A major lawsuit challenging racial segregation in New York City’s public schools was allowed to move forward on Thursday, raising the potential for it to bring landmark changes to admissions at selective schools in the nation’s largest school system.
Starting as early as kindergarten, city students are sorted into two different academic tracks in which they take either general elementary school classes or specialized gifted and talented classes. Children in the latter track are often funneled into selective middle and high schools.
The suit argues that many Black and Latino students face “systematic exclusion” from the gifted and selective pipelines, which blocks them from “prime educational opportunities” and denies their right to a sound education under the State Constitution.
The case, if successful, could ultimately force fundamental changes to admissions policies at hundreds of selective schools, one of the most divisive education issues in New York and around the country.
A lower court judge had previously dismissed the suit, ruling that it asked the court system “to make educational policy,” which is beyond its purview. But, on Thursday, a New York appellate court found that the decision was an “error” and allowed the case to proceed.
In its ruling, the court found that arguments between lawyers for the state and city blaming each other “lead to the nonsensical result that no government entity is responsible for a sound basic education.”
Mark Rosenbaum, one of the lawyers who filed the suit, said on Thursday: “This is a historic decision. It means it’s the beginning of the end of the two-tiered education system in New York City.”
The court’s decision could reignite an emotional debate about racial and economic segregation in one of the nation’s most diverse cities. After previous leaders vowed to reshape the education system but ultimately changed little, Mayor Eric Adams and his schools chancellor opted not to prioritize integration. Now, the ruling may force the administration into the conversation.
The suit could now become the highest-profile education case in New York in more than a decade, and will likely resurrect heated arguments among parents and policymakers about the merits of selective admissions policies.
An increasingly powerful faction of families has argued that selective programs provide rigor and opportunities to students who work hard for them. But supporters of desegregation, including local educators, have called attention to longstanding gaps between Black and Latino children and their peers in reading proficiency and graduation rates. They point to how selective admissions can divide privileged parents from vulnerable families.
During the arguments over the appeal, several judges signaled that they believed the case could have merit.
“We cannot just keep on saying, ‘This problem is too big. There’s nothing we can do about it,’” Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels, of the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, told a lawyer for the city at the time.
“Meanwhile, thousands and thousands and thousands of children keep on being graduated from a system that’s not teaching them,” she said.
The lawsuit is distinct in the landscape of K-12 education. Unlike conservative efforts to roll back admissions policies aimed at racial diversity — including an ongoing suit at an elite Virginia public high school that may reach the Supreme Court — the New York case argues that students are entitled to an “anti-racist education.”
On Thursday, Mayor Adams’s office, as well as the city and state Education Departments — which are both named as defendants in the suit — did not immediately return a request for comment. It was unclear if they would aim to settle the case outside a public courtroom.
Mr. Rosenbaum said he and the other civil rights lawyers who filed the suit would move forward with the case at “warp speed.” But, he added, he would like to see it resolved before a trial.
“My hope is that the city and state will say enough is enough,” said Mr. Rosenbaum, who was joined on the case with Sidley Austin, one of the nation’s largest law firms. The practices used to “screen out Black and Latino students” from elite high schools are “going to go down,” he added.
The suit focuses largely on selective pathways in New York’s schools. The city has historically screened students for admission into public schools — considering metrics like grades and interviews — more than any other American district.
The lawyers argue that those policies have given rise to a two-tiered system in which factors like affluence, test preparation and “insider knowledge” shape where many students end up.
In the city’s gifted and talented program, the sorting begins before a child’s fifth birthday. Black and Latino students comprise roughly two-thirds of the population of all schools, but in the fall of 2022, they made up only about a third of kindergartners offered spots in gifted classes.
Mr. Adams added 1,000 seats to a separate gifted track starting in third grade. Black and Latino children fared better there, making up about 47 percent of third-grade classes, according to data obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Law records. Researchers often suggest waiting later to identify gifted students, and the kindergarten disparities could become a focus of the case.
Gifted classes in elementary school often serve as a pipeline for the city’s most elite public middle schools. As a result, the suit argues, by the time many Black and Latino students reach their teenage years, “entire swaths of high schools and programs are functionally off limits” to them.
At Stuyvesant High School and the city’s other specialized schools, where admissions are based on an entrance exam, only about one in 10 offers last spring went to Black and Latino pupils.
The case has already attracted attention from a conservative nonprofit that has filed motions in several suits nationally over race-conscious policies, including affirmative action at Harvard University.
The group, Parents Defending Education, argued in a court filing that many families could lose “priceless educational opportunities” if selective programs were changed or eliminated. In its filling, the group included an unnamed parent who said the city should focus on fixing its lower-performing schools, rather than harming its higher-performing ones.
The lawyers behind the suit have argued that if the city’s goal was to create an education system to “replicate and in fact exacerbate pernicious racial inequality,” it “would be challenging to design a more effective system than that which currently exists.”
The two competing visions for the school system are now poised to come to a head.
When a city lawyer argued for dismissing the case in November, Justice Manzanet-Daniels told him: “You want to throw out the baby with the bath water — and it seems to me that based on the allegations in this complaint, you’ve got a really dirty baby.”
