YIATIN CHU’S 26-YEAR-OLD daughter isn’t thrilled her mother is suing the New York State Department of Education.
In January, with Pacific Legal Foundation’s help, Yiatin and several others filed a lawsuit challenging New York’s Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP), which hosts test-prep, training, and instruction for 7th-to-12th-grade students. Yiatin’s problem with the program? It’s not open to all New York students. Kids are eligible only if they’re economically disadvantaged or identify as black, Hispanic, Native American, or Alaska Native.
In other words, the child of black millionaires is eligible for STEP, but the child of Chinese or Ukranian immigrants living just above the poverty line is not.
Yiatin believes in a colorblind, meritocratic education system. She has two daughters; her younger daughter is in seventh grade and would be eligible for STEP if she identified as one of the underrepresented minorities.
Rigging admissions to increase enrollment of certain races while decreasing others is unconstitutional, no matter how politely a school does it.
But Yiatin’s older daughter, an adult, argued with her mother about the lawsuit.
“She said, ‘Mom, come on. Meritocracy is a myth,’” Yiatin recalls. The world is about connections and who you know, her daughter told her.
Yiatin was born in Taiwan. Back there, her dad was an engineer and her mother was a schoolteacher. They immigrated to America to escape the instability of that part of the world, for their children’s sake. In New York City, her dad found work in a factory running machines. Her mother took a job as a filing clerk. They taught themselves English and sent their kids through the public school system, where Yiatin excelled and ended up testing into one of the city’s Specialized High Schools for gifted kids. She later worked at several startups and tech companies, including WebMD.
Now Yiatin argued with her daughter, pointing out that her own life was a story about meritocracy. “Your grandparents, my parents, we didn’t have any connections,” Yiatin reminded her daughter. “I didn’t inherit anything. I did everything on my own.”
“But you’re unusual,” Yiatin’s daughter countered.
“Just because it’s not common doesn’t mean it’s not a value you aspire to,” Yiatin replied.
The Coalition for TJ
YIATIN’S LAWSUIT IS JUST BEGINNING. Two hundred and fifty miles south, another PLF lawsuit is coming to a disappointing end.
In February, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the Coalition for TJ’s case challenging the new admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia. PLF had litigated the case for three years. Unlike most petition denials, this one did not come quickly: The Court considered taking the case over five separate conferences before ultimately rejecting it—and Justice Samuel Alito wrote a strong dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Allowing the Fairfax County School Board’s admissions process to continue “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups,” Justice Alito wrote. “That is indefensible.” He called the reasoning behind the school board’s victory “a virus that may spread if not promptly eliminated.”
If you believe American school systems are systemically biased against minorities and designed to keep power among entrenched groups, Asian Americans don’t fit neatly into your worldview.
In February, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the Coalition for TJ’s case challenging the new admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia. PLF had litigated the case for three years. Unlike most petition denials, this one did not come quickly: The Court considered taking the case over five separate conferences before ultimately rejecting it—and Justice Samuel Alito wrote a strong dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
TJ’s new process was developed in 2020 to change the racial makeup of the school “towards greater equity, to be clearly distinguished from equality,” as one school board member put it. Unlike STEP in New York, TJ does not explicitly use race as a determining factor in admissions. Instead, it replaces the old colorblind entrance exam with a points system that awards students for certain “Experience Factors,” including attending an underrepresented middle school.
That’s what makes it a high-profile case. After the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions cases last year, the question became: Could schools still skew their admissions policies to favor certain groups, as long as they did it cleverly and covertly? Or is it wrong for the government to distribute benefits and burdens on the basis of race, even if it couches the process in neutral words?
For the members of the Coalition for TJ—many of them Asian American parents and alumni—and their Pacific Legal Foundation attorneys, the answer is clear: Rigging admissions to increase enrollment of certain races while decreasing others is unconstitutional, no matter how politely a school does it. As Chief Justice John Roberts said in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard/UNC decision, quoting an 1867 Supreme Court decision, “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows.”
But opponents of the TJ lawsuit pushed back. Sonja Starr, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, called TJ a “dangerous” lawsuit and says the idea that our Constitution is colorblind shouldn’t apply to “benign classifications benefiting people of color[.]”
And Janel George, a professor at Georgetown Law, said the Coalition for TJ’s “opposition to diversity efforts perpetuates a myth of meritocracy rooted in white supremacy”—a strange thing to say about a majority-Asian, predominantly immigrant group.
