Archive for February, 2010
The Wake County School Board in North Carolina is one of many government school systems that factor in socio-economic status when assigning students to spread the races across the district. Under the plan, students are bused to schools outside their neighborhoods, a practice that appears unpopular among parents of all races.
Those who oppose busing students in Wake County believe the assignment plan should promote neighborhood schools. They want to remove all references to diversity and make neighborhood schools a priority.
This week, a member of the board’s three-person policy committee made a motion to recommend approving the assignment change, but the majority rejected it. “I didn’t feel right about the wording,” said board member Debra Goldman. “I need to eyeball this more, especially when the policy has such major implications.” (Source)
Goldman voted against the change in December as well. Busing opponents say she’s betrayed her constituents. Goldman, ironically, is part of a newly elected trio that ran campaigns opposing the busing plan.
“Our school system is not family friendly,” she says on her campaign web site. “As a concerned citizen, I have learned that true progress in our schools is not possible without involvement and support from the community. As a parent, I have firsthand experience with the burden of outdated reassignment practices.”
Defending her rejection of the change, Goldman said the board needs more information, and the wording of the change needs to be stronger.
Busing supporters wring their hands over “resegregation.” Majority-minority schools are to be avoided, even if it means hauling children to schools outside their neighborhoods. The implication is that black and Hispanic students can’t learn among their own. White students must be present, or we’re headed back to the days of Jim Crow. Isn’t it odd that people in homogenous countries like China and Japan aren’t fretting over lack of diversity? Apparently, they don’t have their priorities straight. Are school administrators in Scandinavia biting their nails over what to do about so many white faces? If not, perhaps they need a “Celebrate Diversity!” campaign.
Mostly in America will you perceive the dreaded fear of all- or majority-black government schools. Black children can’t learn, social engineers insinuate, unless they’re sitting beside white children. If blacks are doing poorly in school, the problem must be too few white students (and too few black teachers?). What excuse do poorly performing white students have — too many whites?
The only way out of the madness is homeschooling and private schools.
Filed under: Diversity | |Comments off
Last month, I blogged about the brouhaha at South Philadelphia High School (a school designated “persistently dangerous”), where groups of mostly black students beat up students of Asian descent. The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed suit against the school district, alleging “deliberate and discriminatory indifference.” The district suspended about 10 students.
The group said the district not only failed to protect the students, but covered up and downplayed the attacks.
According to Philly.com, a retired federal judge named Judge James T. Giles released a report this week that sounds to me like more downplaying. Although it appears the black students attacked the Asians primarily because they’re Asian, the judge said race or ethnicity “were contributing factors.” What were the other factors?
According to the story, there were rumors that a group of Asian students attacked a “popular, disabled” black student, and this attack, which may or may not have happened, triggered the attack on Asian students.
“We believe that in some instances, [the Asians] were randomly attacked or attacked because someone in their group was identified or misidentified as being connected to the earlier events.”
So, after black students “identified or misidentified” the Asian(s) responsible for allegedly attacking the disabled black student — although the judge couldn’t determine whether the disabled student was the victim or part of the mob — the black students retaliated? Sort of convoluted, but there you go.
As for the cover-up allegations, the judge apparently found no evidence of a cover-up but recommended the school ban hoodies, put more cameras in the school, and set up an anonymous tip hotline for students. To keep down the violence.
Good luck with that.
Philly.com columnist and blogger Will Bunch calls the judge’s report a whitewash and “complete joke.” Bunch, who’s no conservative, writes:
“A racially motivated mob can rampage through a high school in Philadelphia for two days, amid a much longer climate of violence and harassment, even from adult staffers, and not only is no one from the school district accountable but none of the perps is even arrested…Let’s move forward!”
Assigning blame would shed light on the darkness, Mr. Bunch, and nobody wants to do that. Not only would it be politically incorrect to call the problem by its name, but complaining about it will cause people to wonder whether you’re…racist.
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What more needs to be said about this Newsweek article on racial preferences that John Rosenberg hasn’t said?
