Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Getting Beyond Race (John Fund on Affirmative Action, Sandra Day O'Connor)
The Wall Street Journal ^ | 9 April 2007 | John Fund

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 ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: aa; affirmativeaction; discrimination; education; oconnor; racism; schoolchoice
This is an excellent column on why Affirmative Action is not only wrong and unconstitutional, but ineffective as well. This column made me wonder what exactly made Sandra Day O'Connor qualified for the Supreme Court bench in the first place.

Our broken education system is right up there with illegal immigration as the greatest domestic problem facing our nation today. In the long run, I think it's even more important than illegal immigration. The conclusion of John Fund's column:

Indeed, many obstacles that have nothing to do with a need for more resources stand in the way of improving the educational performance of minorities. Those include burdensome teacher-certification programs, a failure to involve parents more in the education of their children, rules that hamper school principals, weak-kneed politicians and powerful teacher unions wedded to the status quo.

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.

1 posted on 04/09/2007 7:09:33 AM PDT by The Pack Knight
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: The Pack Knight

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...


2 posted on 04/09/2007 7:22:11 AM PDT by Redbob
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Redbob

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.


3 posted on 04/09/2007 7:24:55 AM PDT by Redbob
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: Redbob
The only flaw in your argument is that Tennessee State, Tennessee Tech, and UT Knoxville are all on the semester system.

Affirmative action is about universities feeling virtuous, not about actually helping members of groups that are suffering the effects of past discrimination.

4 posted on 04/09/2007 8:29:47 AM PDT by Verginius Rufus
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: The Pack Knight; All

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.


5 posted on 04/09/2007 11:46:46 AM PDT by Wuli
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Wuli
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.

I also believe that if there's any one issue that will break the Democrats' monopoly on the black vote, it'll be school choice. Sooner or later black voters, particularly in the inner city, are going to wonder why Democrat politicians want to keep their kids in failing government schools while they send their own to private school. Then maybe they'll wake up and realize that it's been largely Democrat-supported institutions such as government education and the welfare state that has been keeping them from prospering as a group, not allegedly "racist" Republicans who would rather leave them free to use their God-given talents to succeed, just as the ancestors of whites were.

Only a true racist would believe that an entire ethnic group simply cannot succeed without government intervention, no matter their history.
6 posted on 04/09/2007 12:00:56 PM PDT by The Pack Knight (Duty, Honor, Country. Gingrich/Bolton '08 (for now,,,))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: The Pack Knight

“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.


7 posted on 04/09/2007 12:17:58 PM PDT by Wuli
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: The Pack Knight
Affirmative action often creates the illusion that black or other minority students cannot excel. At the University of California at San Diego, in the year before race-based preferences were abolished in 1997, only one black student had a freshman-year GPA of 3.5 or better . . .

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.


8 posted on 04/09/2007 12:35:32 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters except PR.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Wuli
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...

That's true, though Progressive Era progressives did have quite a bit in common with modern "progressives". They are the ones who gave us the 16th (Income Tax), 17th (Direct election of Senators), 18th (Prohibition), and 19th (enfranchisement of women) Amendments, at least three of which went a very long way towards creating the federal welfare state we have today. This would have pleased Marx as a strong step towards Communist revolution in the United States. Luckily we've always had crotchety old conservatives to put the breaks on this movement. Oh, and by the way, I'm not touching the 19th Amendment.
9 posted on 04/10/2007 7:46:15 AM PDT by The Pack Knight (Duty, Honor, Country. Gingrich/Bolton '08 (for now,,,))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: Redbob
University of Tennessee, or Tennessee Tech, and he’ll be out on his ear in 3 quarters, max.

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.

10 posted on 04/10/2007 2:27:31 PM PDT by Calvin Locke
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: The Pack Knight
The b-school lesson in quality control is to catch "errors" early in the process before you have to fix or throw them out down stream.

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.

11 posted on 04/10/2007 2:34:43 PM PDT by Calvin Locke
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson