Archive for General
A few years ago, white parents in Seattle and Jefferson County, Kentucky, sued the school districts for assigning students based on race, a policy they said violated their rights to equal protection of the laws. The schools claimed they used race only as a “tie-breaker.” The cases made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the race-based school assignment programs unconstitutional.
The court contended that “remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination is a compelling interest under the strict scrutiny test,” but because Seattle was never court-ordered to desegregate, and Jefferson County’s desegregation order had been dissolved, remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination wasn’t involved in the case.
“The school districts have not carried their heavy burden of showing that the interest they seek to achieve justifies the extreme means they have chosen–discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments.”
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, Jefferson County still relies too heavily on race when assigning students, so says Ted Gordon, the lawyer who challenged Jefferson County’s assignment plan. “They cannot use race as a factor. Here we are again.” (Source)
A family of Indian descent wanted their daughter to attend Stopher Elementary, their neighborhood school. The district assigned her to Shelby Elementary, a school 20 miles away. Gordon said the district likely assigned a certain number of black students from the Shelby neighborhood to Stopher through a race-based assignment plan, which Gordon says violated the Supreme Court’s ruling, and assigned the child of Indian descent to Shelby for racial balance.
Jefferson County School Superintendent Sheldon Berman insists sending children to certain schools based on the color of their skin is necessary to preserve “diversity in our community.”
Why do school districts classify and assign students by race, although Brown v. The Board of Education was supposed to end this practice? One reason is that some schools will become heavily black. Why is that a problem, you ask?
If you know the answer, please share it with me. I’m dying to know.
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In April, Bucknell University deans shut down a racial preferences bake sale that a conservative student group hosted to illustrate the unfair and demeaning nature of lowered admissions standards based on race. The school cited a discrepancy between prices at the time of application and at the time of sale. A technicality.
After almost three months, the issue’s still hot. The story recently was covered by the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. From the Inquirer:
The “affirmative-action bake sale”…was shut down by the administration in April. But it didn’t end there…Bucknell president Brian C. Mitchell has received about 100 letters, e-mails, and phone calls protesting the administration’s response.
The controversy at Bucknell – a 3,500-student liberal arts university in Lewisburg, Pa., about 75 minutes north of the state capital – is not unique.
College campuses across the country frequently must deal with delicate issues of free speech, political posturing, and race relations.
Affirmative-action bake sales, usually held by conservative groups, have been cropping up on campuses for years, much to the chagrin of many administrators – although Kutztown University a few years ago let one go on and used it as a “teachable moment.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) became involved after the school shut down the bake sale. The organization successfully defended the free speech rights of student groups who held similar demonstrations at the College of William and Mary, Northeastern Illinois University, DePaul University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. FIRE is on fire. Keep up the good work.
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The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) published a 20-page study (PDF) titled, “Racial, Ethnic and Gender Preferences in Admissions to the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy.” Among other things, the authors found that both service academies lower standards for black admittees, and the academic qualifications gap between blacks and whites is “substantial.”
The gap between Army admittees is smaller than the Navy’s gap, and the one between whites and Hispanics is smaller. The study concludes that Hispanics don’t benefit from preferences in the Army’s admissions, and there’s no evidence that Asians receive preferences at either academy.
“In fact, there is evidence that the Asian applicants with the same academic qualifications find it somewhat more difficult to obtain admission than do their white counterparts at both academies.”
According to the report, the tougher the school’s standards, the more it uses race preferences. No surprises there.
In a section titled, “Computing the Odds of Admission,” the study shows that the odds of black-to-white admissions is 4.44 to 1, Hispanic-to-white odds 3.32 to 1, and Asian-to-white odds .67 to 1.2.
“[W]e find preferences in favor of blacks at both academies, preferences in favor of Hispanics at Navy but not at Army, and preferences against Asians at both academies. We find that the odds ratios for blacks and Hispanics relative to whites are significantly greater at the U.S. Naval Academy than at the U.S. Military Academy.”
The implications of admitting students with much lower qualifications are far-reaching. As the study notes, these students will have a more difficult time academically and graduate at lower rates.
Whites and Asians with superior credentials are rejected in favor of less qualified blacks.
“At the Naval Academy, 131 Asian rejectees (41 percent) and 2,640 white rejectees (42 percent) have both math and verbal SATs equal to or higher than the black admittee math and verbal SAT medians. There are 69 Asians (50 percent) and 1,232 whites (25 percent) rejected by the U.S. Naval Academy who attained a class rank equal or better to the rank of the black admittee median.”
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Asian groups have complained that the University of California’s (UC) recent admissions changes will negatively impact students of Asian descent. These students account for 40 percent of all undergraduates at Los Angeles, 43 percent at Berkeley, 50 percent at San Diego, and 54 percent at Irvine. Americans of Asian descent account for about 12 percent of California’s population and four percent of the U.S. population.
