Im-Politic: A Viable Alternative to Affirmative Action?

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affirmative action, African Americans, college, college admissions, Defense Department, education, higher education, Im-Politic, integration, Latinos, math, minorities, NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress, reading, schools, segregation, Supreme Court

One of the most compelling arguments for ending racial preferences in college admissions – a demand that the Supreme Court will address in two high-profile cases – also seems to be one of the most depressing. As some opponents of such affirmative action programs contend (according to what I’ve heard on some cable talk shows), anyone truly interested in helping students from disadvantaged communities climb the education and therefore career success ladders would focus on improving the grade and high schools that are supposed to be preparing them for college, rather than on awarding higher education opportunities to those who don’t qualify according to race-blind criteria.

It’s depressing because for so long Americans have seemed unable to “fix the schools.” So ending or at least thoroughly weakening affirmative action in higher education, even if Constitutionally prohibited, looks like a recipe for perpetuating racial and ethnic achievement gaps.

Except that some impressive evidence has just emerged showing that primary and secondary schools have succeeded in bringing African American and Latino student test scores closer to white test scores. It comes from the latest edition of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Performance (NAEP – “the nation’s report card”).

The NAEP is incredibly data-rich, but one set of findings I regard as especially revealing were those presenting the shares of different racial and ethnic groups performing at or above the level viewed as “proficient” by NAEP. (Here’s a starting point for this section of the report card.) The results go back to 1990 for math and 1992 for reading, and through 2019 for both. Therefore, they show both trends over time and changes achieved in the roughly three decades before the pandemic and related school closings struck – and set back everyone. I chose proficiency as a standard versus “NAEP Basic” because it figures that the proficient students are those likeliest to attend or want to attend college.

It would have been great to describe not only the scores for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math, but for high school seniors. Unfortunately, those data only cover the short 2015-2019 period.

Here’s how the shares of white, African American, and Latino fourth graders who have been math-proficient has changed from 1990-2019:

White: 16 percent-52 percent

African American: 1 percent-20 percent

Latino: 5 percent-28 percent

 

Here are the same type of math figures for eighth graders:

White: 18 percent-44 percent

African American: 5 percent-14 percent

Latino: 7 percent-20 percent

 

And now the results for reading proficiency among fourth graders from 1992-2019:

White: 35 percent-45 percent

African American: 8 percent-18 percent

Latino: 12 percent-23 percent

 

And for eighth graders:

White: 35 percent-42 percent

African American: 9 percent-15 percent

Latino: 13 percent-22 percent

It’s clear that in every single case above, African American and Latino scores significantly lag white scores both at the beginning of the time periods examined and at the end. But it’s also clear that in evey single case above, the scores for both minority groups improved at a faster rate than those for white students.

Yes, there’s a baseline effect at work everywhere – that is, when the figure for a comparison year is very low, it’s going to be much easier to generate bigger percentage changes than for a comparison year that’s much higher. But in this instance, what seems most important to me is that bigger is indeed bigger, and undeniably encouraging.

The remaining racial and ethnic gaps remain disturbing, but two other recent findings indicate that faster progress is anything but a pipe dream. First, the U.S. Defense Department runs its own very big school system. In fact, the NAEP compares it to a U.S. state. And even though many of its students come from disadvantaged backgrounds, they’ve been outperforming their “civilian” counterparts for many years in reading and math at both the fourth grade and eighth grade levels. (Twelfth grade data aren’t available for this group.) So maybe the military has long known something about education that it could teach the rest of us?

Or maybe these schools function well because they place disadvantaged kids out of neighborhoods whose many and varied troubles create terrible learning environments? As it happens, there’s some strong evidence for that proposition, too. In other words, as a Washington Post education columnist has put it, the best way to help low-income (including of course minority) students isn’t to try making their local schools better, but to move them into better schools.

