AS SOON AS she heard that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio had appointed Richard Carranza as the city’s new chancellor of education, Wai Wah Chin was worried. “We knew it wasn’t good, Carranza isn’t on board with a race-blind meritocracy. He wasn’t interested in improving our failing public schools as much as photo ops.”

Wai Wah is the former president of CACAGNY, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York, an organization with deep roots dating as far back as the 1800s. The local New York chapter had been largely dormant before Wai Wah’s involvement, but since 2016, CACAGNY was becoming a louder voice in New York against racism targeting Asian Americans.

Wai Wah knew Carranza’s appointment meant there were new battles on the horizon for Asian New Yorkers. But she’s the kind of person willing to take a fight as far as she can, just on principle. And she was preparing for battle.

THE MAIN REASON for Wai Wah’s worry was what Carranza planned to do with the city’s Specialized High Schools. New York City’s Specialized High Schools offer New York students a shot at receiving a free, elite education. These schools, which included the likes of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, trained New York City’s best and brightest students. And that’s not an exaggeration—collectively, these schools boasted 14 Nobel Laureate graduates. Unlike the city’s public schools, the education was guaranteed to be best in class. Unlike the city’s private schools, tuition was free.

The admissions criteria for these high schools were straightforward. Most students were admitted by earning a high-enough score on a single test known as the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, or SHSAT. It was a simple, merit-based approach to high school admissions—you scored high enough, you got in. No interviews, no favoritism for legacies, no string-pulling.

This meritocracy was exactly what Wai Wah and many others admired about the Specialized High Schools. The test meant anyone of any class, race, or creed could get into some of the best public high schools in the world. “Passing the test, it takes time. It takes effort. It takes study,” Wai Wah explained, but whoever was willing to study and put in the time had a chance at an elite education.

In April 2018, however, Richard Carranza decided that race, not time, effort, or studying, should determine a student’s academic fate.

BY ANY DEFINITION, Richard Carranza’s life story was the story of the American Dream.

The grandson of Mexican immigrants, Carranza grew up in Tucson, Arizona. His mother was a hairdresser, and his father was a sheet-metal worker. The family spoke Spanish at home, and Richard learned English in school. He worked his way through college at the University of Arizona by taking on gigs as a mariachi musician, and ultimately earned his master’s and doctorate in education. He skyrocketed through the education system. He was a teacher and principal before earning prestigious superintendent positions in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Houston.

But the irony about Carranza is that how he describes the American Dream isn’t the American Dream at all. To Carranza, the American Dream— the notion that success is available to anyone and everyone willing to work for it—simply isn’t true for racial groups oppressed through “structural racism.”

In brief, structural racism argues that “racism” isn’t always explicit bigotry, à la Jim Crow. Rather, it’s an invisible force haunting all our social institutions. Racism defines the very structure of society. Carranza promotes the theory that individualism, objectivity, and even “the written word” are the tools of “white supremacy.” In fact, if you work in Carranza’s Department of Education, he’ll require you to take training on “white supremacy culture.”

That’s the theory. In practice, however, addressing structural racism winds up looking a whole lot like the racism it decries. Carranza has repeatedly evangelized that the color of someone’s skin should dictate how the school system serves them. As he describes it, “We cannot have excellence, we cannot improve outcomes without tackling the inequities that exist in our system.”

And so he waged war, to varying degrees of failure and much to the chagrin of most everyone he worked with. As superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, he scrapped an accelerated algebra program because not enough minority students were qualifying for it, and instead of focusing the district entirely on improving students’ performance in class, he led the school board in instituting an ethnic studies program in high schools. The year after he left San Francisco, the NAACP declared an educational state of emergency in the city because minority students’ test scores were dangerously low. In his next gig, as the superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, he tried to achieve racial balance in the city’s high-performing magnet schools by eliminating many of the test-score and academic requirements. The Houston school board was incensed by his efforts to sacrifice academic rigor for racial utopianism. He barely lasted 18 months in Texas.