But I think I can manage a few comments.
In Newsweek, writer Raina Kelley makes a valiant attempt to re-frame the “affirmative action” debate to give it what she apparently believes is a much-needed makeover. What Kelley and others refer to when they use the term actually are racial preferences, which she contends are a “crucial tool in the fight for equal opportunity and access for all.”
First, Kelley seems believes affirmative action is not about preferential treatment and lowered standards, although the evidence says otherwise. “Opponents of affirmative action have succeeded in associating the phrase with unfair advantages for undeserving minorities and women.”
If a preferred racial minority is admitted with lower grades and scores than a white student, or a lesser qualified preferred minority is hired over a more qualified white person, the advantage is unfair. And no one deserves a college placement or a job. He earns it, based on qualifications. The only thing we come close to deserving — and that might not be the right word — is the chance to compete for placement or employment.
Kelley ironically cites a Stanford Magazine article in which the writers assert unequivocally that Stanford University discriminates and prefers certain racial minorities in admissions, hiring, tenure, contracting, and financial aid. The writers state the obvious: racial preferences are divisive. “In no other area of public life is there a greater disparity between the rhetoric of preferences and the reality.”
Kelly disagrees, but it’s difficult to know if she disagrees that preferences are divisive or that there isn’t a greater disparity between the rhetoric of preferences and reality.
“Stanford has every right to compose a student body based on the qualifications it thinks will maintain its status as an elite university. If one of those qualifications is a diversity of background, so be it. Any guidance counselor will tell you: it takes more than good SAT scores to get into college. Affirmative action isn’t around to play favorites—nor is it supposed to prefer people of color over white ones. It is a system designed to make sure that everybody is getting into college through their qualifications whether you are a poor kid from East L.A. or a fourth-generation legacy.”
So much to parse here. First, as a private university, Stanford may have more leeway in discriminating against and preferring certain groups. Publicly funded colleges and universities do not, although many of them do lower admissions standards for certain groups. I assume Kelley supports affirmative action at state colleges and universities. If that’s the case, it’s dead wrong. Using public funds to discriminate against and prefer people based on race is exactly what the Civil Rights Act was created to prevent. Good intentions don’t render racial discrimination and preferential treatment lawful.
Second, affirmative action does play favorites and does prefer “people of color” over whites. More than that, the practice discriminates against people of Asian descent. Ironically (or perhaps not), Asians also faced discrimination. Because they manage to excel in spite of past treatment, however, no one considers lowering standards for them.
The bottom line is that preferences exist, because for various reasons, certain racial minority groups don’t perform as well as whites or certain Asians. Consequently, some institutions have developed elaborate evaluation methods designed to mask different standards of review. The solution to the racial disparity “problem” isn’t giving college placements and jobs to lesser qualified people. Solving the problem is a far-reaching and deep-rooted challenge that does not fall within the authority of the government to fix, but to individuals themselves.
The quick fix of lowering standards based on race has to be one of the most condescending and anti-American practices ever conceived. Yet, blacks who criticize the practice are the Uncle Toms and self-haters. The world really has gone mad.
Third, affirmative action is not designed so that “everybody is getting into college through their qualifications.” If that were the case, why use affirmative action in the first place? Qualifications would speak for themselves, regardless whether the student is poor.
Read John Rosenberg’s post to understand why Kelley’s characterization of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Howard University commencement speech in 1965 as supporting preferences is off the mark.
Kelley makes the same benefits-of-diversity assertion as other preference proponents. “Diversity challenges assumptions and forces people to rely on personal experience instead of stereotype. It’s hard to think black people are inferior if they’re sitting next to you in freshman English or in a conference room.”
What if personal experience confirms stereotypes? And why would it be difficult for a white person to conclude a black person is inferior because he’s sitting next to said black person? Familiarity may breed contempt and confirmation. That’s totally beside the point in any case. Who cares what someone thinks? The law is not designed to change the way people think; it’s designed to regulate how they behave. People can hold all kind of stereotypes. The government’s role is to make sure the law is applied consistently and equally, not to make sure white people don’t think bad thoughts about black people.
