WHAT IS AFFIRMATIVE ACTION; HOW DOES Waiting for Superman DEMONSTRATE THE IMPORTANCE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION TO LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD
Ends April 27, 2012
What does this tell us about admissions, meritocracy, and notions of “fairness”
UC admits more foreign, out-of-state students
The university offers fall entrance to 43% more non-California freshmen than last year. Such students would each pay an extra $23,000 a year, helping plug budget gaps caused by reductions in state funding.
April 18, 2012|By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times
The University of California admitted 43% more out-of-state and international freshmen than last year, significantly boosting its controversial efforts to enroll those higher-paying students, according to data released Tuesday.
As a result, officials said they expected the share of the upcoming freshman class from outside California to be somewhat higher than the 12.3% this school year but said the actual proportion remains uncertain because non-Californians are less likely to enroll than resident students.
UC offered fall entrance to 61,443 California students to at least one of its nine undergraduate campuses, an increase of 3.6% from last year.
FOR THE RECORD:
Transit: An April 16 Op-Ed article about the 30/10 transit plan in Southern California referred to a 72-22 Senate vote on a two-year transportation bill. The vote was 74 to 22. —
It also admitted 18,846 students from other states and countries, up from 13,144 the previous year. Those students would each pay an extra $23,000 a year and help plug the budget gaps caused by reductions in state funding. Students have until May 1 to decide whether to enroll.
UC hopes to raise the overall enrollment of non-Californians to 10% of all undergraduates in a few years, up from the current 6.9%, although UCLA and UC Berkeley already have much higher shares of out-of-staters.
Kate Jeffery, UC’s interim director of undergraduate admissions, said Tuesday that more California students “are being squeezed out” of their first- or second-choice campuses, and she blamed cuts in state funding, not the rise in out-of-state admissions. However, she insisted that all students who meet UC’s academic requirements are being offered a space somewhere in the system, with UC Merced as the backup if all other campuses have rejected them.
Because applications from state residents increased substantially and enrollment is not expanding much, it got harder for Californians to find a spot in UC. The situation may have been inadvertently worsened by changes this year in UC admissions criteria that were approved before the state budget crisis and were intended to expand the application pool; those reforms included dropping the requirement that students take two supplemental SAT subject exams, although the main SAT or ACT tests are still mandatory.
Overall, the admissions rate for California students declined from 69.7% last year to 65.8% for fall 2012. And non-Californians faced a similar trend: 53.9% of out-of-state students in the U.S. were admitted, down from 60.7% last year, and about 61.3% of foreign applicants, compared to 64.1% in 2011.
UCLA again was the hardest UC campus to crack for Californians, with only 17.7% offered entrance at the Westwood school. Next came Berkeley, 22.7%; San Diego, 32.1%; Irvine, 33.6%; Santa Barbara, 41%; Davis, 44.5%; Riverside and Santa Cruz, both 61.6%; and Merced, 76.5%.
When non-Californians are included in the acceptance rate, UC Berkeley had a slight edge for being the most selective UC campus, offering a spot to 21.2% of all applicants compared with 21.3% at UCLA.
California families are right to be outraged to see their high-achieving children turned down at some campuses while non-residents are getting in, said Patrick Callan, who is president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think tank in San Jose.
As California residents and state legislators come to feel less connected to the university, UC will be less likely to have its funding boosted when the economy improves, he said. “It’s a mistake and it’s a disservice to the people of California,” Callan said of the rising ranks of out-of-state students. “I think it is a short-term benefit that really does compromise the university in the long term.” Instead, UC should cut duplications in graduate academic programs, he said.
Jeffery, however, noted that the proportion of non-Californian undergraduates at UC “is still very small and certainly small compared to some other public institutions in other states.” She added that out-of-staters and foreign students add cultural diversity and different perspectives to campuses.
Eight campuses increased their number of admissions offers to non-Californians. Only UC Berkeley, which already attracted controversy for enrolling 30% of its current freshman class from out-of-state, pulled back, cutting those admissions by 12.5%.