Of course, that kind of policy shift would open up a whole can of related “white flight”and “school busing” and housing-segregation worms that have sparked numerous racial conflicts in recent decades – even in liberal cities like New York and Boston. But that only reenforces a conclusion about American attitudes toward making sure that none of our country-men and women are left behind: Too often, failure or inadequate progress stems not from lack of resources or of knowledge, but of will.

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Im-Politic: More Reasons to Think Americans Aren’t So Divided

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abortion, affirmative action, college admissions, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, education, gender, higher education, Im-Politic, LGBTQ, minorities, polarization, politics, polls, public schools, race relations, social issues, Supreme Court

RealityChek regulars know that a theme to which I keep returning centers on intriguing evidence that Americans’ views on supposedly polarizing social issues aren’t nearly as polarized as the positions taken by activists on all sides.  Indeed, the public’s views are a triumph of both common sense and a spirit of compromise that’s continually overlooked by the political class across the spectrum. (See, e.g., here on the overall national mood, and here on abortion – a subject of special interest lately given the Supreme Court’s June decision to reject the idea of a Constitutional right to privacy and therefore to abortion.)

So I’m pleased to report new findings of equally surprising and encouraging consensus on two other supposedly divisive wedge issues.

The first is affirmative action in higher education admissions, whose future (for the time being) will be decided by the Supreme Court beginning later this month, when cases challenging such racial preferences will be heard.

If the public opinion has anything to do with the final outcome, however, these programs will clearly be toast – at least according to research summarized in this Wall Street Journal column. As noted by the author, retired University of California, Santa Cruz literature professor John Ellis,

“A 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that 74% of Americans oppose the use of race in college admissions. Even more surprising, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 59% of blacks also opposed it. The same applied to both political parties, with 87% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats objecting.”

Most stunningly, even the African Americans who are the main intended beneficiaries of race-influenced admissions policies now strongly oppose the practice – along with three-fourths of the entire country.

Further, Ellis cites referendum results showing that uber-liberal California is off the affirmative action boat, too.

The second set of findings concerns the emotionally fraught matter of whether subjects like gender identity, sexual orientation, gay rights, and trans rights should be taught to pre-college students, and whether such materials on these “LGBTQ” topics belong in these students’ assigned reading.

A national survey from the University of Southern California (brought to my attention in this Washington Post article) makes clear that Americans are strongly opposed to these subjects in elementary school education, but much more open to bringing them into high school classes.

Specifically, the share of respondents agreeing that primary school students should learn about these subjects was only between 28 and 30 percent. But roughly twice as many Americans were fine with including LGBTQ subjects in high school curricula.

Somewhat oddly (at least to me) support for assigning LGBTQ-themed books was a good deal lower for both grade school students (18 percent) and for high school students (38 percent).

All the same, though, a strong consensus view – and one that should make intuitive sense as a starting point for making policy – shines through: Little kids just aren’t ready to be exposed to new challenges to longstanding ideas about gender identity and such. High school students? Much more so.

Of course, as we learned earlier this year with the Supreme Court’s latest abortion ruling, the fact that the public has figured out pragmatic ways to view complex social issues (simply put, supporting a broad right to an abortion early-ish during pregnancies and increasing restrictions as the pregnancy proceeds) is no guarantee that American leaders will be able, or want to, agree.

But as I pointed out in the above-linked abortion post, a powerful lesson taught by U.S. history has been that the Supreme Court “is most successful when it pays attention to public opinion, and runs into its greatest troubles when it gets too far ahead of or too far behind these attitudes.” The same surely applies to elected politicians and activists. Let’s just hope that all of them can get with the common sense approaches favored by Americans before further inflammatory actions really do produce dangerous and lasting national divides.