There is nothing new under the sun. Raina Kelley attempts to do what other racial preference proponents have done and will continue to do: offer impassioned rhetoric to convince those who support racial equality that blacks and other preferred minorities deserve unearned benefits at the expense of the majority because of America’s treatment of their ancestors.
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Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case filed by black firefighter applicants, who claim that a pencil-and-paper multiple choice employment test is discriminatory because black applicants disproportionately scored too low to qualify for employment in 1995.
Specifically, the plaintiffs claim the city used an unlawful score cutoff point. Those who scored 64 or below were disqualified. Because so many applicants scored 89 or above, however, the city told those who scored below 89 but above 64 (passing scores) they likely would not be hired. Consequently, a disproportionate number of blacks were disqualified. The Business Insider reports that Chicago stopped using the cut-off scores eight years ago.
But the issue before the Supreme Court is procedural, not substantive. The court won’t decide whether the test was discriminatory, but whether the plaintiffs filed the claim in time to seek relief. Parties have a 300-day window to file complaints, but the plaintiffs in this case waited 430 days. A federal judge ruled in favor of the applicants, but the appeals court overturned the ruling and held that the applicants waited too long to challenge the test results.
The court’s decision may be announced before fall.
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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…
The austere and backward-thinking Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigration Rights By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) is determined to overturn a race-neutral law and put government discrimination and preferences back on the books.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that BAMN filed suit this week challenging—again—Proposition 209, which barred government discrimination and preferences in California.
BAMN contends that racial minorities have a constitutional right to preferential treatment, and says Prop. 209 “promised a ‘color-blind’ Constitution. But this was and is a lie…[It] has created a racial caste system in which the state’s most prestigious schools train mostly white students and students from some Asian backgrounds while admitting Latina/o, black and Native American students at only a third of their presence among the high school graduates of the state.”
Did BAMN’s lawyers really think “color blind” meant “equality of outcome”? Any reasonable person knows there’s no such thing. A color blind government policy removes discrimination and preferences. A color blind government policy keeps race and ethnicity out of the equation, a goal civil rights movement participants and supporters fought to reach.
BAMN also asserts that Prop. 209 violates the Equal Protection Clause “by forcing minority students and their supporters to sponsor an onerous and almost certainly futile statewide referendum in order to secure the adoption of lawful affirmative action programs. Every other group, however, retains the right to secure a change in admission policies that are in its members’ interest by a simple majority vote of the Regents or their subordinate bodies.”
Every voter acts in his own best interests. Sometimes, he also acts in the best interests of his group(s). Doing so doesn’t make the individual or group necessarily wrong or the law unconstitutional. People who voted for and against Prop. 209 did so in their best interests. One side lost, and the other side won. Is BAMN arguing that the whole process is unconstitutional, because the minority doesn’t get its way? Isn’t this how the process works? Otherwise, why permit a voting process at all?
BAMN cites Grutter v. Bollinger to support its quest for California to discriminate and prefer based on race. The Supreme Court held that the University of Michigan law school’s use of race in admissions to achieve a “critical mass” of minorities was narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest in “obtaining the educational benefits that flow from” skin deep-only diverse student body. However, the court didn’t compel states to consider race in admissions; states may consider race in admissions. The majority of voters in California do not want their government to consider race.
Incredibly, BAMN says California’s law barring racial discrimination and preferences is akin to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that states were permitted to enact laws that separated the races, as long as segregated facilities were “equal.”
In Plessy, the government mandated racial discrimination. It set out specifically to keep the races separate. In contrast, Prop. 209 bars the government from such actions. A racially neutral standard won’t ever produce equal outcomes. No law can do that. But the law does assure individuals that their state is not permitted to deny them college admission, a job, or a contract because they’re black, or white, or Asian, or a woman, or a follower of Joseph Smith.