Breaking the Narrative
IF YOU BELIEVE American school systems are systemically biased against minorities and designed to keep power among entrenched groups, Asian Americans don’t fit neatly into your worldview.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about six percent of the U.S. population identifies as Asian American. It’s half the size of the population that identifies as black and about a third of the population that identifies as Hispanic. But at many top public high schools—including Stuyvesant in New York City and TJ in Virginia—Asian American students have become a majority. Many, like Yiatin, are immigrants or first-generation Americans. They rose to the top of their classes and successfully applied to magnet schools through colorblind processes.
For their success, these Asian American students are derided as privileged and “white adjacent.” At a 2022 DEI training, a San Diego school superintendent said Chinese American students do well in school because their parents are wealthy—a sweeping generalization that positions an entire group of people as oppressors and downplays students’ individual successes.
The truth is Asian Americans are a diverse group. In 2019, New York Times Magazine writer Jay Caspian Kang sat down with several Asian American students to discuss their feelings about affirmative action. Kang is also Asian American. When he met with an 18-year-old named Alex, Kang found him “somewhat annoying at first.”
“I saw in Alex the stereotype of the Asian grade-grubbing machine,” Kang wrote.
But Kang quickly realized he himself was guilty of “a certain arrogance and presumption—that because you look like your subject, your perspective carries some revelatory power[.]” He and Alex were both Asian but had lived different lives. Kang grew up in a majority-white neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while his father earned a post-doctorate in organic chemistry at Harvard. Alex was from Flushing, Queens, where his father, Qiao, worked as a technician. Qiao had grown up in poverty in rural China. Life hadn’t been easy for him as an immigrant, Qiao told Kang. But he vastly preferred America to the corruption of China.
“Everything was open in America,” Qiao told Kang. “If I had the right paperwork for something or if I finished the work I was supposed to do, the right thing would get done. At least I could trust that.”
Alex, Qiao’s son, was gifted: He got into Bronx Science, one of New York’s Specialized High Schools.
Kang asked Alex how he felt about affirmative action. “I understand the thinking behind affirmative action,” Alex said, “but I just wish the message wasn’t that Asians are all so privileged and rich and buying their way into colleges. And I wish that it didn’t mean that my work didn’t count in the same way as other people’s work.”
A Teacher Fights for Meritocracy
VERN WILLIAMS is a member of the Coalition for TJ. He’s neither Asian nor an immigrant: Vern is black and grew up in segregated DC. At school he fell in love with math; he became a teacher and taught middle school math in Fairfax County for 40 years. “By all accounts, he is one of the best math teachers in the country,” The Washington Post wrote in 2011.
He worked with students in Fairfax County’s gifted and talented program. “It used to be called the gifted and talented center,” Vern says. “I remember the year they got rid of that. They said, ‘No, we can’t do that. Because that’s implying some kids are born with a gift.’”
If you’re an exceptional math student in Fairfax County, TJ is where you want to go to high school. Vern prepared countless students for the TJ application process and wrote recommendations. “Some of these kids are beyond brilliant,” he says. “Their mind is so studded with brilliance that they probably don’t have room for their address.”
But even before the Fairfax County School Board changed TJ’s admissions process, Vern saw a shift happen at the school—away from an emphasis on individual excellence toward an insistence on group equity. He told The Washington Post that in 2004, the recommendation form for applicants asked teachers to rate students on their interest in math, self-discipline, and problem-solving skills. But by 2011, the recommendation form was asking teachers to rate on intellectual ability, commitment to STEM, and how the student would “contribute to the diversity of [TJ’s] community of learners.”
When Vern complained to the Post about the initial changes to the recommendation process, a reader wrote a letter to the editor in response:
Cheer up, Mr. Williams… Faced with a similar task some years ago, a colleague removed any hesitation I might have felt doing it by suggesting my letter of recommendation include the following statement: “This student belongs to a very small minority. He has mathematical talent.”
Today, under the new admissions process, there are no teacher recommendations at all.
The Strongest Voices
TO VERN WILLIAMS IN VIRGINIA and Yiatin Chu in New York, and to other teachers, parents, and students across the country, school should be an arena for the pursuit of individual excellence. But to those who see the world through an oppressor-oppressed framework, people are not defined by their own talents and ambitions but by their status in relation to others. A person’s success isn’t just success in this worldview; it’s a form of oppression because it leads to unequal outcomes.
That’s a particularly awful worldview to bring to schools, where students should be excited by their individual potential to be different, to rise above.
Immigrants and first-generation Americans are among the strongest voices opposing the oppressor-oppressed framework, because it contravenes the reason their families came to America: where the laws are meant to be open and the people equally free.
The strongest voices against it also tend to be parents. When Yiatin sees young activists and teachers promoting race-based enrollment, she thinks: You know what? Wait until they have kids.
“There are certain times in our lives where our values will start shifting,” she says. “And when you become a parent, you see the world through a different lens.” ♦