Im-Politic: On a Parkland Applicant, Harvard Flunks the Character Test

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adolescents, character, college admissions, colleges, Earl Warren, Florida, forgiveness, gun violence, Harvard University, higher education, Hugo Black, Im-Politic, Japanese internment, Ku Kux Klan, Kyle Kashuv, Parkland, racism, school shootings, Supreme Court, universities, World War II

The more I read and think about Harvard University’s decision to rescind admission to Kyle Kashuv because this survivor of the Parkland, Florida high school mass shooting last year made a variety of racist and other offensive and bigoted remarks in a digital document two years ago, when he was all of sixteen years old, the more outraged I get. And the more convinced I become that Harvard pounced upon an excuse to respond to pressure to punish Kashuv for refusal to jump aboard the gun control bandwagon.

Let’s get one aspect of this incident clear right away. Kashuv’s remarks were genuinely appalling. But for any fair-minded observer, the mitigating factors are overwhelming. He was in mid-adolescence – when even good kids often get tempted to do and say lots of stupid and even cruel things. His remarks were so loopy that they even included anti-semitic slurs – even though Kashuv is Jewish. They were made in private digital communications to a handful of apparently equally stupid friends and other schoolmates – i.e. no one has ever accused him of voicing such sentiments in public, an act that would create actual victims. He has admitted responsibility and apologized profusely. Further, nothing known about him so far – and clearly, folks have been looking, since he was outed by a fellow Marjory Stoneham Douglas student who apparently opposed his views on guns – indicates that these remarks ever reflected his actual views, much less do so now.

In fact, overall, Kashuv’s behavior has been far more honorable than Harvard’s handling of his character issues. To its credit, the university first responded to “media reports discussing offensive statements allegedly authored” by Kashuv by noting the morals clause that’s one of its admissions considerations and asking for “a full accounting” so that the matter could be “considered.” (The best source for these and the following Kashuv and Harvard statements is Kashuv’s Twitter feed:  @KyleKashuv.   

But Harvard’s professed open-mindedness was actually a sham, as is clear from its June 3 letter to Kishuv following his apology and explanation, and rejecting his appeal. The admissions dean William R. Fitzsimmons told Kashuv that he and his colleagues “appreciated [his] candor and…expressions of regret” and “discussed [them] at length.” And they bounced him anyway.

It’s disturbing enough that Harvard refused to accept a lengthy apology for a 16-year old’s misdeeds, an equally lengthy promise to learn and grow, and evidence of actually acting on this promise (in the form of reaching out to the university’s diversity office for guidance and counseling). At least as disturbing is seeing this inflexibility at an educational institution – which presumably is in the business of human improvement and focuses on teenagers, who surely represent many of the most improvable individuals on the planet.

As Kashuv himself has wisely noted, Harvard’s actions also raise broad moral questions about whether “we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistake brand you as irredeemable.” I’d add that the odds of making offensive comments in particular have risen dramatically in recent years, since the amped up coarsening of culture and society is bound to trickle (and even flood) down to the young. Moreover, given how unpopular his guns views tend to be in the left-leaning political cultures on so many college campuses, and especially at so-called elite institutions like Harvard, the school’s treatment of Kashuv reeks of a politicized admissions process.

At the same time, the potential practical consequences of such gun jumping (no pun intended) should be sobering. I’m thinking in particular of Hugo Black. This mid-twentieth century Supreme Court Justice belonged to the Ku Kux Klan as a young adult. He was never especially apologetic, either. But on the High Court, he became one of its staunchest proponents of racial integration and a singular champion of free speech and other individual liberties – for Americans regardless of color.

And don’t forget Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Court during much of Black’s tenure. As Attorney General and Governor of California during World War II, he was instrumental in carrying out the federal policy of indiscriminately throwing Japanese-Americans into internment camps solely because of their race or ethnicity. Not until his memoirs were published posthumously is there any public record of regret for these actions. Yet as Chief Justice, he became an even more powerful force than Black for racial justice and civil liberties.

The main – and screamingly obvious lessons – it seems to me are:

First, people can evolve even as adults, much less from their childhood and adolescent selves.

Second, the case for affording the benefit of the doubt, especially when the offender is young, and forgiveness is sought, is impressive.

And third, to understand these truths, you sure don’t need a Harvard education.