Mamdani, city leaders accused of racially engineering elite public HS's to keep Asians out

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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.

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.

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