The American Civil Rights Institute’s Ward Connerly wrote a piece for the Sacramento Bee about this issue. He recounts a conversation he had with a UC administrator:
“I asked him why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. In an unguarded moment, he told me that unless the university took steps to ‘guide’ admissions decisions, UC would be dominated by Asians. When I asked, ‘What would be wrong with that?’ I got an answer that speaks volumes about the underlying philosophy at many universities with regard to Asian enrollment.
“The UC administrator told me that Asians are ‘too dull – they study, study, study.’ He then said, ‘If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it.’ I won’t betray the individual’s anonymity because to do so would put him in a world of trouble. Yet, it is time to confront the not-so-subtle hand of discrimination against Asians that masquerades as ‘building diversity’ at many campuses.”
As Connerly notes, the effort to attract more black students to a campus isn’t a bad thing per se; it becomes so when schools discriminate against other racial groups to achieve this goal. Since California voters barred their government from preferring or discriminating against individuals or groups in hiring, contracting, and admissions based on factors like race, Asian admissions to the UC system have risen.
Consequently, UC eliminated its policy to automatically admit the top 12.5 percent of all students based on statewide performance and reduced reliance on grades and scores. Since Asian students tend to score higher on standardized tests and achieve higher grades than whites, blacks, Hispanics, and other groups, the new policy likely would reduce their numbers.
UC didn’t count on Asian groups protesting the new policy, but the “proposed UC admissions policies are so egregious and so dramatically discriminatory against Asians that these groups could not remain silent – and have credibility within their communities – as the grass-roots opposition from within specific Asians groups began to surface,” Connerly writes.
Americans of Asian descent are not a typical grievance group. Will UC’s discriminatory polices change that?
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With a preferences supporting biracial president in the White House and a preferences supporting “wise Latina” judge awaiting confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, there’s no time like the present to openly debate the fairness of so-called affirmative action and the means by which to end it once and for all.
The National Policy Institute (NPI) notes that Democrats are worried about how their support for preferential treatment for minorities will affect Democrat-voting white working class voters, and rightly so. With a biracial man sitting in the Oval Office, it’s difficult to argue that Americans should keep the bar lowered for black Americans in perpetuity. An excerpt:
During the 1970s and ’80s, programs to increase representation of minorities in public- and private-sector hiring, college admissions, and government contracting ignited many of the most searing arguments in American politics and helped remake the Republican and Democratic electoral coalitions. But since then these issues have provoked only rare skirmishes, as a combination of political, economic, and cultural changes have reduced their visibility and immediacy to all but a handful of activists on each side. “You had an environment where it wasn’t on the top of the radar screen for anybody,” veteran Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said…Now Sotomayor’s nomination is forcing these issues back into the spotlight. And they have quickly proved as polarizing as ever.
NPI points out something that will impact the “affirmative action” debate as well as Sotomayor’s confirmation. Republicans may be reluctant to strongly challenge Sotomayor for fear of being called racists (which people call them anyway). Republicans have tried unsuccessfully to woo Hispanics, so offending them should be the least of their concerns. Defending what is right should be the focus.
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Linda Chavez isn’t hopeful that Republicans will do the right thing. “I regret to say that it is probably going to be one or two short questions, that they have no appetite for this.”
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According to a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University, 55 percent say “affirmative action” should be history, and 71 percent disagree with Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion in Ricci v. DeStefano.
A majority of Americans (70 percent) aren’t buying the “diversity” argument for preferences in government hiring. Apparently, those folks aren’t in decision-making positions in government entities, where such thinking runs rampant. An even larger percentage opposes preferences in the private sector (74 percent).
Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, offers insight:
“Whether it’s a belief that the statute of limitations on past wrongs has run out or economic pressures on workers, programs that supporters call affirmative action and opponents label racial preferences are unpopular with most American voters.”
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At National Review’s The Corner blog, Victor David Hanson writes about a phenomenon most of us probably have experienced. “Beneficiaries” of racial preferences, those whose race was a factor in their admissions to colleges and universities, complain when others stigmatize them because race was a factor in their admissions.
Hanson writes:
“So Michelle Obama describes the fear that Sotomayor felt at Princeton — and its lasting effects to this day — and then compares it, of course, to Michelle’s own ambiguous feelings toward the same Princeton campus (cf. Michelle’s thesis for the details), that one is willing to put up with for the education and prestige it gave, but does not really like for the presence of apparently so many stuck-up, rich, preppy kids and their ubiquitous exclusive campus culture.”
It’s sad that minorities tend to see everything through a racial lens. As Hanson points out, the first year of college is often terrifying for everyone, but people like Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor reduce it race. I went to an historically black college, and I was scared and uncertain about what to expect. I spent the next four years dealing with “stuck-up” kids and others who didn’t like me for whatever reason. Regardless of race, we all go through uncertainty and feelings of exclusion. But at a black college, I couldn’t play the race card the way minorites like Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor can.