BAMN also invokes Brown v. the Board of Education to bolster its claims, a double shame. The court held that racial segregation denied black children equal protection of the law. States created separate schools for different races. Prop. 209 doesn’t do that. If some schools end up majority one race, it isn’t because the government mandated separate schools. A consequence of a racially neutral law is that a school may end up majority black or white, but not by government mandate. That’s the point. Solving this “problem” shouldn’t be within the government’s purview. The government is restrained from coercing individuals and/or treating them differently based on race.
In hilariously hyperbolic language, BAMN calls California’s race-neutral law a “Tuskegee-like experiment” and implies minority students are “suffering” under the law. That’s the way to lift people up — speak of them in terms of oppressed victims too ignorant to help themselves.
Read the full text of the complaint.
Before I go, I must include this quote from George B. Washington, BAMN’s lead lawyer. He told the Chronicle that his group must overturn the law, because the American Civil Rights Institute was “going to go and play bully boy with minorities in states like Utah and Arizona.” As we mentioned earlier this week, Utah seeks to bar its government from discriminating against and preferring individuals or groups based on race.
Good for Utah and for the doctrine of racial neutrality.
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Last week, the Boston Globe published an op-ed about a topic we’ve covered on the blog several times. Thomas Espenshade is an author of a Princeton University study that revealed students of Asian descent face discrimination at elite colleges and universities.
His research showed that a black student with 1150s and a white student with 1460s had the same chance of admission as an Asian student with 1600s, top scores. Download his 11-page Power Point presentation for a quick view (PDF).
(Incidentally, Espendshade called for a project to close the racial academic achievement gap between the races “with the same scale, urgency, and sense of importance as the original Manhattan Project.”)
According to the op-ed, Princeton spokesperson Emily Aronson said “no particular factor is assigned a fixed weight and there is no formula for weighing the various aspects of the application.”
The op-ed’s author, Boston College teacher Kara Miller, shares this bit of news: “A few years ago, however, when I worked as a reader for Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, it became immediately clear to me that Asians – who constitute 5 percent of the US population – faced an uphill slog. They tended to get excellent scores, take advantage of AP offerings, and shine in extracurricular activities. Frequently, they also had hard-knock stories: families that had immigrated to America under difficult circumstances, parents working as kitchen assistants and store clerks, and households in which no English was spoken….But would Yale be willing to make 50 percent of its freshman class Asian? Probably not.”
Do colleges and universities keep Asian admittees below a certain percentage?
“There are a lot of poor Asians, immigrant kids,” University of Oregon physics professor Stephen Hsu told Miller. “But generally that story doesn’t do as much as it would for a non-Asian student. Statistically, it’s true that Asians generally have to get higher scores than others to get in.”
Americans of Asian descent typically aren’t as vocal about discrimination or nearly as successful spreading collective guilt as other minorities. Perhaps op-eds like this, along with Espenshade’s research, will change that.
States like California banned discrimination and preferences in government-supported colleges and universities. Consequently, Asians account for about 40 percent of students at these schools, Miller notes, although they account for 13 percent of the state’s population. It’s possible that in states where preferences are permitted, colleges and universities redline Asians so the student body can reflect the population.
If any group should support bans on preferences and discrimination, it should be formerly oppressed minorities. These bans protect all individuals, regardless of race, from being judged by their race. The government’s intent to benefit these minorities is irrelevant. The authority to treat people differently based on race is a proverbial double-edged sword.
Filed under: Achievement Gap | |1 Comment
The inimitable economist Thomas Sowell has written an article on Berkeley High School’s proposal to eliminate science labs to divert funds to closing the racial academic achievement gap.
“This is a proposal to redistribute money from science to social work, by providing every student with advisors on note-taking, time management and other learning skills…The point is to close educational gaps among groups, or at least go on record as trying. As with most equalization crusades, whether in education or in the economy, it is about equalizing downward, by lowering those at the top. ‘Fairness’ strikes again!
