Archive for Diversity
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.
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Through the years, racial preference proponents have talked about the so-called benefits of diversity. Preferences benefit minorities by virtue of their being preferred over the majority and non-preferred minorities (people of Asian descent, for example). What’s difficult to assess is how campus diversity benefits non-preferred groups.
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Grutter v. Bollinger 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. The court said the law school’s critical mass rationale “is further bolstered by numerous expert studies and reports showing that such diversity promotes learning outcomes and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce, for society, and for the legal profession.”
One of the reports the court relied on to make this assessment was the Gurin Report. Patricia Gurin, a psychology and women’s studies professor, said racial diversity “has far-ranging and significant benefits for all students, non-minorities and minorities alike,” and that interacting with racially diverse peers “is positively associated with a host of what I call ‘learning outcomes.’ Students who experienced the most racial and ethnic diversity in classroom settings and in informal interactions with peers showed the greatest engagement in active thinking processes, growth in intellectual engagement and motivation, and growth in intellectual and academic skills.”
Duane Ellison, of the National Association of Scholars, submitted a response brief to the court challenging Gurin’s study. For example, Ellison says Gurin’s work is statistically flawed…”inconsistent and…trivially weak.”
“Gurin defines her own idiosyncratic diversity variables, which she labels ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘democracy outcomes…[b]ut, Gurin finds no statistical correlation between a racially and ethnically diverse student body and her ‘learning outcomes’ and democracy outcomes.’ Her statistical output shows that taking an ethnic studies course, participating in a diversity workshop, discussing minority issues, and other measures yield exceedingly weak correlations with learning and democracy outcomes, at least some of the time. At other times, she finds nothing, no statistical correlation.”
In other words, the relationship between doing all of these race-focused things and racial and ethnic diversity on campus is not strong enough to sustain the diversity-benefits-everyone argument. Yet, the Supreme Court relied on this study to decide racial discrimination was constitutionally permissible.
With the intro out of the way, I’ll point you to an article at Benzinga.com that summarizes a new study by two Duke University professors, Peter Arcidiacono and Jacob Vigdor (pictured), challenging the diversity-benefits-everyone argument. The person who wrote the article noted that increasing minority representation “usually” entails lowering standards for those minorities, a fact that isn’t expressed nearly enough.
According to the study, evidence strongly suggests that racial preferences themselves have “a negative net impact on students not directly targeted by the program.” The researchers found weak evidence of a relationship between campus diversity and postgrad outcomes of whites or Asians.
“Our empirical results cover a broad range of outcomes, including earnings, educational attainment, and satisfaction with both one’s life and one’s job. Across these varying specifications, we fail to find any significant evidence that white or Asian students who attend more diverse colleges do better later in life. Moreover, the strongest evidence we uncover suggests that increasing minority representation by lowering admission standards is unlikely to produce benefits and may in fact cause harm by reducing the representation of minority students on less selective campuses.”
In other words, whites and non-preferred minorities don’t benefit from racial bean counting in admissions. Let’s be honest. Is that one of the goals of “affirmative action”? I say no. Asserting that whites and others will obtain certain educational benefits because they’re surrounded by preferred minorities is part of the advertising claim to sell the obviously discriminatory policy. Some whites buy the product; some don’t.
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t excerpt Walter Williams’s tongue-in-cheek column on Townhall, “We Need Diversity.”
The obsession with diversity is focused on increasing the representation of racial minorities in any given arena. It almost never goes the other way. No one seriously demands that the NBA or NFL be more racially diverse. The only thing that matters is how well an individual can play. It just so happens that individuals of African descent are better, on average, than others. (Are Samoans counted as “black”? They’re definitely not “African American.”)
“According to the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport report titled ‘The 2008 Racial and Gender Report Card,’” Williams writes, “the percentage of black male basketball players in Division I was an all-time high at 60.4 percent. It was 45.9 percent in football and 6.0 percent in baseball.
“Diversity is worse in professional sports…One can understand the absence of concern for diversity in professional sports; they are in it just for the money. But one is left flummoxed by the lack of sports diversity in college sports. After all, you can’t listen to any college president or provost speak for more than five minutes before the word “diversity” drops from his lips. Colleges take diversity seriously and they spend tens of millions of dollars on it. Juilliard School has a director of diversity and inclusion; MIT has a manager of diversity recruitment; Toledo University, an associate dean for diversity; Harvard, Texas A&M, California at Berkeley, Virginia and many others boast of officers, deans, vice presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity. But, in what appears to be the height of deviousness and deceit, these diversity-driven administrators allow sports, the most visible part of the college, be the least diverse and least inclusive.”
