Today the Washington Post has one of its rare OpEds opposing affirmative action. It’s worth taking a look.
Reuben Navarrette, the author, is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News. In fact, his WPost OpEd first appeared there on April 4. His argument? Preferences exploit minorities.
Supporters of affirmative action love to talk about the benefit of colleges and universities having diverse student bodies. They insist that diversity offers a real-world experience to students who step onto the campus having had limited exposure to other races, ethnicities and cultures. And they may be right.
Yet they never acknowledge the costs. While boasting about how racial preferences enhance the education of white students, they never stop to consider that this enhancement comes at the expense of the education of blacks and Latinos. How could they? That would mean accepting the possibility that a program created nearly 40 years ago to help minorities may now be harming them. It would also mean that by keeping it going, these supporters are accomplices in a brand of exploitation not altogether different from what was going on in our society before programs like affirmative action were created. Not long ago, exclusionary admissions policies that kept blacks and Latinos out of college put minority students at a disadvantage for the benefit of whites.
Preferences, Navarrette asserts, lure ill-prepared minorities to institutions where they are likely to perform poorly and fail to finish. Navarrette, who is Hispanic, believes the real villains are the public school system, and the liberals who defend it.
That would be the same public school system in which only about half of black and Latino ninth-graders ever graduate from high school. And the same system that liberals support and defend by fighting against merit pay for teachers, vouchers for students and just about any other attempt to impose accountability….
Those most intent on preserving the educational status quo have a personal interest in also preserving racial preferences. To the degree that there are failures and shortcomings in K-12 public education, racial preferences at the college level help to conceal them.
Navarrette’s argument is not unusual, but it is unusual to see it in the Post.
“Unusual”? Try “astonishing”. And it’s the exact same argument I’ve been making all along – AA at the college level allows the K-12 level to remain inadequate. It allows lowered educational standards for minorities to remain in place. The removal of AA would make the flaws of the K-12 public system much more evident.
Kimberly Swygert has indeed been nailing this issue for a good while, and I strongly encourage readers to add her Number 2 Pencil to your must-visit list. See especially this recent post there.
Not quire astonishing. But admirable.
That should be “quite,” above.
I should hope that it would be readily apparent that Affirmative Action – even if it were completely effective, which is certainly a dubious claim – is curing a symptom, and not the problem. The problem is, quite simply, that most students who fall behind (regardless of race), fall behind possibly even before Kindergarten. Isn’t that the point of programs like Head Start?