…
“In keeping with the rhetoric of the prevailing ideology, our education professor refers to ‘privileged’ parents and ‘privileged’ children who want to ‘forestall any progress toward equity.’…In the language of the politically correct, achievement is equated with privilege. Such verbal sleight of hand evades the question whether individuals’ own priorities and efforts affect outcomes, whether in education or in other endeavors. No need to look at empirical evidence when a clever phrase can take that whole question off the table.” [emphasis added]
Truly maddening. The professor accused parents who stress education of trying to keep others down. As Sowell notes, somewhere along the way, achievement became a synonym for privileged. Only in a PC-saturated, Alice-in-Wonderland kind of world is such a thing possible. People of Japanese descent in Canada and the U.S. tend to have higher incomes than other minorities and even whites. Given past discrimination against this ethnic group, does the privileged accusation make sense? Of course not.
“Achievement by overcoming obstacles is a special threat to the left’s vision of the world, and so must be magically transformed into privilege through rhetoric…Those with that vision do not want to even discuss evidence that students from different groups spend different amounts of time on homework and different amounts of time on social activities.” [emphasis added]
Sowell appeals to common sense–rather than wrong-headed social engineering schemes to take from one group and give to another–when discussing how individuals can improve academic performance: change attitudes, priorities, and behavior.
George Leef at the Phi Beta Cons blog writes:
“Welcome to the world of the education experts, where families that encourage children to work hard in school are ‘privileged’ as though they were our equivalent of European nobility, and where the primary educational goal is ‘equity’ among designated groups rather than assisting all pupils to progress to the best of their ability.”
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Lawmakers in Utah are attempting to ban government racial preferences via a state constitutional amendment. Last week, the state’s House Business and Labor Committee approved the resolution, which heads to the full house for consideration. According to the Associated Press, there’s little evidence that preferences are “being used or has caused problems” in Utah.
Of course, it doesn’t matter whether there’s evidence. A ban would give notice that no government entity may prefer or discriminate against individuals or groups based on race. Republicans control the Utah legislature, and the governor is a Republican. These factors increase the measure’s likelihood of passing. A two-thirds vote of the state house and senate and the governor’s signature are required to amend the constitution.
Several states already ban government racial preferences. For example, in 1996, 54 percent of voters in California banned preferences. The same year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in Hopwood v. Texas that racial preferences in college admissions was unconstitutional. In 1998, Washington state voters banned preferences by 58 percent. Ten years ago, former Florida governor Jeb Bush banned government preferences. In 2006, Michigan voters banned preferences by 58 percent, as did Nebraska voters in 2008.
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I’ll have to check the Civil Rights Act to confirm, but I’m pretty sure this is illegal, too.
In fact, “whites-only” anything is viewed as the ultimate form of unfairness, injustice, flat-out racism, and the root of all the world’s evil.
Conservative groups likely will challenge the scholarship program. Will liberal groups do the same? They balked at a satirical whites-only scholarship offered by College Republicans at Boston University a few years ago. Surely they’ll balk over the Oregon League of Minority Voters’s scholarships.
I’m surprised people still come up with such schemes, given their clear illegality. Why would the voters’ group risk wasting resources on litigation and undermining its credibility with donors?
A decade ago, a federal judge ordered two historically black colleges in Alabama to set up programs to attract white students after both schools accused the state of treating predominantly black colleges differently than predominantly white colleges. It’s safe to say most whites aren’t inclined to apply to predominately black colleges. To sweeten the pot, at least one of the colleges offered a whites-only scholarship. A black student named Jessie Tompkins sued. Tompkins was represented by the Center for Individual Rights. (Source)
Because the Oregon League of Minority Voters receives some public funding, it’s also safe to say the whites-only scholarship won’t stand, nor should it. Only privately funded sources like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are allowed to prohibit people of certain races from applying for money. (No whites need apply.)
The minority voters group must know the race-based scholarships won’t stand. Could it be a publicity stunt to “raise awareness” among mostly white Oregonians to do their part to narrow racial disparities that have little to do with racism and a lot to do with individuals’ personal choices and/or lack of responsibility?