For those who say black players dominate certain sports teams because they’re better than whites, imagine the same statement turned around: whites dominate certain professions because they’re better than blacks.
“It should be remembered that diversity creed holds that we are all equal and would be proportionately represented by race across all activities but for the fact of discrimination and oppression.”
Using that logic, whites and Asians are underrepresented in American basketball and football because of discrimination and oppression. If you think that’s ridiculous, some assume blacks are being oppressed and discriminated against because they’re underrepresented in certain professions.
“But La Shawn, that’s different.” How?
Consistency is the bane of PC’s existence.
Williams lists disparities among lighting-struck victims, job-related deaths, cervical cancer rates, and more. Diversity advocates serious about their jobs will have their hands full making sure a range of colors, sexes, nationalities, body types, etc., are represented in these groups.
(You have to laugh at this stuff to keep from tearing your hair out at the disingenuousness of diversophiles.)
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In a recent Townhall column, I wrote about the Berkeley High School Governance Council’s proposal to cut before- and after-school science labs and divert resources to “equity grants” to narrow the racial academic achievement gap The council called the gap at Berkeley, the widest in the state, “unconscionable.”
At BigJournalism.com, Linda Seebach, formerly of Rocky Mountain News, brings up an important yet overlooked point in the debate (emphasis added):
“Enrollment this school year is 14 percent Latino, 26 percent African-American, 34 percent white, 16 percent in a category the district calls multi-ethnic, and approximately 8 percent in a variety of Asian groups. But students make very different academic choices. Berkeley has six component schools, four of them officially designated ’small schools,’ averaging around 200 students each; about 500 in the International High School; and the rest, a majority, in a fairly traditional program called Academic Choice. For instance, one of the small schools, called the Community Partnerships Academy, has 51 percent African-Americans and only 7 percent whites. Another, the School for Social Justice and Ecology, is 44 percent African-American and 20 percent white. In contrast, the international program is 21 percent African-American and 44 percent white.
“These choices play out in the science classes as well. The AP science classes are only 10 percent African-American and 53 percent white, while the science classes without additional lab time almost exactly reverse the proportions, with 51 percent African-American and 9 percent white.”
The choice idea is one I considered as well. I know in the scheme of things, students’ academic choices carry little weight in “diversity” arguments. If there’s a disparity, its cause must be racial discrimination and/or lack of funding. If black students choose science classes at lower rates than other students, where’s the logic in depriving other students to divert more funds to black students? Doesn’t it essentially penalize Berkeley’s science lab students for being…white and Asian?
Unless the school is preventing qualified black students from attending science labs, there’s no issue. If presently unqualified black students wish to take more science classes, school counselors and teachers (and parents) should advise them to take the necessary preparatory classes earlier in their academic journey.
Simple-minded, I know. I can’t help it.
(Hat tip: Discriminations)
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The University of Massachusetts will set aside 12 slots at its medical school for members of “underrepresented” groups, which include blacks, “Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers.” (Source)
Wow. I guess the school could cram a couple students from each group into those lower-standard slots.
For people who don’t believe preferences and set asides equal lower standards and think I sound like a broken record, consider this: without even looking at grades, scores, and statistics, why do you think schools set aside slots for members of certain races if these students are being admitted under the same standard as everyone else? Students admitted to those 12 slots are not being assessed in the general pool of applicants. The med school has minimum criteria, of course, but the race and ethnicity of these students are given weight that others students don’t get. With the set-aside slots, no matter how small or large, students are being admitted or denied admission based on race.
According to the article, low-income and first-generation college students of any ethnic background could apply under the “Medical Scholars Program.” That makes it sound as if any poor or first-generation college students can apply, if we go by plain language. But everyone on the face of the planet has an “ethnic background.” Do they have in mind ethnic Germans and ethnic Lithuanians?
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg blogs at The Corner:
“I won’t make the usual and obvious points about why discrimination on the basis of skin color and national origin is unfair, divisive, and stupid. All that aside, this seems to me to be almost certainly illegal. To be sure, this isn’t exactly like the race/ethnicity set-aside program that was struck down in Bakke, since here the slots are also (in theory at least) going to be open to applications from members of disfavored racial and ethnic groups, so long as they are low-income or the first in their families to attend college. But this is still a very mechanical use of race, like the point system struck down in Gratz v. Bollinger. And the justification given for the racially discriminatory program by UMass president Jack Wilson is the need for ‘role models’ — which has also been rejected by the Supreme Court (in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, in 1986).”
A commenter writes:
“In one fell swoop, they have DESTROYED the value of the years of hard work and academic merit of any minority candidate who might graduate through the color-blind open competition admissions process (this includes all minorities from any other state or country (or even worse, from this state) who are not among the ’special’ 12 minorities who are given this unique ‘reverse discrimination’ privilege). Not only have they stripped all value from the degrees of the truly accomplished minority candidates, but the existence of this affirmative-action program will spread like wildfire by word of mouth, and knowledgeable patients will intentionally avoid any contact with ALL minority graduates of UMass Medical School for fear of being treated by one of these affirmative-action ‘doctors’ who may not know what they are doing. The stigma of this program will drive all of these fully-qualified minority graduates out-of-state after they become doctors, where they will hope that few people will know of the existence of this truly disastrous program.”
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In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan law school’s use of race in admissions was narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest in “obtaining the educational benefits that flow from” a skin deep-only diverse student body.
Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, who voted with the majority, wrote that she and her colleagues “expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
Six years later, O’Connor says the “25 years” language shouldn’t be construed as a deadline for the end of racial preferences. (Surprise!) Social scientists need to “clearly demonstrate the educational benefits of diverse student bodies, and to better understand the links between role models in one generation and aspirations and achievements of succeeding generations.” (Source)
What if social scientists prove that so-called educational benefits flow to racial minorities, but not to racial majorities? Under this scenario, would O’Connor and company still believe racial bean counting is constitutional?
I echo Roger Clegg’s sentiment: “I am glad she is no longer on the Supreme Court. [She] “is not a social scientist by training, and the problem with her jurisprudence is that she would too often try to be a social scientist rather than a justice. She tried to make policy rather than interpret laws.”
The Center for Individual Rights’s Terry Pell (pictured) said, “I think the fact Justice O’Connor is doing this reflects the fundamental weakness of the opinion she offered: It failed to offer a principled basis for limiting — or even judging the effectiveness of — these practices.”
Unfortunately, as long as agencies and companies can be sued for “disparate impact,” racial preferences will exist. Until any and all differences between the races disappear, there will be “discrimination” accusations, allegations, and lawsuits. However, Ricci v. DeStefano sends a warning shot to employers who infringe on the rights of individuals in one group for fear of disparate impact lawsuits from another group.
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Why would adding an eight-point credit to the exams of high school graduates or GED holders applying to the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) result in more black firefighters? (Source)
New York City Councilman Leroy Comrie is proposing such a bill. FDNY requires applicants to have at least 15 college semester credits earned at an accredited college or university, full time military service with an honorable discharge, or six months of full time, satisfactory paid work experience.
Giving applicants extra points merely for graduating high school certainly would benefit applicants, but why would doing so result in more black firefighters?
Ah, there’s the rub! It may result in more black firefighters if the credit were applied only to blacks.
And that would be illegal.
Mark Daly, communications director for the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, said the bill “would not pass legal muster, but we are willing to work with the council to create a proposal that can be upheld by the courts. The state constitution requires candidates be chosen by fitness and merit. Just graduating from a New York City high school is not enough.”
Talk about lowered standards!
Veterans, NYC residents, parents of police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty, and siblings of officers and firefighters killed on September 11, receive extra points. But these race-neutral credits are legal.
One councilman who opposes the bill gets to the heart of the issue: obsession with skin deep-only diversity. “I don’t think it’s fair,” said City Councilman Eric Ulrich. “If they want it to be all inclusive why don’t they have it apply to graduates of city Catholic schools and Yeshivas as well.”
It’s obvious Comrie and supporters haven’t thought this through. They should read Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, one of my favorite books, as well as heed the lessons in the Supreme Court case, Ricci v. DeStefano.
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The post’s title is a concise and apt description of the skin deep-only diversity obsession.
