This article is remarkable just for showing the emptiness of so much of the rhetoric against affirmative action. For years, we heard that affirmative action was flawed because its focus on race helped middle class blacks while leaving deserving poor students without any help. So in response to the attacks on affirmative action in Texas and California, new race-blind policies give college access to the highest achievers from every high school. Due to economic and racial residential segregation, this has led not only to maintenance of racial diversity in Texas universities, it has actually apparently increased access to college to the economically disadvantaged - exactly the supposed goal of the "class, not race" anti-affirmative action folks.
Now that it's happened of course, the racists now admit that they just don't want anyone but the privileged or rather the "economically prepared" to be allowed to get a higher education. -- Nathan Newman
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BY ANY OTHER NAME STILL SMELLS Source: NY Post Published: 11/27/99 Author: [editorial]
For those desperately seeking a way to solve the problem of how to increase minority enrollment in elite state universities without using affirmative action -- which has been ruled unconstitutional -- new laws in three states must have seemed like a godsend. But a new report suggests strongly that educators more interested in social engineering have merely replaced one problem with another.
In Texas, the top 10 percent of graduates from each and every high school are guaranteed a place at the state university campus of their choice, regardless of how they've performed on standardized admissions tests. (In Florida, the automatic-admit level is 20 percent; in California, 4 percent.) And minority enrollment in those Texas schools has climbed back to the levels seen before courts threw out race-based admissions systems.
But far from guaranteeing that the system will be composed of academically elite students, the new program has created a two-tier system in which students from impoverished inner-city and rural schools simply can't keep up with college-level work.
"It's a humbling experience," one freshman admitted under the plan -- a student who would not have qualified for admission based on his test scores and is now on the brink of failing two required courses -- told The New York Times. "I never felt slow or dumb before." In fact, he added, "all the stuff I should have done in high school, I'm doing now."
University officials are trying to put a bright face on this problem, citing the students' "go-getter attitude" which, they claim, compensates for a lack of academic preparation. But clearly, the prospect of flunking out of college just weeks into one's freshman year -- simply because they're not equipped to handle the work -- can put a damper on the most enthusiastic attitude.
The problem is that students increasingly are being told not only that they have a constitutional right to attend college, whether they're qualified or not, but that they have a right to attend the most rigorous, demanding schools -- all solely in the interests of maintaining the racial mix.
Many of these same students would no doubt do well at other, less elite colleges -- but to send them there, we're told, will destroy their sense of self-worth.
New Yorkers know the problem well; in essence, it's a spin on the open-admissions policy instituted by the City University system three decades ago -- a policy that resulted in the academic deterioration of a once-respected institution. CUNY officials tried to deal with the problem by offering massive remediation -- which is exactly what's taking place at the University of Texas.
Indeed, the director of UT's remediation program for pre-med students admits that "without intervention, only one in 10 of them will go on to get a degree and make it into the health professions."
But when remediation doesn't work, the next step is social promotion -- in the way that the Massachusetts Board of Education has just voted to deal with students' increasing inability to pass statewide high-school graduation exams by drastically lowering the passing mark.
These attitudes, like those of the people who fought so long and so foolishly to stop CUNY from ending remediation, do no service to those they're intended to help. Those who press ahead with such nonsense are merely sticking their heads in the sand and refusing to concede the real problem: the decline of serious academic standards in elementary and high schools.
And in the meantime, students are sacrificed in appalling ways because the nation's education establishment will not address the real issue.