Rep. Garnet Coleman, a black Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives, defends Texas’s top 10% admissions plan.
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Rep. Garnet Coleman, a black Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives, defends Texas’s top 10% admissions plan.
While I would (might?) argue that the Michigan plan is legal, the Texas plan is superior both politically and educationally. Other than that it has nothing going for it.
I don’t remember seeing it in the column — did Coleman say/show that those 10% from every school were ready for college? It would be pretty bad to find out alot of kids from crappy educational backgrounds, who did the best with what they got, then went to UT-Austin and flunked out in the first year.
People keep acting like all that matters is getting into the “right” college. If these kids couldn’t get into college without this program, then I would wonder if they’ll actually end up getting a degree.
There was a long article about this in the Washington Post. Many kids in the good suburban high schools around Houston and Dallas are getting screwed by the 10% rule. They can have a higher SAT score than anybody from an inner city school and still not get in. Or if they are admitted, they are admitted to the college of education but not to the business school or engineering department.
I imagine that the situation is worse in California with the 4% rule.
One of the problems with the program, though, is that not all schools are created equal. A top 10% student in a rural school in the Valley might be incapable of making the top 20% at a magnet school in one of the major urban centers. Their success is due less to ability than it is to the depth of the pool. Top 10% removes the objective measurement of skill provided by standardized testing and replaces it with the seemingly objective (but not quite) meassure of class rank.
Pesronally, at a minimum I’d make it top 5% gaining automatic admission to the state’s top-flight schools in Austin, College Station, and Lubbock, and top 10% elsewhere. Even better would be to make it top 5 % in all schools, and set aside 10-15% for students who have demonstrated their having overcome some major personal struggle in a manner that shows their readiness for college.
I wonder what they do about schools like my daughter’s. She’s in a magnet program that’s a school-within-a-school: there’s the honors program for kids who live anywhere in the city and qualify to transfer in, and the standard program for the kids who live in the zone. Since the honors program attracts the very brightest kids in the city, (my daughter who is not a genius but is no dummy either is ranked 117th in her class), the standard-program kids wouldn’t stand a chance; whereas at some schools in the city the valedictorians have to struggle to pass their exit exams.