UCLA and UC Irvine took in more freshman than anticipated last year and decided to reduce their numbers of admissions offers to California freshmen to compensate for that, officials said. UCLA cut in-state freshman admissions by 15.1% and Irvine by 16.2%, making Irvine appear noticeably more competitive than in the past.
The proportion of Latinos and blacks offered admission to UC rose slightly from last year, to 27.3% and 4.4% respectively. Asian Americans kept nearly the same share, 36.3% while whites declined, reflecting state demographics, from 30.6% to 28.2%.
via UC sees uptick in admissions of foreign, out-of-state students – Los Angeles Times.
via UC sees uptick in admissions of foreign, out-of-state students – Los Angeles Times.
Some Thoughts on Ivy League Admissions-And Affirmative Action- For Donald Trump
Professor Mark Naison
Fordham University
Donald Trump’s comments that Barack Obama didn’t have the grades to get into Ivy League
Schools shows a profound ignorance of the admissions policies of those institutions. According to Bowen, Shapiro et all who thoroughly researched the admissions policies of elite universities in the US ( and whose conclusions can be found in their 2002 book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values) the greatest admissions advantage at those schools goes not to children of alumni, or underrepresented minorities, but to recruited athletes! Not only are their twice as many recruited athletes as underrepresented minorities at these schools, but the admissions advantage accruing to an athlete, whether male or female, is twice as powerful as those given to a minority or a “legacy”.
We are not talking about a small number of students here. At most Ivy League schools, close to 20 percent of the undergraduates are recruited athletes, and at Williams College, they
constitute 40 percent of the student population. Given the variety of the sports encompassed, which go from lacrosse, to golf, to tennis to sailing, to soccer, to hockey along with softball, baseball, basketball and football, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of beneficiaries of
“sports affirmative action” are white. Not only are these athletes admitted with significantly lower grades and SAT’s than the university mean, but their grades in college tend to be lower than those of their fellow students. Nevertheless, their incomes after college are no lower than those of their fellow students because a large proportion of them go into careers in the financial sector, which go out of their way to recruit “Ivy league athletes” as key components of their work force.
The populist resentment of allegedly “undeserving” minorities who push hardworking white students out of top college- which Trump is exploiting with his rhetoric- turns out to be misplaced. To put the matter bluntly, there are a lot more white hockey and football players who get into Ivy League schools with SAT’s below the school norm than there are Black and Latino students from the inner city. As someone who spent more than 15 years coaching athletes from diverse racial and class backgrounds in Brooklyn in the 1980’s and 1990’s, I know this from personal experience as well as research. One young woman I worked with, a nationally ranked tennis player who was highly recruited by every Ivy League college, actually got a letter from Harvard telling her that her target SAT score for admission was 1100! Another young man from our community, a highly recruited left handed pitcher, was told that his admission target for Princeton was 1200, with an expected verbal score of 600 because “Princeton has a lot of reading.” Needless to say, both of those young people were white!
So much for “undeserving minorities” pushing white kids out of top colleges! To put this in perspective, I have taught African American Studies at Fordham for more than 40 years and talked to hundreds of Black and Latino students about their college recruitment experiences. Not one of them has mentioned being given SAT targets that low for admission to Harvard, Yale or Princeton!
Donald Trump needs to find a new subject for his demagoguery. If Barack Obama got into Columbia with lower grades and SAT’s scores than the college mean, he was only one of many students- the vast majority of whom were white- who fell into that category. And his success, along with so many others so admitted, should be a warning that traits measurable on standardized tests are not the only indicators of talent and potential that should be considered for university admission. When Ivy League schools admit students, irrespective of the scores they register on standardized tests, they almost never drop out, and usually achieve professional success after graduation. Whether these schools should have as much power as they do in American society is another question, but none of the students they bring in are programmed to “fail.”
Columbia College chose wisely in admitting Barack Obama. His admission was only one small part of a broad policy for creating a student body diverse in talent as well as cultural background from which far more whites than ethnic and racial minorities were beneficiaries
Mark Naison
Aprl 27, 2011
Redefining campus diversity
Selective schools need to be vigilant in their effort to bring in more low-income kids.
