Students from the New York City Student Union, a citywide student-run organization of City public high school students, reacted today with disappointment to yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. “Affirmative action, in its purest form, is the establishment of more holistic admissions criteria. An ideal affirmative action program measures students not only by the academic heights that they have reached but also by the length of their climb,” said Seth Pearce, 17, a member of the NYCSU. Other students pointed out that admissions to New York City’s specialized high schools—determined solely on the basis of a score from a single standardized test— disproportionately exclude minority students relative to their numbers in the public high schools as a whole. According to Insideschools.org, only 6% of the enrollment at the City’s flagship elite high school—Stuyvesant—is African American or Hispanic. Even several of the students from the NYCSU who agreed with the court’s ruling acknowledged that the problem highlighted in the cases and in the Supreme Court’s decision is the failure to achieve educational equity across America’s classrooms. Lorenzo Mendez, 16, said, “Schools need more flexibility to create programs that promote widespread educational equality than this ruling allows.”