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Civil rights industry types are worrying about the wrong thing, as usual.
For instance, the University of California’s Civil Rights Project argues in its 130-page “Choice Without Equity” report that charter schools have been a “civil rights failure.”
Are the researchers implying that government officials are blocking school doors so children can’t get in? Is there some law still on the books that mandates separate charter schools for different races?
No. The Civil Rights Project is up in arms because charter schools tend to be predominately one race or another—not by government mandate, but by choice, a word that sticks in the craw of liberals, unless the topic of discussion is abortion.
Whereas the civil rights movement’s focus was dismantling legal segregation, today’s movement focuses on racial bean counting. The top priority is not to give students of all races a quality education; it’s to put minority students next to white students. Otherwise, their civil rights are hanging in the balance. (Cue panic riff.)
According to the report, charter schools—government schools with fewer rules and regulations than traditional government schools, and attended by choice—are more segregated than traditional government schools. Charter schools tend to be located in urban areas. “As a result, charter school enrollment patterns display high levels of minority segregation, trends that are particularly severe for black students.”
What’s wrong with that? According to the researchers, “Decades of social science studies find important benefits associated with attending diverse schools, and, conversely, related educational harms in schools where poor and minority students are concentrated.”
The researchers use words like severe and harm and intensely and segregation and white flight and apartheid to insinuate something sinister is going on. To them, there is: choice.
Although whites attend charter schools in lower proportions, they’re “overrepresented” in charter schools in the Southwest and states like North Carolina. In the West, the study notes with alarm, whites are the lowest percentage of students in traditional government schools, but the highest percentage of white charter school students. Again, what’s wrong with that? Watch the researchers make a leap (emphasis added):
It would be very damaging to invest public money in schools that finance white flight from regular public schools and take with the departing white students, state and federal funding badly needed for the students left behind in even more segregated regular public schools. The fact that a number of these “white flight” schools do not report any students on free lunch suggests that they may be segregated by both race and class.
It’s all in the way you frame it. The researchers assign underhanded motives to white parents, rather than viewing them as people exercising school choice. What motives do they assign black parents for doing the same? Well, none. Most are given the choice of an inferior traditional school, according to the report, or an inferior charter school.
On the one hand, the researches call segregated charter schools a civil rights issue; on the other hand, they say charter schools’ supposedly “superior academic education performance” is “not sustained by the research.” So why all the complaining about segregated charter schools?
The researchers acknowledge that charter school enrollment almost tripled this decade, and received “increased level of funding and support from federal, state and local education agencies,” yet charter schools dominated by one race or another are problematic to them.
The selling point for charters is they claim to offer a better education than traditional government schools. The researchers are not convinced, and in any case, they believe lack of skin color diversity undermines the schools. If a predominately black charter school receives its share of funds, why is the school’s racial make-up a cause for concern? (Can you imagine a group of white parents complaining that their kids have to sit next to other white kids in school? Do parents of black charter school kids complain about the schools’ racial makeup? I fervently hope not.)
Ironically, America was transformed by a movement that sought to end government-mandated, race-based school enrollment decisions. Today’s civil rights industry wants the government to do the exact opposite.
What a shame.
The answers offered in the report on how to solve the segregation crisis aren’t groundbreaking or insightful, just the same old dated “civil rights” complaints. Among the recommendations to “promote diversity and prevent racial isolation” in charter schools are more rules and regulations. Make charter schools more like magnet schools (“specialized” schools with geographically open admission polices to draw whites — these schools still end up mostly one race or another). Other recommendations include providing free transportation, community outreach, and — surprise! — reducing choice.
Parents with choices exercise those choices. Too much government coercion, and they’ll choose a different school. Neighborhoods play a big role in the racial make-up of schools. Just short of telling people where to live, there isn’t much the government can do about that.
Addendum: Are charter schools a civil rights failure? Some of the answers on the National Journal’s education blog are priceless.
Filed under: Diversity | |Comments off
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