Across America, the nation’s select colleges are expanding their concept of diversity. It’s not just about improving racial and ethnic balance on campus, but also increasing the percentage of low-income students – which is even lower than for minorities. Both are important goals.
Politics and the courts are pushing elite schools toward this broader approach.
In June, it will be five years since the Supreme Court gave the University of Michigan law school a pass on its practice of using race as one tool to consider in admissions. But this qualified OK on affirmative action is tenuous. Given the justices now on the bench, a new challenge could well be overturned. Such a case may grow out of a recent suit against the University of Texas at Austin.
At the same time, political momentum is building to ban race as a consideration in public education and hiring. This fall Colorado, Missouri, Arizona, and Nebraska will put such initiatives on ballots. If past voter approval in California, Washington, and Michigan is any guide, the four measures will pass, and handily.
Opening the university gates to make it possible for more low-income students to attend still means shutting out otherwise qualified students. But voters perceive discrimination based on income as more acceptable than racial preferences. And there are no legal hurdles.
Attuned, selective colleges and universities are making a greater effort to improve income mix and still keep an eye on racial diversity.
In recent months, Harvard, Stanford, and other elite schools have announced free tuition for students whose families earn less than $60,000 (more in some cases).
Several private foundations have begun programs to match smart but poor kids with elite schools.
Last fall, 19 of the country’s largest public university systems pledged to halve the achievement gap for minority and low-income students by improving their college attendance and graduation rates.
And the nation now has a proven model in Texas, which has found a legal way to increase income, geographic, and racial variety – and academic performance. The University of Texas guarantees admission to the top 10 percent of state high schools. It sweeps rural and urban schools, poor and wealthy, minorities and whites. (The above-mentioned lawsuit challenges the part of admissions that still uses racial preferences).
These efforts are encouraging, but the challenge is daunting.
A 2003 study by the Century Foundation found that African-Americans and Hispanics each constitute only 6 percent of incoming freshmen at the nation’s 146 most select schools (as defined by the Barron’s guide). Yet the percent of blacks and Hispanics among 18-year-olds is more than twice that. Income disparity was even worse: only 3 percent of all the freshmen were from the poorest quarter of the population.
It’s also expensive to pay for poor kids and then follow through with the extra skills help they may need, especially when state budgets are being squeezed and a recession may be settling in.
The trend over time is that more students of color will graduate from US high schools, and many will be low-income. Higher education must be vigilant in moving them onto and up the learning ladder.
via Redefining campus diversity – CSMonitor.com.
via Redefining campus diversity – CSMonitor.com (participation).
Facebook stalking in the name of affirmative action
Ahead of the Supreme Court hearing on affirmative action, I recall how at Roll Call newspaper, I was told that one of our three interns had to be from a racial minority. Diversity is important, but giving someone an advantage beyond his experience degrades the applicant and the hirer.
By Debra Bruno / March 21, 2012
University of Michigan student Ebrie Benton demonstrates outside the Federal courthouse March 7 in Cincinnati, where the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals was hearing oral arguments in a review of their ruling last summer that Proposal 2, the ban on affirmative action in Michigan, is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court will soon hear a case on affirmative action, involving race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas.
Al Behrman/AP
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There I was, Facebook stalking again. But I wasn’t chasing after an old boyfriend or trying to see if my niece was having too good a time in Italy. As the internship coordinator for Roll Call (now CQ Roll Call), a newspaper covering Congress on Capitol Hill, I was looking at the faces of candidates for internships.
One might ask: Why did I care about what a prospective intern would look like? The answer was that I was told that out of three interns hired each semester at Roll Call, one of them had to be from a racial minority: African-American, Hispanic, Asian, South Asian, Native American. And in some cases, what you can’t tell from a name you can see from a picture.
Mike Mills, the paper’s editorial director, denies that Roll Call had a policy to “tip the scales in favor of any candidate solely to fulfill our our diversity goals,” but I was given a clear directive otherwise, initiated when I was with Roll Call in 2009 and 2010. It was part of an overall push to improve diversity at the newspaper, which is owned by The Economist Group. The company felt, laudably, that an ethical work environment is one that offers opportunities to those who may not have had them in the past.
OPINION: Eight ingredients for a peaceful society
I want to be clear that I think the goal is a good one: Most newsrooms these days are anything but diverse, and that lack of diversity affects the kinds of stories covered, the approach to those stories, the photographs, the headlines, everything.
But is there a way to fix this – at least a better way than using race as a key part of the selection criteria? The US Supreme Court will to take up a version of that question itself when it hears a case that challenges the University of Texas’s race-conscious admissions practices later this year. In 2003, the court ruled that public colleges could use race in a vague way as a criterion for college admissions. But now the court has agreed to look at a case involving admissions at the University of Texas. Observers predict that the more conservative bench today is likely to end any kind of race-based preference in higher education.
In my case, what I discovered in my hunt for the right interns was an obstacle that had less to do with racial factors and more to do with economic ones. When I started at Roll Call as features editor in charge of internships, we offered three unpaid internships each semester and in the summer. What that meant was that one of the main qualifications for the job was a set of parents who were able and willing to allow their child to work fulltime for free for several months, with the hope that it might lay the groundwork for future employment.
CONTINUE READING @ Facebook stalking in the name of affirmative action – CSMonitor.com.
via Facebook stalking in the name of affirmative action – CSMonitor.com.
Women Of Color Directed 1 Percent of TV Episodes Last Season, Make $23,325 Less Than Male Writers
By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 20, 2012 at 1:37 pm
This week, spurred on by the debut of HBO’s Girls and the subsequent discussion of the show’s whiteness, has seen a significant discussion about the erasure of women of color on television, and the fact that the depictions of women of color, when they do happen, are frequently created and mediated by white writers. However we feel about Girls, and opinions vary, I think we can agree that the larger situation is untenable, and that our popular culture would be a richer, more interesting place if women of color had more opportunities to create, run production on, star in, and direct more television shows. I also think it’s critical to emphasize that just because women of color aren’t always visible as characters on television doesn’t mean they’re not already writing episodes of television and acting as showrunners. So in this post and another that run on Monday, I want to do two things: first, lay out the actual facts on the employment of women of color in television, which is an important starting point for a conversation about structural reform, and second, call attention to the great work of some of the women of color who are creating television already, but who don’t get the same kind of attention as Shonda Rhimes.
So let’s talk some numbers. First, the state of women’s employment in television overall is an embarrassment. According to the Women’s Media Center, during the 2010-2011 television season, women made up:
-18 percent of creators
-22 percent of executive producers
-37 percent of producers
-15 percent of writers
-11 percent of directors
-20 percent of editors
-4 percent of directors of photography.
Those numbers have not appreciably improved since 1997, and in fact, the years in which women make some gains in one of those professions frequently seem to be followed by declines in substantive seasons.
Moving in from those general numbers on women’s employment, the numbers are substantially worse when you look at women of color. A Directors Guild of America analysis of the 2010-2011 television season found that women of color directed just 1 percent of 2,600 television episodes that aired during that period (men of color directed 11 percent of those episodes, numbers comparable to those helmed by white women).
It should be noted that in television, unlike in film, writers have substantially more impact on the final product of a given episode than directors do. The Writers Guild of America, West puts out its Hollywood Writers Report less frequently than some of the other reports I’ve cited here or drawn other figures form, but the 2011 edition of the report, which looks at employment data from 2009 is revealing. It doesn’t break out data on minority women, but the numbers are still worth a look.
Between 2005 and 2009, the number of minority writers in television has fluctuated between nine and ten percent—as the report puts it, “it appears that minority writers are at best treading water when it comes to their share of television employment.” The median salary for white male television writers in 2009 was $108,000. For all minority writers, the median salary was $84,675. The pay gap between white male television writers and minority writers of both genders was $8,007 in 1999, $10,688 in 2007, and in 2009, rose to $23,325.
