A year after the city’s racial quotas kept their daughter out of an elite public school, an Indian couple from Brooklyn is filing a class-action lawsuit to make sure it doesn’t happen again to her or any child.
“Children should be judged on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin,” said Dr. Anjan Rau, the girl’s dad, about the quotas at Mark Twain School in Coney Island.
“The selection process should be colorblind,” Rau said.
For decades, the school has enforced racial double standards on its tests to maintain a 6-4 white-to-minority ratio to comply with a 1974 federal court desegregation order.
The order now prevents minority students from becoming more numerous than whites.
Last May, Rau’s daughter, Nikita, 11, was rejected by Mark Twain, which caters to gifted students, after she scored 79 on a music admission test.
Officials said Nikita, who is considered a member of a minority group, had to score at least 84.4 score to be accepted. But white students needed to score only 77.
After The Post revealed Nikita’s case in June, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein called the quotas “unnecessary” and an “anachronism.”
But Klein has not sought to end the quotas – even after the US Supreme Court weeks later ruled in two other cities’ cases that race could not be used to decide which public schools kids attend.
So the Raus today are suing Klein and the Department of Education in Brooklyn federal court.
The quotas are “telling high-achieving minority students, ‘You can’t go to this program solely because of your race,’ ” said Terrence Pell, president of the Washington-based Center for Individual Rights, which represents the Rau family.
“It’s preposterous that the Raus have to sue to fix this problem, to remove a quota that the school itself says serves no purpose.”
Rosemarie Arnold, another lawyer for the family, said: “We gave the city every opportunity to do the right thing on behalf of Nikita Rau. And they left us no choice but to sue.”