Four years ago, a group of race-grifter activists in New York City tried to sue their way into government-enforced racial quotas and race-centric curricula. But New York state’s highest court just decided they are not allowed to use the judicial system to mandate the indoctrination of children.
According to Defending Education (DE), which intervened in the case in 2021, far-left group IntegrateNYC’s attempt to abuse courts to create racial quotas for students and blame the racial make-up of school staff and a “white and Eurocentric curriculum” for poor education outcomes among the city’s black and Latino populations was put to an end Friday when the New York Court of Appeals dismissed the case.
The Education Article in the New York state constitution “does not permit judges to micromanage matters of educational policy, which are broadly entrusted to local control,” wrote Judge Michael J. Garcia, an appointee of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y.
As laid out by Garcia, IntegrateNYC alleged that the city’s public education system “discriminates against and disproportionately affects Black and Latino students, leading to unequal educational opportunities and negative outcomes for those students” because of its systems for admissions and screening, the content of curricula, and the purported lack of diversity among teachers.
They claimed further that the school system was segregated because black and Latino students underperform on admissions exams because of “discriminatory standardized testing policies,” shuttling them to “inferior schools that are deficient in terms of physical facilities and instrumentalities of learning, resulting in poor educational outcomes.”
As DE put it, activists “sought to use the courts to inject race into all aspects of the city’s education system. … Plaintiffs claimed that the city’s school system is discriminatory because, in their eyes, not enough students from their preferred races are admitted to the city’s selective academic programs.”
Sarah Parshall Perry, DE’s vice president and legal fellow, noted that “the challengers to New York’s gifted and talented program had demanded consideration of race in order to prevent race discrimination.”
However, suing into existence a wide variety of political and policy preferences is a tried and true left-wing political tactic used in places where their political movement is incapable of getting their candidates elected to bodies — like legislatures or city councils — that should actually be responsible for dealing with these issues.
The fact that New York City, and more broadly the state of New York, is run by people who largely agree with IntegrateNYC’s premise means that the high court’s ruling against them is at the very least a credit to the state’s ability to maintain separation of powers (in this instance) — but also a testament to how weak the group’s claims were.
IntegrateNYC could not prove any kind of systematic racism or injustice, and they could not point to an operational law or ordinance that blocked black or Latino students from attending the schools they wanted to “integrate.” Rather, they essentially tried to blame poor student outcomes on racism.
Those students are also apparently negatively affected because they are apparently subjected to a “white and Eurocentric curriculum.”
The activists want to artificially alter the admissions, staffing, and curriculum by instituting a “culturally responsive” curriculum and apparently changing recruitment after the district has purportedly “failed to recruit and support a diverse educator workforce” and did not provide “appropriate training . . . on how to deliver a racially equitable and culturally responsive education.”
New York City already does maintain “culturally responsive” teaching, which is basically a euphemism for critical race theory and abolishing merit-based systems. In some cities that have taken these concepts to even more of an extreme, like Chicago, it means “decolonizing” Western academic tradition entirely, deemphasizing reading and writing in favor of indigenous and African traditions like oral storytelling.
But IntegrateNYC could not prove its claims were caused by anything other than the poor outcomes of the students on whose behalf they were ostensibly suing.
“Plaintiffs have offered nothing to support the proposition that ‘disrupt[ing] the complex system of biases and structural inequities in society’ through culturally sensitive curricula or faculty is a component of the Constitution’s guarantee of a sound basic education,” Garcia wrote. “At best, plaintiffs’ novel input allegations represent a policy disagreement rather than a ‘gross and glaring inadequacy’ in the education being provided.”
IntegrateNYC needed to prove that “the State fail[ed] to provide [plaintiffs] a sound basic education” and also “sufficiently allege causation,” Garcia noted. “Plaintiffs here have ‘failed to clearly allege even one’ such cause.”
“Negative educational outcomes” like “lower graduation rates and conferral of advanced Regents diplomas,” the activists claimed, are the result of minorities being in “‘predominantly black and Latinx’ general education as opposed to the ‘predominantly white and Asian’ Gifted & Talented programs or screened and specialized schools.” But as Garcia noted, quoting a previous case, the plaintiffs do not even claim that “these results are caused by any deficiency in teaching, facilities or instrumentalities of learning, or any lack of funding.”
“Instead, the ‘deficient input’ alleged by the plaintiffs was ‘the composition of the student body,’” Garcia added.
“This victory is a win not only for New York City’s specialized schools program — the crown jewel of the American public education system — but also for meritocracy writ large,” DE President Nicole Neily said. “As Chief Justice Roberts famously said, ‘the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,’ and we are gratified that the court recognized the folly of this activist campaign.”
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