Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to expand the Discovery program as a way of increasing enrollment of black and Latino students in the city’s elite specialized high schools has drawn the ire of Pacific Legal Foundation.

The group is now suing the city in federal court, relying on an argument similar to an affirmative action case it has against Harvard University: Discovery essentially discriminates against Asian students who overwhelmingly represent the specialized high school student population.

Expanding the Discovery program—essentially offering rigorous summer classes for students who missed the cutoff in passing the specialized high school test—takes effect in 2020, when 20 percent of specialized high school seats will be reserved exclusively for black and Hispanic students who pass Discovery. As it stands, 10 percent of black and Hispanic students are enrolled. At the much coveted Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan, for instance, only 10 black students were offered placement into the freshman class of 2018. There are 902 seats in all.

Discovery, as an immediate substitute for repairing deep-seated problems within the school system, at least attempts to make things equal. Pacific Legal Foundation is having none of it.

While other factors could hamper upward mobility, it’s clear that a quality education is a critical key towards that change in socioeconomic status. And with 54.1 percent of blacks and 33.7 percent of Hispanics comprising the jail population at Rikers Island, according to 2018 statistics, it’s clear something has to be done.

Pacific Legal Foundation’s argument that the program violates equal protection under the law could be neutralized by equally offering Discovery across the entire system and not to black and Hispanic students, but to every poor student. Expanding it to the entire system provides equal protection. This should at least net a better percentage of the 67 percent of black and Hispanics students that make up the system. Discovery’s exclusivity is as problematic as a specialized high school’s.

Pacific Legal Foundation doesn’t care about that. Their winner-take-all mentality ignores decades of structural racism that’s led to the economic disenfranchisement of minorities. Much of that has impacted black and Hispanics. It’s been tough to untangle that from New York City culture. But it still persists. The best schools are typically found in affluent neighborhoods, with poorly performing schools in low-income neighborhoods, a status quo the city is rightfully attempting to fix.

It can take decades to undo the damage of dividing over diversifying. De Blasio, good or bad, is attempting to do that. Any student who feels they’ve been left out of the program should consider lobbying their New York Council members in building another specialized high school. The demand is clearly there.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.