Today, it continues under Mamdani, who credits his celebrated Bronx Science education for opening his own doors of opportunity.

Meanwhile, Yi Fang’s son grew into a teenager determined to earn a seat at Stuyvesant, which has the highest admission cutoff score.

This spring, the very harm Yi Fang predicted eight years earlier arrived.

Her son’s SHSAT score was 558, three points shy of Stuyvesant’s cutoff—driven higher by Discovery’s expansion. His middle school also didn’t meet Discovery’s income threshold, shutting him out of that path, too. Yet all students Stuyvesant admitted through Discovery—one-fifth of the incoming class—scored at least 65 points lower than the school’s cutoff.

“It’s racial discrimination and it’s devastating,” says Yi Fang.

The denied opportunity gave her son something valuable: standing to sue. So, represented by PLF free of charge, Yi Fang returned to federal court. This time, she’s keeping her son close to the fight.

“I want him to see firsthand how hard we are fighting for his education rights and against something that’s wrong,” Yi Fang says, noting the hard lessons he’s already learning.

“He said, ‘Mom, why do so many people have such anger or hatred toward a 13-year-old kid?’” she recalls. “In a sense he’s very right. And if these rules don’t go away, many more kids will suffer.”

“Eight years later, New York is still defending the indefensible,” says PLF senior attorney Glenn Roper. “Yi Fang’s dismissal the first time around backfired for the city, which now faces two lawsuits instead of one, and the Constitution hasn’t changed a bit—the government must treat people as individuals, not members of a race.”

Her two younger children and countless others still to come through New York City public schools give Yi Fang even more reason to see the fight through.

“I know it’s an uphill battle. But it’s about constitutional rights and individual students like my son who are harmed by this discriminatory public policy,” she declares. “I just want equal opportunity for all kids. If not, then I keep fighting.”