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Jewish World Review April 14, 2005 / 5 Nisan , 5765 Forget preferences — educate By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Latino and African American professionals can get pretty worked up defending affirmative action. I know this firsthand. Whenever I mention to a group of them that I oppose racial preferences in college and university admissions, I get a tongue-lashing.
Not that I buy the argument that giving minority students a boost in admissions amounts to reverse discrimination against whites, especially white males. I don't. But I am convinced that preferences hurt intended beneficiaries by lowering academic standards and masking deficiencies in the education given to Latinos and African-Americans at the K-12 level.
I usually have trouble selling that line of reasoning to well-educated and well-off affirmative action beneficiaries, many of whom are so loyal to the program and so grateful for all it has done for them personally that they defend it with everything they've got because they're convinced they wouldn't have gotten anywhere without it.
But defending affirmative action is the wrong fight. Latino and African Americans should worry less about the admissions policies of college X or university Y and more about the everyday practices at elementary and secondary schools in this country. What should concern them is that so many public schools fail so dismally at educating minority students that relatively few will ever be in a position to benefit from affirmative action in the first place.
Just look at the depressing situation in California where, a recent Harvard study concluded, many of the schools that service primarily black and Latino students have become little more than "dropout factories." Some of those schools are in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where just 39 percent of Latinos and 47 percent of African Americans graduated with their class in 2002. That is compared to 67 percent of whites and 77 percent of Asians. Statewide, according to the report, just 57 percent of African Americans and 60 percent of Latinos graduated on time, compared with 78 percent of whites and 84 percent of Asians.
This is everyone's problem. With demographics changing rapidly and the student bodies of our nation's grade schools and high schools becoming more nonwhite, we can't continue to undereducate the very people who, a decade or two from now, will make up the majority of our workforce, tax base and leadership class. The whole country would suffer.
So what are we to do? Well, for starters, we have to expect more from our students and demand more from our schools.
Teachers insist that they already demand a lot from students, and, many of them claim, to expect more from them would take the fun out of learning and frustrate those for whom schoolwork is difficult. Those are the arguments that a group of teachers used recently in San Diego to pressure school board trustees to trim back literacy goals for kindergarten students to what they were three years ago.
Elsewhere around the country, school districts continue to complain about the increased accountability demanded by the No Child Left Behind law. It is in response to those complaints that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently announced that states would have more flexibility in meeting the law's requirements if they could show that they are raising student achievement.
That was precisely the wrong thing to do. Spellings should hold the line and demand that states follow the law as written. Besides, if it is up to the states to show how well students are achieving, there will always be questions about the accuracy of their figures. States always have the incentive to inflate the statistics if doing so helps them achieve more flexibility under the federal law. How are we supposed to know how well students are doing, as opposed to how states want us to think they're doing?
We have this all backward. It is astounding and troubling that at the very moment when society demands more from those who come through our educational system, the trend among educators and public officials alike seems to be to demand less from students. And the way public education works, the less you ask for, the less you get.
Now that's an argument that should resonate with Latinos and African Americans. Who knows? It might even convince them that the time has come to shift their concern away from defending affirmative action and toward fighting a battle that's really worth fighting — one to improve the entire educational system.
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Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
