Update III (4/10): Same problems in Britian. Fatherlessness and family instability. It’s out of control. But with no “legacy of slavery” or former government-mandated segregation to blame, they should focus on the key to fixing this mess, which isn’t more government programs. Need a hint? Parents, parents, parents!
Update II: John Fund writes about former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whose vote upheld the University of Michigan law school’s illegal race preference admissions policy in Grutter v. Bollinger. Hopefully, the current Supreme Court will interpret the Equal Protection Clause properly.
Fund also mentions UCLA’s new holistic review admissions policy. (Hat tip: Discriminations)
In other news…another government school creates a separate program for black boys (free reg. req.) to compensate for cultural factors like fatherlessness and family instability in an effort to close the academic achievement gap. An excerpt:
Some black scholars said that achievement-gap programs must be tailored to the needs of black male students if the programs are to succeed. Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said that many black boys grow up with few male role models and in high-crime neighborhoods, where being smart in school is not considered cool. “You can’t just ignore the needs of a group and say all children are the same,†he said.
That may be true, considering the program has produced positive results for some of the boys, but you can’t get around the fact that taxpayer-supported race-based [more precisely, racially exclusive] programs are illegal. This is why people need to focus on fundamentals like building solid, intact families and strong communities, and placing a premium on education in those families and communities rather than relying on government to take up the cultural slack.
Good luck with all that. 
Update (11:47 a.m.): A reader e-mailed to let me know that Danny Westneat, who covers this issue for The Seattle Times, will host an hour-long online chat starting at noon today. Last week in this post, I linked to Westneat’s column on Seattle’s latest mess. Yesterday, he wrote about the response to that column.
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Seattle Public Schools
A lot of school districts in this country are obsessed with “diversity” and arbitrary racial balance. But Seattle Public Schools stands out (in my mind) for its rhetorical missteps. Last year, a woman named Caprice Hollins, head of the school system’s Office of Equity and Race Relations, posted this Marxist drivel on the web site. After much ridicule and outrage (and giving libertarians another reason to push free market education), she removed the statement.
Read more in my latest column, Seattle’s Guilt-Tripping Battles.
More “Holistic” Hokum
According to the Los Angeles Times (free reg. req.), UCLA’s new “holistic review” process is reaping more black and brown faces. Amazingly, UCLA has admitted more blacks and hispanics for the coming fall semester than it did last fall, thanks to a holistic admissions process. More here.
In “compliance” with a state law barring preferential treatment by the government based on race, UCLA took into account students’ “classroom performance, motivation to seek challenges and the rigor of a student’s curriculum within the context of high school opportunities. Academic achievement still will be given the greatest weight. But added emphasis will be placed on the school context and the resources available to the student.” (Source)
So, by holistically reviewing all applicants, the admissions committee managed to find more qualified blacks and hispanics and fewer qualified whites and Asians in just a year’s time? It seems that blacks and hispanics with scores and grades comparable to whites and Asians suddenly applied to UCLA when they learned about the new holistic review process. Wow! What are the chances of that? Ward Connerly expressed similar amazement:
“One of three things must be happening,” Connerly said Thursday. “Black kids have either gotten extremely smart or extremely competitive in a way they weren’t five or six years ago, or there’s been a deliberate, carefully orchestrated effort by a lot of admissions people to conspire to increase those numbers, or they’ve found a proxy for race.”
Yes, I’m being sarcastic. As I said before, holistic review is nothing more than race preferences in disguise, an ill-fitting one at that. If applicants of all races were judged equally under the new policy, statistically speaking, many more whites and Asians would have been admitted, not “a marginally higher percentage” of whites and a decrease of Asians (according to the article). I explain such assertions in this post.
Only black and other “minority” applicants are judged by the high-sounding but lowered-bar process, which, despite the policy’s clever language, is illegal. Proposition 209 bars schools like UCLA from treating students differently based on race, and that’s exactly what the system is doing. Someone will challenge this holistic junk, I’m sure, and it won’t stand.
Affirmative Action Debate
I believe race preferences cannot be rationally defended, and even someone as dumb as a box of hammers could easily win a debate arguing why preferences are illegal and immoral. The team that won this debate were no dummies. An “all-white” anti-race preferences team debated and won over an “all-black” pro-race preferences team at Boston University.
Why the teams were divided by race is a mystery. Was it intentional? Could they not find black anti-race preferences folks? I think the debate would have been much more interesting if the sides were reversed: the black team arguing against and the white team arguing for. The refreshing change would have generated a lot more discussion. More here.
Creating Equal
Ward Connerly invited me to an event he’s hosting in California this summer. The invitation is quite an honor. By the time I knew who Connerly was, I was a conservative. Had I been a liberal, the requisite “Uncle Tom” ad hominem may have crossed my lips.
Connerly seems to detest race-based preferential treatment as much as I do, probably more. He was raised in poverty during Jim Crow, so he’s no pampered affirmative action charge. He was abandoned by his father, and his mother died when he was four. Connerly was raised by his grandmother, and they spent a year and a half on welfare. An excerpt from my 2003 review of his book, Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences:
One day, Connerly had enough of the caseworker’s probing, personal questions. “As I listened to the bureaucratic drone and saw the submissive look on Mom’s [his grandmother] face, I suddenly stood up and announced that I would not accept another check.†The young teenager stormed out of the house and went directly to a prominent man in the community to ask for work. The next day, Connerly had a job. He’s been working tirelessly ever since.
Connerly learned the value of personal responsibility from his uncle James, with whom he’d lived for a brief period of his childhood. James taught him what it was to be a man. “The only thing James wanted was for this world to respect him and regard him as a man, a word he pronounced with his down home accent as mane,†he writes. Being a man meant taking care of your family and not accepting handouts. Honest work — no matter how menial — meant empowerment and independence.
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