All the while, Carranza developed a reputation for petulance and for using his power to retaliate against those who posed a challenge to his rising star. In San Francisco, he was accused of creating a hostile work environment for women who confronted him about inappropriate engagements with female colleagues. And in Houston, he grappled with school board and community members who felt that his policy proposals were ideological and half- baked.

He was a political wrecking ball, single-minded in his goal to remedy racial inequality. And now, with his appointment as the New York City education chancellor, he had the opportunity of a lifetime— to achieve his vision in America’s biggest school system.

ONE PROBLEM WITH the New York City school system, according to Carranza, was that the racial demographics of the Specialized High Schools differed markedly from those of New York City as a whole. There weren’t as many black and Hispanic students attending the Specialized High Schools as there were white and Asian American students. To Carranza, this alone was glaring evidence of structural racism in the New York City school system.

Yet a simple glimpse at the history of New York’s Specialized High Schools shows that the racial composition of these schools has always fluctuated. At one point, they were predominantly Jewish. In the ’90s, some were majority black. Nowadays, many Asians fill the schools. Often they’re first-generation immigrants, and just as often they are impoverished. But none of this mattered to Carranza. Asians were acing the SHSAT. Blacks and Hispanics currently weren’t. There could be no other conclusion to draw than that the test itself was a product of structural racism.

Carranza’s ultimate plan was to do away with the SHSAT entirely, in favor of an admission policy that would rely more on students’ race, income, and geography. But such a radical move would require the state legislators in Albany to formally repeal the law that created the test. In the short run, to “fix” the representation problem, Carranza planned to manipulate a program intended to give a small number of seats at the Specialized High Schools to low-income students called the Discovery Program.

Traditionally, Discovery Program students account for about 5% of admissions. In the past few years, however, low-income Asian students comprised about two-thirds of all Discovery admissions.

PLF attorney Chris Keiser, writing in the New York Daily News, explains Carranza’s manipulation: “Carranza decided to limit the [Discovery] program to certain middle schools that score 60% or higher on the city’s ‘Economic Need Index,’ a measure that estimates the percentage of economically disadvantaged students attending a particular school. Then they expanded Discovery to 20% of the seats at each Specialized High School, effectively locking the ineligible schools out of a large portion of available spots.”

It was not a coincidence that these newly ineligible schools just happened to be predominantly Asian, and Carranza didn’t make much of an effort to hide the fact that extending the Discovery Program was really about race. When asked whether he was concerned that the policy could hurt Asian-American students, even those from poor families, Carranza responded, “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.”

Wai Wah knew exactly what Carranza meant. “He was just admitting, ‘We can’t fix our failing public school system.’”

And boy, are New York’s public schools failing. Huge numbers of students are failing the state exams, and many teachers have come forward, admitting to grade inflation. If the rest of the public schools are largely failing, why go after the Specialized High Schools? Why go after Asians? Wai Wah doesn’t hesitate to offer a rationale: “They need a scapegoat, and we were just too easy to pass up.”

Wai Wah knew she’d be leading a charge to fight back. Through CACAGNY, she organized dozens of rallies and protests where families implored Carranza to reconsider the radical changes he was making to what is perhaps the only part of the public-school system that is working. “But his attitude was ‘We can’t improve the public schools, so let’s change what the Specialized High Schools look like.’”

It all fell on deaf ears. Carranza and de Blasio repeatedly made clear that the racial implication of Carranza’s policies was the point. The end goal was for New York City’s elite schools to mirror the racial percentages of the city’s overall population. Anything less was unacceptable and proof of a structurally racist system.

Carranza escalated the fight by branding his detractors, including the members of the Asian-American community, as racist. On social media, he shared a viral video with the headline “Wealthy white Manhattan parents angrily rant against plan to bring more black kids to their schools.” At a contentious City Council meeting, when asked about his preference for scrapping the SHSAT, he retorted, “Integration doesn’t lower academic achievement for any student; it improves it. Yet I can’t tell you how many times I hear in this discussion where there’s an equation of diversity and a lowering of academic standards. I will call that racist every time I hear it.”

With their independent efforts hitting a brick wall, Wai Wah and CACAGNY needed to change tactics. If protests and diplomacy weren’t going to work, then perhaps they had grounds to sue. After all, wasn’t racial discrimination a blatant violation of Americans’ civil rights?

Carranza’s racist education policies weren’t unique to New York. School districts in other states were pushing similar agendas. But fortunately, Pacific Legal Foundation was helping other families fight back.

WAI WAH’S HUSBAND, George Chin, heard about a discrimination case in Hartford, Connecticut, that was similar to what they were facing in New York. So he called PLF to ask about taking their fight to the courts. When Joshua Thompson, a senior attorney at PLF, began looking into the New York case, he saw how it was eerily similar to the case they were already arguing in Hartford.

Thompson echoed many of Wai Wah’s sentiments about Carranza using the Asian community as scapegoats, rather than attempting real reform to improve the rest of the schools. He and Wai Wah both pointed to the elimination of gifted and talented programs in the city. These programs were aimed to give high-achieving students in lackluster schools a leg up. When they were eliminated, black and Hispanic students stopped passing the test.

Thompson is even more blunt than Wai Wah about de Blasio’s superficial plan to make the specialized schools more “equitable”: “When de Blasio took office, he had a plan. He didn’t like the racial demographics of these specialized schools. But rather than combatting the cause, the lack of gifted and talented programs in these black and Hispanic districts, he says, ‘I’m not going to go after to the cause, I’m just going to change the effect and I’m going to mandate the racial composition that I want for the schools instead of raising up the opportunity for kids of all races to succeed on the specialized exam.’”

On December 13, 2018, PLF filed a lawsuit against de Blasio’s administration, alleging that the state’s reorganization of the low-income Discovery Program harms Asian-American students in both intent and practice. PLF also submitted a motion for preliminary injunction that would prohibit the city from implementing the new policy while the lawsuit was pending.

This turn of events was heartening for Wai Wah. Finally, a group of experts was working around the clock to expose Carranza’s discriminatory agenda and achieve justice for the hardworking members of the Asian American lower class.

But as Wai Wah soon learned, when it comes to effecting change through the court system, the arc of justice is long. PLF’s motion for preliminary injunction was denied by the court and denied again upon appeal. The policy, in the short term, would remain.

THOUGH THE FORCES of nature seemed to be conspiring against Wai Wah and CACAGNY, they retained a glimmer of hope due to an unlikely source: Richard Carranza himself. The man who had lit a powder keg in New York City with his divisive policies and rhetoric was in danger of self-destructing.

In May 2019, Carranza was accused of unlawful race and gender discrimination under the New York City Human Rights Law for replacing high-ranking white employees with less-qualified people of color. The suit alleged that under Carranza’s leadership, targeting Caucasian colleagues on the basis of race had become all but systemic at the Department of Education.

Other controversies followed. In January 2020, the FBI began a probe into potential grade-fixing schemes to inflate education statistics at multiple New York City schools. Whistleblowers came forward with details of administrators encouraging cheating on exams, enforcing “no-fail” policies, and retaliating against staffers who didn’t play ball. The Department of Education also came under fire for repeatedly turning a blind eye to instances of sexual assault at city schools. And lastly, the department was facing allegations that it had advised school officials to cover up cases of COVID-19 in order to keep the city’s schools open.

The swirl of controversy caused a wave of backlash against Carranza. Writers at the New York Post, members of the New York State Legislature, and educators all over the city called for his dismissal. It was unclear whether de Blasio aimed to fire Carranza over the rash of scandals, but the education chancellor ’s future—and the future of the policies he espoused—was becoming more and more uncertain.

WAI WAH WAS not happy to hear about all the scandal surrounding Carranza. His actions were putting careers, even lives, in danger. But she couldn’t help but feel like the child who had pointed out that the emperor had no clothes. What began as a fight for the educational opportunity of Asian-Americans had ballooned into an all-out war in City Hall.

Today, with the help of PLF, Wai Wah is still pursuing her case against Richard Carranza and the New York City Department of Education. She hasn’t yet won, but she hasn’t lost. Though justice has been deferred for thousands of low-income Asian-Americans in New York City, the fight isn’t over.