As is common with these situations, the case ended up on the federal docket. A rejection letter, a scorecard, and a parent who concluded that the rejection was more about a system she thought had been purposefully altered than it was about her own child.
Yi Fang Chen, a 45-year-old data scientist from Brooklyn who holds a PhD in statistics from Stanford, filed a lawsuit last week against the Department of Education and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, claiming that the city’s Specialized High Schools admissions process violates the 14th Amendment by being designed along racial lines.
The Pacific Legal Foundation filed the complaint on Chen’s behalf, identifying the Discovery program as the particular mechanism causing what the plaintiffs claim is illegal discrimination.
| Chen v. NYC DOE / Mamdani Administration — Key Information | Details |
|---|---|
| Plaintiff | Yi Fang Chen, 45 |
| Plaintiff’s Background | Stanford PhD in statistics, data scientist |
| Defendants | NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, NYC DOE Chancellor Kamar Samuels |
| Filing Body | Pacific Legal Foundation |
| Court | U.S. District Court (federal) |
| Statute Cited | 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause |
| Schools Affected | NYC’s 9 Specialized High Schools |
| Annual Test-Takers | About 26,000 |
| Available Seats | Around 5,000 |
| Plaintiff’s Son’s Score | 558 (Stuyvesant cutoff: 561) |
| Program at Issue | Discovery program (started under de Blasio) |
| Reserved Discovery Seats | 20% of SHS placements |
| Discovery Eligibility Cap | Scores up to 495 |
| Reference Resource | NYC Department of Education |
| Reference Reporting |
In November, Chen’s kid received a score of 558 on the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. The most competitive of the nine specialized schools, Stuyvesant High School, has a 561 cutoff. He lost by three points.
Chen’s discovery that students who scored up to 100 points lower than her son would instead be admitted to Stuyvesant through the Discovery program—a separate admissions pathway reserved for students from “high-poverty public schools” who meet specific criteria around family income, foster care status, or English language learner classification—turned the rejection into a lawsuit. Twenty percent of all SHS seats in the system are currently under the program’s authority.
The Pacific Legal Foundation has developed a more nuanced legal case than a straightforward opposition to affirmative action. The foundation is not contesting the Discovery program’s initial goal, which was to increase access for truly underprivileged students of all races when it was initially introduced decades ago.
According to the complaint, the de Blasio administration purposefully revised the program in 2019, precisely calibrating the eligibility requirements to exclude middle schools with high Asian American student enrollment. Using poverty-based eligibility filters as a stand-in for generating a racially targeted admissions outcome, the plaintiffs portray this as the city reversing the program’s declared goal.
This situation inevitably has a political component. The Discovery program and its present eligibility requirements were not developed by Mayor Mamdani, who assumed office earlier this year. Because he inherited the regulations and has continued to implement them, he is named in the lawsuit. In her interview,
Chen particularly brought this up, pointing out that Mamdani attended Bronx Science, one of the same Specialized High Schools whose admissions procedure is currently being contested in court. That comment has a certain tension to it. The SHS system was designed to generate credentials similar to the mayor’s own educational path. The plaintiffs contend that the current administration is running a system that has strayed from the merit-based values that helped its current mayor.
A quick mention of the procedural history is worthwhile. Under de Blasio’s leadership, Chen had previously been a plaintiff in a similar lawsuit against the city.
The Second Circuit Court overturned the 2022 dismissal of that action in 2024 when the appeal court determined that the plaintiffs had provided proof of Asian American pupils experiencing discriminatory consequences as a result of the policy. The current litigation now has a much better procedural foundation than it would have otherwise due to the 2024 reversal.
The litigation will ultimately determine whether the federal court finds that the Discovery program’s eligibility requirements amount to unconstitutional racial engineering or whether the city is able to successfully defend the policy as an expansion of access for underprivileged students that is racially neutral.
Observing how these challenges have progressed through the legal system gives the impression that, following the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision on racial admissions in higher education, the judicial landscape has changed in ways that might not be in the city’s best interests. The policy was passed down to the Mamdani government. It is now their responsibility to fight the lawsuit.