The report also notes an important factor that may interact with these other statistics: in 2005, 2007, and 2009, the number of writers younger than 31 stayed constant at 6 percent. And the number of writers aged 31 to 40 went from 37 percent to 36 percent during those years, so it’s not as if the number of younger writers stayed constant because they’re all aging into the next cohort and being replaced on a one to one basis. In other words, there isn’t yet an influx of a younger generation of writers that might bring more diversity than the current crop of established writers. Changing these numbers doesn’t appear to be something that’s going to change naturally. In fact, in some categories like compensation, the industry is losing ground.
These numbers are pathetic. This situation is pathetic. And if you’d like to let executives at the networks know that, here are the people at the major networks you should call out about it:
via Women of Color In Television, Part 1: The Numbers | ThinkProgress.
via Women of Color In Television, Part 1: The Numbers | ThinkProgress.
Education For Poor Students Threatened By Exclusionary Housing Policies, Report Says (Participation)
Education For Poor Students Threatened By Exclusionary Housing Policies, Report Says
Tanya McDowell, a Connecticut mother, made headlines last year when she was accused of stealing — specifically, of stealing an education for her son.
McDowell, who was homeless, was accused of felony larceny by authorities who said she sent her child to a stronger school in Norwalk, instead of the one she was zoned to in Bridgeport, her last permanent address.
“Who would have thought that wanting a good education for my son would put me in this predicament?” McDowell said in court last month, according to The Connecticut Post. Her eyes downcast, McDowell pleaded guilty to fraudulently enrolling her son in the wrong school district and selling drugs. She was sentenced to five years in prison.
A new Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program report released Thursday lists which metropolitan areas’ housing policies most severely impede low-income students from attending high-performing schools, and found that zoning laws preventing the construction of affordable housing in wealthier neighborhoods are still widespread.
The report, “Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools,” concludes that restrictive zoning laws create “economic segregation that prevents millions of American children from getting the quality education they need.” The paper, written by Brookings senior research analyst Jonathan Rothwell, notes that in some cities, paying for private school is actually cheaper than moving to enroll in a better public school.
“I’d like people to think about the fact that it costs a lot of money to live near a high-scoring school,” Rothwell said in an interview. “Instead of moving toward opportunity, we’re magnifying inequality because of the way we assign students [to schools] based on where they live.”
While policies that affect teachers, such as tenure and evaluations based on student test scores, have garnered recent attention and traction among state legislators, the Brookings paper makes the case for using zoning laws to change education. Rothwell said while there was movement toward changing zoning laws in the 1970s, a Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of exclusionary zoning quashed momentum.
“We don’t hear it so much because it’s hard politically,” said Dianne Piche, a former U.S. Education Department official, who now leads education efforts for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Efforts like this have been really, really scaled back. There’s been very little interest on the part of this administration … but it would be sensible to coordinate housing policy and school policy.”
The disparities are clear. On average, low-income students attend schools whose state test scores are in the 42nd percentile, but their more affluent peers attend schools with scores in the 61st percentile, Rothwell found. He also uncovered a connection between less restrictive zoning policies and smaller score gaps. According to the report, housing near a high-scoring public school costs 2.4 times more per year than housing near low-performing schools.
“We think of public education as free and open to all, but the quality of public education that the family has access to is largely determined by their income,” Rothwell said.
And while the school-choice movement touting charter schools and vouchers aims to broaden parents’ educational options, Rothwell said those offerings are limited. “Families have a strong preference for schools that are closest to them,” he said. “Even if they have two or three other options, those options might not be any better.”
Charter schools in the same district as low-performing schools in concentrated poverty don’t offer the benefits of integration — found to boost performance — that schools located in inclusionary zoning can bring.
The Brookings paper represents the first effort to tie zoning policy to educational quality on a city-by-city basis. Rothwell analyzed data from 84,000 schools, and ranked metropolitan areas in accordance with the test-score gap between middle/high- and low-income students, as well as the housing cost gap between high- and low-scoring schools.
The Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, Conn.-area had the largest test score gap between poor and affluent students, Rothwell found. Hartford, Conn., Milwaukee, Wis. and New Haven, Conn., also had significant gaps. The Bridgeport-area had the largest housing cost gap. Connecticut’s performance gap has been well-documented, and is in fact the central argument of a controversial campaign led by Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Conn.) to alter teacher tenure and increase preschool access.
But his proposals don’t touch on housing. “If you look at the income-related segregation and the housing price differentials by metro area … Connecticut has extreme economic segregation,” said Bruce Baker, an education professor at New Jersey’s Rutgers University. “One of the things that makes northeastern cities so much worse is the extreme differences in wealth.”
The Washington, D.C.,-area, on the other hand, had the 68th-largest score gap and the 80th-largest housing cost gap. Its ranking might stem from the fact that the area encompasses the Montgomery County Public Schools district in Maryland, a school district that has deliberately crafted housing policies that accommodate low-income tenants.
According to a 2010 study by RAND Corp.’s Heather Schwartz, Montgomery County’s poorest students performed better in affluent schools.
The Brookings paper proposes the elimination of exclusionary zoning policies altogether, saying such a move could “produce large educational gains and economic benefits for low-income and minority children and families, and the U.S. economy as a whole.” Since such sweeping policy is likely unfeasible, Rothwell suggests generous housing vouchers for neighborhoods with top-performing schools, and mandating that future construction include a certain amount of affordable units.
“This isn’t just an outcome of free-market forces,” Rothwell said. “There are laws and regulations imposed on markets by local governments in affluent neighborhoods that restrict the density and affordability of housing. This exacerbates inequality, economic segregation and makes it all the more difficult for low-income families to move from those places.”
Still Separate and Unequal, Generations After Brown v. Board
Protesters march against the segregation of U.S. schools. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/National Archives and Records Administration
Today is the 57th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that declared racial segregation in U.S. public schools unconstitutional. Also today, American schools are more segregated than they were four decades ago.
If eradicating racial segregation in education was the original civil rights battle, it continues to be the most enduring one. A court decision that called “separate but equal” schools unlawful led to a couple hopeful decades of racial integration. But today most U.S. kids go to schools that are both racially and socioeconomically homogenous.
Around 40 percent of black and Latino students in the U.S. are in schools than are over 90 percent black and Latino, according to a 2009 study by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. The schools that black and Latino kids are concentrated in are very often high-poverty schools, too. The average black student goes to a school where 59 percent of their classmates live in poverty, while the average Latino student goes to a school that’s 57 percent poor.
And it’s not just blacks and Latinos who are racially isolated. White students go to schools that are 77 percent white, and 32 percent poor.
The Obama administration, which is leading an aggressive school reform agenda, knows what’s going on. In a major speech calling for the overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2009, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan acknowledged in understated terms the re-segregation of U.S. schools, as well as the fatigue with everything that’s been attempted to address it.
“Most minorities were still isolated in their own classrooms,” Duncan said of students growing up in the civil rights era, adding, “Many still are today, and we must work together to change that.”
“We’ve had five decades of reforms, countless studies, watershed reports like ‘A Nation at Risk,’ and repeated affirmations and commitments from the body politic to finally make education a national priority,” Duncan said. “And yet we are still waiting for the day when every child in America has a high quality education that prepares him or her for the future.”
But the Obama administration has been otherwise silent on re-segregation in schools, even as its reform policies have targeted poor communities of color where the lowest-performing schools are located. Twenty-first century racial homogeneity in U.S. schools is a product of decades of regressive court decisions as well as residential segregation.
“There are no significant state or federal programs and little private philanthropy addressing policy to either produce better integrated schools with more racial and economic diversity or to train teachers and students about ways to more effectively run impoverished multiracial schools,” wrote the UCLA study’s author Gary Orfield.
Part of it comes from collective fatigue. The initial, post-Brown push for integrated classrooms gave way over the years to wars over busing and several Supreme Court decisions in the 1990s that forced schools to drop race as a consideration for dealing with school assignments. The Court’s 2007 decision limiting Seattle and Louisville school districts from implementing desegregation policies completed its long slide away from Brown v. Board. Meanwhile, education advocates shifted their calls from demands for integration to calls for equity. Alongside that shift, a numbers and testing obsession was taking hold, catalyzed by the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report Duncan named. That obsession now dominates education reform.
