Free Republic

A Macomb County public school superintendent says the teachers union contract for her district has a provision that would cost the school all the concessions it negotiated if language believed to be against the law is removed. Two years ago, before Deb Wahlstrom took over as superintendent of Mount Clemens Community Schools, she said she was aware of issues in the union contract. Specifically, the union contract includes provisions that the board would not authorize any public school academies (charter public schools) and would implement an affirmative action program in the recruitment, hiring and retention of "multi-ethnic teachers." The full...

The stunning arrest of veteran Democrat Leland Yee will erode, at least temporarily, Democratic dominance in the very blue Golden State. Yee, arrested after a five-year FBI sting operation, faces federal charges related to conspiracy to traffic in firearms without a license and accepting campaign funds in exchange for political favors. An LA Times headline read, “Even old hands are stunned by Yee allegations.” “If there ever has been a more nauseating corruption scandal in Sacramento, I’m not aware of it, writes one observer. “The notion of a legislator masquerading as a gun control crusader while offering to help a...

July 12, 2002 Barriers Students Faced Count In University Admission Process By DANIEL GOLDEN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL IRVINE, Calif. -- Stanley Park felt as if the University of California, Los Angeles, had revamped its admissions criteria just for him. UCLA was looking for students who had overcome "life challenges," such as family illness, being raised by a single parent or being the first in the family to go to college. After Mr. Park's parents, Korean immigrants of modest means, divorced three years ago, he lived with his mother. When she developed breast cancer, he began tutoring...

Some Asians' College Strategy: Don't Check 'Asian' JESSE WASHINGTON Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white. "I didn't want to put 'Asian' down," Olmstead says, "because my mom told me there's discrimination against Asians in the application process." For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it's harder for them to gain admission to the nation's top colleges. Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these...

Asian Americans Turn Democratic Their support for President Obama on Nov. 6 caught many political pundits by surprise. By Taeku Lee and Karthick Ramakrishnan November 23, 2012 As the dust settles on the presidential election, there seems to be a new theory daily as to why Mitt Romney lost and what it signals for the future of the Republican Party. Common to nearly all the speculation are the partisan implications of demographic change. The United States is shifting gradually toward a majority-minority electorate, with ever-growing numbers of Latino and Asian American voters. Notably, these groups are increasingly voting as Democrats....

DAVIS SIGNS ASSAULT ON PROPOSITION 209; PLF POISED TO POUNCE Proposition 209 is the voter-passed amendment to the California Constitution which forbids state and local governments from playing favorites by race in public hiring, contracting and education. The latest in a long line of assaults on Prop. 209 by proponents of racial spoils is Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally's bill that would play inventive word games with key mandates in the initiative. The Dymally legislation, A.B. 703, would require that the words "discriminate" and "preference" be interpreted not by the clear definitions that the California Supreme Court has used when applying Prop....

An historic ballot proposition passed by California voters in 1996 to end race-based admissions to the University of California may have led to more blacks being admitted to UC. “At present, by a wide range of metrics—including relative to state population share and changes in toal UC enrollment—black and Hispanic enrollments are higher than before Proposition 209,” Stuart Taylor, Jr. and Richard Sander write in an amicus brief they filed in a U. S. Supreme Court case. “UC black enrollment had returned to pre-209 levels by 2002 and averaged some 40% above pre-209 levels by 2007.” They filed a brief...

Stunned by an unexpected uprising within their party's minority base, Democratic lawmakers on Monday dropped a push to reverse California's 16-year-old ban on affirmative action in college admissions.

The backlash by Chinese-American activists against a measure aimed at restoring affirmative action in the admissions process at California's public universities has set off political fisticuffs between ethnic groups accustomed to battling side-by-side.

DETROIT, MI -- Wayne County Circuit Judge Wade H. McCree is barred from presiding over a courtroom until January of 2021. The Michigan Supreme Court enacted a recommendation that the judge, suspended without pay since Feb. 3, 2013, be suspended from holding a judgeship for six years from Jan. 1,2015, should he be re-elected in this year's election. The 57-year-old must also pay $11,645.17 in costs, according to the Supreme Court opinion issued Wednesday.

The rise of Asian-Americans and their dominance in academia may be exemplified by the extraordinary performance of Asian-American students in New York City. How A Chinese Solar Giant Was Snared In An Italian Fraud Scandal According to recent media reports, Asian-American students account for almost three-fourths of the enrollment at Stuyvesant High School, one of the city's eight specialized, elite public schools that strictly use test scores for admission. Asians represent less than 14 percent of the city's entire public school student body, meaning they are disproportionately represented at Stuyvesant by a magnitude of about five. (In 1970, Asians accounted...