An inevitable consequence of feeling separate from others, as Hanson points out, is separatism and identification with the “tribe.” Such students may end up joining race- or ethnicity-focused groups, defeating the whole “diversity” effort in the process.
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The Pew Research Institute released a survey last month that revealed 58 percent of blacks agree that minorities should receive preferential treatment. Not a surprise. Only 22 percent of whites agree. Among Democrats, 45 percent agree that minorities should receive preferential treatment, in contrast to only 13 percent of Republicans. Twenty-eight percent of independents agree.
Here’s the surprise: 44 percent of people younger than 30 believe “every effort should be made to improve the position of minorities,” which we may assume includes racial preferences. One would think younger people, who didn’t live through Jim Crow (and whose parents may not have been alive during Jim Crow, either), would oppose preferences now that barriers have been torn down, and the only evidence of “racism” they’ve experienced is a white sales clerk following them around in a store or people looking at them “funny.”
To support preferential treatment is to support lowered standards. There’s no other way around it. Employing racial preferences involves lowering the bar for individuals who are members of certain racial groups.
And some people call that progress.
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“One of the unexpected results of the Sotomayor nomination is a refocusing on the politics of racial identity and the fossilized institutions of affirmative action-or the belief that the U.S. government should use its vast power to ensure an equality of result rather than a fairness of opportunity.” (Source)
So begins an excellent op-ed by Victor Davis Hanson. He summarizes what we anti-preference folks have been saying for many years and in many different ways: given varying levels of talent, drive, and motivation among individuals, it is impossible – impossible – to ensure that everyone ends up with the same stuff. The best we can hope for in our wonderfully free and wealthy society is to ensure that individuals have opportunities to succeed. The process cannot be forced, and failure to succeed is not proof of racism.
Hanson points out the glaringly obvious. With America’s multiracial make-up, who is considered black enough to qualify for preferences? If someone has a white parent and a black parent and checks the “non-Hispanic White” box, he doesn’t qualify for special treatment. If he chooses to self-identity as black, he receives preferences. Right? (He could always check “Other” or write in “American” just to be rebellious.)
Hanson asks, “[W]hat constitutes racial authenticity? Lack of income? An absence of success in the American rat race? Is the fourth generation upper-class Cuban an ‘Hispanic’ who should qualify for affirmative action because his name is Hillario Gonzalez? Does the one-quarter aristocratic Jamaican qualify for American redress on account of his partial blackness?”
See how muddled it gets? It’s rather distasteful to have the government making these determinations to begin with. We were naive to think the civil rights movement ended such practices. The government is still up to its eyeballs in racial categorization.
Hanson does an admirable job illustrating the absurdity of racial preferences by asking a series of rhetorical questions to figure out why preferences exist. Past discrimination against a collective? Then Barack Obama, born of a white mother and Kenyan father, should not have received preferences. Present racism against an individual? Do dark-skinned, non-blacks who face discrimination qualify for “affirmative action”? Is poverty a criterion? Then poor whites should benefit from preferences, right?
The slope becomes more slippery.
“Indeed, creating, recreating, and emphasizing racial identity, especially among elites, currently involves so many contortions that it has descended from the absurd to the outright pernicious-and is becoming a sort of racism itself.”
And lowering standards for blacks instead of expecting them to compete with everyone else is also a sort of racism.
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Rod Paige, George Bush’s former secretary of education, says the academic achievement gap between the races must be closed. How does he proposed to do that? (Source)
Paige has some interesting things to say. For instance, he said racial discrimination and injustice are “now episodic and much less of a barrier to success,” to which I wholeheartedly agree, but I want to get to the heart of the matter. He notes that the typical black 17-year-old reads and does math at the level of a typical white 13-year-old. Again, how do we close the gap?
“Political leaders must be open to support a broader array of instructional modalities including charter schools, private schools, parochial schools and virtual learning systems. They must resist the urging of the guardians of the status quo. Parents must help children understand the power of education to improve life’s circumstances and encourage them to do their best in school. Community leaders must mount after-school and Saturday morning programs and other initiatives that help children catch up on skills they have missed. Churches must expand their education programs and create better coordination with schools. Organizations like the NAACP, LULAC, the Urban League and others must work more forcefully with social organizations on educational initiatives. In other words, closing the education achievement gap will require a total community effort.”
And these will help close the achievement gap? Call me skeptical. Paige’s general suggestions are well intentioned and oft-repeated. The reward for better educated children is huge, but the task of better educating them is also huge.
Racial preferences, i.e., lowering standards, is one consequence of the academic achievement gap. Apparently, there aren’t enough minorities with the grades and scores to compete with everyone else, so schools drop standards (but only for minorities) in order to admit an arbitrary percentage of them for purposes of skin deep-only diversity.
If readers who think I’m off-base have another explantion for lowered standards, I’m all ears.
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