Posted on 04/09/2007 7:09:31 AM PDT by The Pack Knight
Justice O'Connor continued to defend her original position. She lamented statistics that showed that as a result of California's Proposition 209 (passed in 1996) only 2.2% of UCLA freshmen were black, and a fifth of those were on athletic scholarships. (California's overall population is 6.1% black.)
She seemed strangely unaware, however, of the growing evidence that racial preferences might have actually decreased the likelihood that blacks and Hispanics will graduate from college. Put differently, if the body of evidence is correct, the whole affirmative action enterprise has been deeply and tragically flawed from the beginning, failing to achieve its most basic aim: increasing the number of minority college graduates, doctors, lawyers and other professionals.
Other panelists at the Powell symposium discussed the work of UCLA law professor Richard Sander, which shows that minority law students in California who attend law schools at which their academic credentials do not match the credentials of other students are less likely to pass the bar exam than they would have been if they had attended less prestigious law schools where their academic credentials would have been closer to the norm. As a result, according to Mr. Sander, there are fewer minority lawyers than there would have been under colorblind admissions. Justice O'Connor did not attend the rest of the symposium and made no reference to the Sander study in her remarks. ... Racial preferences were intended to help disadvantaged minorities, but in reality they have been turned into a spoils system for the privileged. "Most go to children of powerful politicians, civil-rights activists, and other relatively well-off blacks and Hispanics," says Stuart Taylor of National Journal. "This does nothing for the people most in need of help, who lack the minimal qualifications to get into the game."
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
School choice and other dramatic efforts to improve the quality of K-12 education would do far more to improve the chances of minorities entering and finishing college than any racial set-asides. Indeed, school choice would represent genuine "affirmative action" in favor of millions of disadvantaged kids trapped in failing schools.
Worth reading in its entirety for anyone interested in education or affirmative action.
Sandy Day O’Connor who, without affirmative action could never have made it within screaming distance of the Supreme Court, realizes this fact and stoutly defends it...
Take your average (insert ethnicity here) high school graduate and send him to Tennessee State University, and he could easily graduate.
Give him “affirmative action credits” and admit him to the University of Tennessee, or Tennessee Tech, and he’ll be out on his ear in 3 quarters, max.
Affirmative action is about universities feeling virtuous, not about actually helping members of groups that are suffering the effects of past discrimination.
Anyone who
(1) studied the left and Marxist-based “philosophies” and
(2)looked at the academic and professional origins of the legal teams from which “affirmative action” ideas originated and were first promoted from,
could have, should have and often did understand that the results of such policies WOULD BE a political spoils system rewarding mostly the political advocates of the policies, to a hugely greater extent than the publicly stated and publicly intended beneficiaries of the policies.
That result is no surprise.
Many aspects of “civil rights”, “poverty”, “gay rights” and now “immigrant rights” agendas are not at all about helping or advancing the life or prosperity of the so-called beneficiaries of the “legal” tactics of those agendas. Many of their legal tactics have as their PRIMARY endeavor the altering of and destruction of our Constitutional foundations and protections in favor of a judicial oligarchy (rule by judges unhinged from the Constitution). Liberals and the left fight tooth and nail for this oligarchy because they need it to impose their will against the democratic decisions of the people.
“I’ve said this before: Progressivism is nothing more or less than an incrementalist approach to Marxism, as opposed to the revolutionary approach of self-described communists.”
You are certainly correct when we are talking about most of those who take the “progressive” label today; yes, today’s “progressives” represent an incremental approach of Marxist ideas.
It was not that way originally, with “progressives”, but the progressive movement never got enough wind of its own and after it languished for quite awhile those who began to resurrect the label had been largely educated at our colleges by Marxists; and they were indoctrinated into the entire Marxist dialetic, transporting that indoctrination into the language and thinking of modern “progressive” groups (which I have no doubt their educators were and have been thrilled with).
So, yes, we can find that most of what progressives today advocate is Marxist on some scale, even when they themselves, progressives, don’t realize it or would not admit it.
There were lots of black students capable of doing honors work at UCSD. But such students were probably admitted to Harvard, Yale or Berkeley, where often they were not receiving an honor GPA. The end to racial preferences changed that. In 1999, 20% of black freshmen at UCSD boasted a GPA of 3.5 or better after their first year, almost equaling the 22% rate for whites after their first year. Similarly, failure rates for black students declined dramatically at UCSD immediately after the implementation of Proposition 209.
This is the nut of the article, IMHO. The stuff about Sandra Day O'Connor is ultimately irrelevant because we can't change the past and get Reagan to nominate Thomas Sowell to SCOTUS instead of her.The other salient point is that the true place to attack poor scholastic performance by blacks is to engage black families with their children's schools, and to work now to prevent the problem from continuing to exist in 2027 - by refusing to accept excuses and low expectations for the young black children of today. IMHO that means private school vouchers and even possibly subsidized homeschooling - just about anything that promised get the black parent who despised school as a youth to take ownership of their own children's education would be worth trying.
I forgot UTenn is a quarter system. The Patriots had a player that was able to go to UTenn's dental school because of the quarter semesters.
The last Michigan decision saying that it's okay to discriminate in grad school, but not in undergrad is a bit bizarre. One would think that if someone could make it through as an undergrad, that record of schooling would determine the appropriateness of further study.
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