Secret Service agents on Obama detail sent home from Netherlands after night of drinking Three Secret Service agents responsible for protecting President Obama in Amsterdam this week were sent home and put on administrative leave Sunday after going out for a night of drinking, according to three people familiar with the incident. One of the agents was found drunk and passed out in a hotel hallway, the people said. The hotel staff alerted the U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands after finding the unconscious agent Sunday morning, a day before Obama arrived in the country, according to two of the people....

Until this month, supporters of racial preferences in California have enjoyed a cozy narrative. They were able to dismiss the 55 percent of voters who passed Proposition 209, which barred race and gender preferences in university admissions, hiring and public contracts in 1996, as over-entitled fear-obsessed white folks with little understanding of and sympathy for the obstacles that daunt minority students. That ended Monday when California state Sen. Ed Hernandez was forced to put a hold on a measure to allow voters in November to restore racial preferences in public education. It was a huge about-face. His Senate Constitutional...

Two recent events, one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast, demonstrate that after half a century, support for racial preferences in college admissions is getting more and more unsustainable — both politically and intellectually. In California, liberals have long deplored the 1996 passage of Proposition 209, which banned racial preferences at state universities. Its backers pointed out that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is often cited as the authority for mandating preferential treatment for racial minorities, actually forbids all racial discrimination. “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Supreme Court chief...

Bowing to pressure from within their party, Democrats in the Legislature on Monday abandoned an attempt to repeal California’s voter-approved ban on affirmative action in the state’s higher education system. Assembly Speaker John Perez said he does not have enough support to place the constitutional amendment before voters in November. Instead, he said lawmakers will form a task force to study the issue of access in higher education. California voters passed Proposition 209 in 1996, banning the use of race and ethnicity in public university admissions, state hiring and contracting. The amendment, SCA5, was initiated to address the drop-off in...

SACRAMENTO -- A legislative push to permit California's public universities to once again consider race and ethnicity in admissions appears to be on life support after an intense backlash from Asian-American parents who fear it will make it harder for their children to get into good schools. :snip: A planned referendum sailed through the state Senate in January without fanfare on a party-line vote, but three Asian-American Democrats who initially backed the measure are now calling for it to be "tabled" before the state Assembly has a chance to vote on it -- a highly unusual move. And it seems...

Our “All In” campaign is focused on increasing the enrollment of African American, Latino, and Native American students in AP® courses. We know that you, too, are committed to equality and helping all students achieve at a higher level. This is a tremendous opportunity for you to help by joining the College Board’s All In campaign. By registering below, you pledge to review the master schedule at your school or in your district to ensure that 100 percent of African American, Latino, and Native American students with AP Potential™ are enrolled in courses in the 2014-15 school year.

President Obama will announce a $200 million commitment from nine foundations Thursday afternoon to bolster the lives of young men and boys of color. The funding is part of a larger initiative from the White House to bring private businesses, non-profits and local governments together to intervene in key moments in the lives of young black and Hispanic men to ensure they stay in school and eventually train for and get good jobs. As Yahoo News first reported, the cause will be a major focus of Obama’s—and the first lady’s—even after he leaves office. "I think it’s something that's deeply...

Diversity has become corporatized on American campuses, with scores of bureaucrats and administrators accentuating different pedigrees and ancestries. That's odd, because diversity does not mean any more "variety" or "points of difference," at least as it used to be defined. Instead, diversity has become an industry synonymous with orthodoxy and intolerance, especially in its homogeneity of political thought. When campuses sloganeer "celebrate diversity," that does not mean encouraging all sorts of political views. If it did, faculties and student groups would better reflect U.S. political realities and might fall roughly into two equal groups: liberal and conservative. Do colleges routinely...

‘Compassionate action’ could usher in a genuinely fair societyAs a child growing up in Detroit and Boston, I had many opportunities to experience the ugly face of racism and witnessed the devastating toll exacted by its mean-spirited nature. I was a victim of the racism of low expectations for black children, but in retrospect, I can see that many of those attitudes were based on ignorance. Large numbers of white people actually believed that blacks were intellectually inferior, and there were a host of other inaccurate beliefs that whites held about blacks and that blacks held about whites. It is...