Last June (2007), husband and wife Drs. Anjan Rau and Canchan Katapadi, of Brooklyn, NY, had complained about the alleged quota system followed by the Mark Twain Intermediate School in the Eastern district of New York. But when the state education authorities did not act, the two went to court.

The Washington-based Center for Individual Rights (CIR) on January 14 took up their case and filed a motion against the New York City Department of Education, challenging the use of “separate, lower admission standards for white students at the prestigious Mark Twain Intermediate School, in order to boost the number of white students at the school,” said CRI in its release.

“The case is going to be at the Eastern District Court because the court had made a ruling in 1974 that minority students cannot be more than white students. The ratio should be 60 to 40,” Dr. Rau told Desi Talk.

Rau and Katapadi have three children. Their eldest, Nikita, now in Grade 6, was denied admission to Mark Twain last year. She scored 79 on the entrance evaluation for “instrumental music talent.” White students were admitted that year with scores as low as 77, while Nikita and other minority students were required to score 84.4 or better to be admitted.

The CIR says it moved to intervene in a more than thirty-year-old desegregation lawsuit to challenge a decree that it expects the New York officials will rely upon to justify the continued use of racial quotas at Mark Twain, based on the 60 to 40 ratio.

“It is a very stressful time because we have to fight the Department of Education,” Rau said. “We did not want to file any lawsuit. We wanted them to just accept her in the school because the system is actually wrong. But they would not do anything until the lawsuit was filed,” he added. “This issue came into the media in June of last year, but Mr. Klein [Schools Chancellor] did not do anything about it. At least now he is not contesting it. So hopefully, if the judge agrees that it is well past for the order to be repealed, that would be good.”

Rau was referring to New York Education Department head Joel Klein, who said after the filing that he would move to get the discriminatory law off the books.

“Mr. Klein is trying to improve the standards of the education, but he really should try to remove this discrimination that was put in place so many years ago,” Rau asserted.

He also contended that the discrimination continues in other forms elsewhere.

“My daughter applied to Hunter High School and even now they ask for the ethnic origin of the parents, not just the child. They don’t openly say there are quota systems, but this seems to be a hidden one,” he contended. “I think they try to do ethnic balancing because they have only 220 seats and more than 3,000 children apply.”

He said that the case filed January 14 was important even though Nikita was now in another gifted children’s school where the cutoff was lower.

“I have two other children down the road. One of them, in grade 5, is in a gifted school.”

The ‘topsy-turvy quota system” (as CIR calls it) began with a 1974 desegregation lawsuit, Hart v. Community School of Brooklyn, when the school district was ordered to admit classes to Mark Twain consisting of specified percentages of minority and white students at 60 to 40. But changes in population since then have witnessed an increase in the number of minorities and hence minority students in the area. As a result, a quota system established 50 year ago to increase minority enrollment has ironically become one that limits their entry.

Mark Twain is “the best” of all the schools available in the area, according to Rau. Admission is based on a series of tests students take during the fifth grade. “Mark Twain uses different cut-off scores in determining admission, depending on an applicant’s race or ethnicity, in order to racially balance its incoming classes to be 60 percent white and 40 percent minority,” the CIR contends.

“School officials have not sought to rescind the quota even though it deprives qualified minority students of a place at the school for no reason other than race,” it asserts, and “school officials inexplicably have taken no action to correct the problem.”

The Center for Individual Rights is being assisted in the case of by the national law firm of John Day and by the law offices of Rosemarie Arnold. Both firms are donating their time .