NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- A federal judge has overturned 34-year-old racial quotas that were designed to desegregate a Brooklyn middle school but ended up forcing it to turn away talented minority students after it became a sought-after academy for gifted students.
In the wake of Friday's ruling, Mark Twain Intermediate School will adopt a "race-neutral" admissions policy for 2008-2009, city Education Department spokeswoman Debra Wexler said. The agency sought the ruling after a minority couple sued over a student's rejection.
The Coney Island school has been desegregated and is a "stellar model of urban education," U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein wrote.
The court imposed the desegregation order in 1974, finding that the local school board was deliberately steering white, middle-class students away from Mark Twain, although the district it served was 70 percent white. The court said the school's demographics must roughly mirror those of the district.
Now, whites make up about 40 percent of the district's middle-school students, and Mark Twain has become a selective and well regarded magnet school. Students must take tests or audition to get in.
Because the court order still dictated the school's racial balance, white students have effectively competed against one another to get into the school, and minority students separately.
That has resulted in different standards that have put qualified minority students at a disadvantage, according to a lawsuit filed last month by the parents of Nikita Rau, who is Indian-American. She took the school's music admissions test last year and scored above the average for white students, but below the average for minority students, and was rejected, according to the lawsuit.
"We are very proud of Nikita for coming forward on behalf of children in her position," her father, Dr. Anjan Rau, said Friday.
In a starkly divided ruling in June 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court limited voluntary efforts to integrate public schools. The ruling did not affect the several hundred public school districts under court desegregation orders nationwide.
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