Merit, Contested. Critics continue to challenge achievement-based admissions at elite schools like New York’s Stuyvesant High School.

In the struggle to achieve racial equality are two closely related controversies about “equal treatment” and “merit.” Does equal treatment mean treating individuals without regard to race, as critics of affirmative action assert, or with regard to race, as demanded by advocates of race-based diversity? And what is merit, and how should it be rewarded?

Developments in California over the past several months brought both those issues boiling to the surface. On May 5, black and Hispanic Democratic legislators introduced Assembly Constitutional Amendment 5, the latest attempt to repeal Proposition 209, which added a provision to the state constitution prohibiting state agencies from “discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Prop. 209 was approved by 55 percent of California voters in a 1996 referendum.

On May 21, the Board of Regents of the University of California voted unanimously to drop the requirement of the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the American College Test for freshman admissions. “Putting racial politics above merit,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized, “diversity bean-counting has displaced the philosophy of merit and excellence that made the UC the envy of the world.”

ACA-5 passed the California Assembly on June 10 and the Senate on June 24 on party line votes, and will appear as Proposition 16 on the November 3 ballot in California. If passed, treating some individuals better and some worse because of their race, ethnicity, or sex would no longer be prohibited in California.

These attempts to rewrite civil rights law so that it permits rather than prohibits preferential treatment based on race—and to eliminate standardized tests as measures of merit—are not new

People will give what you expect of them.

Set the bar low and they have no reason to try harder.

Blacks in this country are condescended to in many ways and told that they are not able to compete on a level playing field.

It tells them they are inferior and have to have special, preferential treatment to compete with whites.

It’s very demeaning and degrading. It’s a very subtle message, but it’s there nonetheless.

The entire topic is tenuous and boring. I took the NYC specialized high school exam in the fall of 1991. There is nothing culturally biased about the exam. Either you know what they’re asking for or you don’t. If any of you ever took the SSAT for an independent school it’s a similar exam (or at least was at the time).

Working class Asians and South Asians pay to send their kids to test prep centers (not too unlike Kumon, Huntington, or Kaplan) to drill their kids on how to pass the tests and that easily explains the disproportionate number of Asians in the three specialized high schools (Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, and The Bronx HS of Science).

If any of these bureaucrats wanted to truly wanted to increase enrollment for Blacks and Hispanics they would subsidize these centers in their neighborhoods.

Recommend “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” (or any of his books) by Thomas Sowell.

“The impossible is not going to be achieved.

It is a waste of precious resources to try to achieve it.

The devastating costs and social dangers which go with these attempts to achieve the impossible should be taken into account.

......
Presumably, the vast ranges of undeserved inequalities found everywhere are the fault of “society” and so the redressing of those inequalities is called social justice, going beyond the traditional justice of presenting each individual with the same rules and standards. However, even those who argue this way often recognize that some undeserved inequalities may arise from cultural differences, family genes, or from historical confluences of events not controlled by anybody or by any given society at any given time. For example, there was no way that Pee Wee Reese was going to hit as many home runs as Mark McGwire, or Shirley Temple run as fast as Jesse Owens. There was no way that Scandinavians or Polynesians were going to know as much about camels as the Bedouins of the Sahara— and no way that these Bedouins were going to know as much about fishing as the Scandinavians or Polynesians.
In a sense, proponents of “social justice” are unduly modest. What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice.
This perspective on justice can be found in a wide range of activities and places, from the street-corner community activist to the august judicial chambers of the Supreme Court. For example, a former dean of admissions at Stanford University said that she had never required applicants to submit Achievement Test scores because “requiring such tests could unfairly penalize disadvantaged students in the college admissions process,” because such students, “through no fault of their own, often find themselves in high schools that provide inadequate preparation for the Achievement Tests.” Through no fault of their own— one of the recurrent phrases in this kind of argument— seems to imply that it is the fault of “society” but remedies are sought independently of any empirical evidence that it is.”

Just a simple suggestion: build another high school. Keep the A double plus kids in the A double plus school. For those kids who were not good enough for the A double plus school there would be the B double plus school. Twice as many kids would get to be educated in a special setting. And if a kid in the B plus school made all A grades, that kid could move up to the A plus school. Like wise a kid with lousy grades in A plus school would be moved down to B plus school. Charter schools which are tailored towards the abilities of the students.

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.