OUR CLIENTS NEVER asked the elites to come save them, but the elites came anyway. From coast to coast, minorities’ unwelcome champions have been working hard to bake racial discrimination back into the law, ironically, in the name of equality.
Last year, Pacific Legal Foundation produced a documentary, Quota, about our case in Hartford, Connecticut, where thousands of Black and Hispanic children are being denied admission to their neighborhoods’ world-class magnet schools, even though the schools are under-capacity. Why? Because in an effort to ensure diversity in the schools, the state is forcing the schools to reserve 25 percent of their seats for white and Asian students. This means that if not enough white and/or Asian students attend a given school and more than 75 percent of that school’s student body is Black and/or Hispanic, then the school can be fined or even shut down entirely.
Connecticut would rather shut down world-class schools giving Black and Hispanic students excellent educations than let those students learn if there aren’t enough white students around them.
More recently, PLF produced another documentary, Dream Factories, which is an almost-mirror-image of the Quota story. New York City’s Specialized High Schools are among the best in the world. They are free for any New York student, and admission is open to anyone who passes a rigorous admissions test. The schools have produced 14 Nobel Prize winners—more than many countries.
New York’s Specialized High Schools are extraordinary on their own merit, but they are even more incredible when compared to the city’s regular public schools. In recent years, New York’s public school system has been plagued with grade inflation scandals, cheating, low attendance, and low proficiency on statewide tests. But instead of addressing the city’s failing general school system, Mayor Bill DeBlasio and Education Chancellor Richard Carranza are distracting attention from those hard-to-solve issues to focus on the fact that the students at the Specialized High Schools are primarily Asian.
DeBlasio and Carranza have called the admission test for the Specialized High Schools—which doesn’t record the student’s race at all—racist, implying that the number of Asian students prevents Black and Hispanic students from getting in. They’ve changed some of the admissions policies for the Specialized High Schools in ways that are specifically designed to limit Asian students, and they want to do away with the race-blind test altogether and take students’ race into account for admissions.
In Quota, our clients are fighting activists who are risking the futures of thousands of children for a “more diverse” Hartford. In Dream Factories, our clients are fighting self-serving politicians who are weaponizing identity politics to draw attention away from their failures.
These two stories are not identical, but they share some striking similarities. In both cities, activists and politicians have appointed themselves judges of who is worthy of opportunity and who isn’t. In both states, these racial alchemists are saying they’re improving minorities’ lives. Yet, in both states, they are making them worse.
The heroes of both stories are everyday Americans who want to make their own choices—the right choices—for their families. The villains are bureaucrats who cloak their meddling in high-minded, self-righteous goals. The conflict is between competing visions of human beings. Should people be treated as members of groups based on immutable characteristics, or should people be treated as individuals with their own minds and their own judgment?
We stand decidedly with our clients on this conflict: on the side of freedom.
Quota
“I liken it to Jim Crow 2.0, I call it Jamie Crow. Too many children are being denied a quality education for a quota.”
– Craig Stallings, Father and Former Harford School Board Chairman
“We shouldn’t be focusing on the child’s color to determine who gains access to the 26 letters of the alphabet.”
– Gwen Samuel, Mother and President, Connecticut Parents Union
“There was a quote with something like ‘We want quality, integrated schools.’ And my thought bubble was, ‘How about we want quality schools?’
“Integrated schools are too often the pet projects of elite people.”
– Sharif El-Mekki, Charter School President
DREAM FACTORIES
“These people are working their a**** off. Why would we try to hold back people whose performance reflects what’s possible to be achieved in society?”
– Glenn Loury, Professor, Brown University
“My grandparents worked in sweatshops so that I could have a better future here. We should have an equal amount of chance and opportunity to go to a Specialized High School.”
– New York Public School Student
Watch Dream Factories on YouTube.
“Man, if you don’t realize that in the 21st century, affirmative action is deeply problematic for Black people—is injurious to the dignity of Black people—you’re not paying attention. I’m an economist, I would like to win the Nobel Prize in Economics one day…but it would be worth nothing if the committee that awards Nobel Prizes was picketed by Black Lives Matter for six months before they awarded it to me, demanding that a Black American be given the Nobel Prize in Economics. Keep your hands off of my honor!”
Glenn Loury