George Leef, director of research for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, responds to an article on diversity in The Chronicle of Higher Education, particularly academia’s obsession with it. Widespread in the humanities and social sciences, diversity is making unfortunate headway in at least one school of medicine. Leef says that “Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City has succumbed and now has a three-person Office of Faculty Diversity.” (Source)
He challenges the diversity officer’s implication that the racial/ethnic make-up of the current faculty makes minorities feel less than welcome.
“You have to wonder…how often it happens that medical professionals in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities make people feel unwelcome simply because they’re from a different background…The main rationale Dr. Leonard gives for her office is that American medical schools need to ‘model diversity’ but aren’t doing a good enough job of that because black and Hispanic professors comprise only three and four percent respectively of the faculties at American medical schools, less than the percentages of those groups in the general population.”
How would a medical school do a better job of training doctors if the faculty had the “appropriate” percent of minority faculty members? Leef notes the assumption that a “minority” doctor would be better at treating members of his racial/ethnic group, and it extends to medical school professors.
“[T]he assumption that a med school professor who is black or Hispanic knows about the cultural peculiarities of black and Hispanic patients is unfounded. It’s like assuming that every black person is good at basketball or every Hispanic is a devout Catholic.”
Leef notes that there have been “pockets of resistance” to diversity obsession in math and the physical sciences, where there is either a right or wrong answer, with potentially huge consequences. Medicals schools also should resist focusing on group representation and keep the focus on individual competence, because of the “serious repercussions from bad decisions.”
In my non-scientific, anecdotal observations, I notice that standards are dropped to achieve diversity in less rigorous professions. For example, when was the last anyone proposed dropping standards for commercial airline pilots?
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Glenn Ricketts and Peter Wood, author of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, address a topic I’ve written about: colleges considering noncognitive factors in the application process for purposes of diversity. Their focus, however, is on commitment to diversity as a requirement for admission.
Ricketts and Wood quote in “Diversi-Oaths: Creedal Admissions in the American University,” a portion of Yale University’s Common Application Online:
“A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.”
This “diversity question,” write Ricketts and Wood, “displays a remarkable intellectual slovenliness.” Considering the so-called educational benefits of skin color diversity isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not clear whether these perceived benefits bring students together or raise the quality of education. The desire for education in and of itself is what should bring students together.
Ricketts and Wood believe diversity doctrines do just the opposite: separate students. A student’s potential to diversify the campus seems to trump his individuality, and pushes students to focus on their “pre-chosen identities.”
“They know their ethnic or racial categorization, their socio-economic status, and other such characteristics matter far more to admissions offices than their actual thoughts about who they are…These ‘diversity’ essay questions are never innocent. They are a tool to keep college applicants aligned with the dominant ideology on campus, which continues to favor group categorizations over both individuality and the broader claims of shared community.”
Colleges and universities ask applicants to describe how they’ve “overcome barriers to access opportunities in higher education, evidence of how you have come to understand the barriers faced by others, evidence of your academic service to advance equitable access to higher education for women,” and so on, but what if you have no such story? What if you simply have the grades, scores, and desire to become a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief?
The question is rhetorical, as institutions of higher education probably are overwhelmingly filled with students who don’t have hard-luck stories or aspire to socially engineer a world where everything is equal. They just want to go to school.
One unintended consequence of including diversity questions on applications is some students may feel pressured to make up or exaggerate hard-luck stories. Will pledging allegiance to skin color diversity and/or having been a victim of racial discrimination become an explicit requirement for admission?
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The Wall Steet Journal’s James Taranto, who I met a couple years ago when we (and other bloggers) had dinner with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, weighs in on liberals’ obsession with diversity. He cites Grutter v. Bollinger, a case in which the Supreme Court barred racial quotas but allowed some racial considerations in admissions.
Without offering proof or even a logically sound rationale for the so-called educational benefits of diversity, the court decided that racial discrimination was okay after all, despite what anyone claimed during the civil rights movement.
“But there is reason to doubt whether ‘diversity,’ as practiced by American higher education today, has any educational benefits at all–never mind whether those benefits are sufficient to justify discrimination,” Taranto writes. “Whatever its benefits in theory, diversity in practice is often anti-intellectual, replacing reasoned debate with ritualized expressions of phony emotion.”
Read the full article here.
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