Integrating schools is still a worthwhile goal. Researchers have found that desegregation, while always thorny politically, is one of the most direct methods for raising the education achievement of students of color, especially those that are poor. Columbia University researchers found that when they controlled for other outside socioeconomic factors, students in schools where black and Latino kids were isolated from kids of other races had fewer math and literacy skills—that their educational development was in effect limited by the racial composition of their schools.
And researchers at the University of Connecticut evaluated new strategies like those popularized by North Carolina’s Wake County school district. There, students in wealthier neighborhoods can attend magnet schools in poorer neighborhoods, while students in poorer neighborhoods attend schools in wealthier neighborhoods. Student achievement improved in the system. As an added bonus, researchers also found that allowing kids of different backgrounds to hang out with each other improved students’ racial attitudes about each other.
Still, courts and tea partier-dominated school boards, have continually hampered integration efforts.
Today, the major thrusts of education reform, echoed and pushed in Obama administration policy, are teacher accountability through testing and charter-school expansion. In this iteration of the school reform saga, race is everywhere—acknowledging the existence of the achievement gap is an uncontroversial statement these days. But actually naming, and addressing, the roots of educational inequities is passé.
As the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein told me when I was researching the impacts of the recession on education in communities of color, “Everybody acknowledges differences in achievement but nobody wants to address the inequalities that produce them.”
Indeed, the discourse today is schizophrenic in many ways. Teachers, for instance, are singled out as both the ultimate solutions to and the biggest culprits for our nation’s education woes. Duncan and his colleagues, the celebrity school reformers like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, and the big-city mayors who’ve backed their reforms often laud and eviscerate teachers in the same breath.
The Obama administration has made adopting punitive teacher accountability policies that evaluate teachers based on their students’ test scores a requirement for states that want some federal education money. Through Race to the Top, Obama’s marquee education reform project, states have been asked to adopt merit-pay schemes that also tie teachers’ jobs to their students’ performance on standardized tests. States have also been asked to lift caps on charter schools and designate failing schools for takeover by, among other entities, outside charter groups.
States are not, however, rewarded for adopting the integration policies that education researchers have found to create such change.
“What’s missing from the debate is a recognition that teachers and schools alone are not the most important influence on a child’s achievement,” said Rothstein.
A coalition of race-conscious reformers are promoting a plan they’ve dubbed the Bolder, Broader Approach to Education, which pushes for a racially explicit and holistic approach to addressing education inequity. There’s noticeably no mention of teacher accountability schemes in the three-point version of that plan. It instead calls for high quality early education for all kids, starting from birth and going all the way up through pre-kindergarten. It also calls for high-quality and consistent after school and summer programs for kids, and routine and preventative health care for kids.
“Low-income children have 30 percent more absences than middle-class kids just due to health alone,” Rothstein said. The idea is to mimic the supports that middle-class kids have regular access to. “Unless we do something there’s still going to be something that’s much more important influencing kids’ education than the quality of their teachers.”
It’s not simply a matter of misplaced priorities. Where educational inequities are concerned, the diagnosis has always been easier than deciding on the course of treatment. Nearly 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, we’ve yet to resolve the fundamental question of how to deliver high quality public education to kids of all races.
And after decades of wrangling over possible fixes, the de facto re-segregation of American schools is something that the education reform movement, including the Obama administration, have all but given up on addressing. If integrating public schools was once the answer to bringing equity to the classroom, these days, most people are too fatigued and frustrated to even try.
But now more than ever, mustering the energy to address, head-on, the roots of educational inequities is an issue of utmost urgency. Students of color are 44 percent, and growing, of the U.S. public school system. Racial segregation is a legacy we’ve yet to shake off, nowhere more than in American public schools, where students of color are educated in schools that are today both separate and unequal.
IntrotoCES 