No, this is not the latest battle in the War of the Acronyms … or maybe it is.
In any event, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund has issued a report accusing the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights of investigating and discouraging “race conscious” measures that the LDF believes were “endorsed” by the Supreme Court in its two Michigan rulings.
According to the Chronicle,
In those rulings, the Supreme Court held that public colleges could give some consideration to applicants’ race or ethnicity for the sake of promoting diversity, as long as the colleges treated applicants as individuals.
Nevertheless, the article reports with no apparent irony that the NAACP LDF report is critical of OCR for, among other things, investigating colleges that operate “programs reserved for minority students.” Isn’t excluding students based on race alone pretty much the anithesis of treating applicants as individuals?
In addition, the report suggests that the NAACP LDF still believes colleges have an obligation to correct academic gaps and other disparities that exist in the general society:
The report also criticizes the office for focusing its energies on encouraging educational institutions to pursue race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action, even though such policies, in themselves, cannot close the gaps between black and white students in enrollment and graduation rates.
That’s rather like saying that race-neutral non-discrimination will do nothing to end poverty, cure cancer, or put a Hispanic astronaut on the moon.
In conclusion, the article gives a nod to the Center for Equal Opportunity, which “has argued that many colleges’ admissions policies, and all race-exclusive college programs, give more weight to race than the Supreme Court’s rulings allow.”
The first paragraph of the NAACP’s report is absolutely mind-boggling:
“More African-Americans are without a high school diploma than have a college degree, while whites are nearly three times more likely to have a college degree than lack a high school diploma. In a new report released today marking the second anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court rulings in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) underscores the need to close this wide racial gap in educational opportunity and achievement, by using all legally permissible means, including race-conscious ones.”
So, why the focus on college admissions if getting a high school degree is the more serious problem among blacks?
One gets the feeling that the symbolic battle over college admissions trumps any common sense. Why is the NAACP fighting this battle over college admissions? It ought to be fighting to make sure that black kids get a high school degree, a degree that reflects competence in hard skills.
Years ago, I taught remedial writing to Freshmen at a not to be named college. The kids were just about entirely black. What is the purpose of passing on the teaching of basic skills to the college level?
Sometimes we overlook the obvious. In order to solve the problem of black TEENAGERS not getting a high school diploma, one must CHANGE THE BEHAVIOR OF those TEENAGERS. Got any teenagers in your family? Ever tried to change the behavior of a teenager? If you were the NAACP, would you want to undertake to make black TEENAGERS
Isn’t the NAACP LDF approach merely a reiteration of the accounting fraud that decides to assess the success of individual civil rights through the presumptive standard of ‘group results’?
Apparently the NAACP would prefer the Constitution acknowledged ‘equal results’ as a legitimate substitute for ‘equal rights’.
The Olestra of civil rights. The ‘right results’ without all the bother of implementing a true colorblind assessment that might not turn out the way the PC-taliban wishes.
Aside from the fact that “more African-Americans are without a high school diploma than have a college degree”, fully 25% of young black males are in jail/prison or on probation/parole.
The fact is that the pool of eligible candidates is severely limited not because George Wallace is “standing in the schoolhouse doorway”, but because, unfortunately, many young African Americans are running away from the schoolhouse in droves by engaging in drugs, becoming pregnant and generally ridiculing formal education at the high school level.
Until this issue is addressed by the African American community itself, don’t expect a significant improvement.
One cannot legislate attitudes, especially those of the self-destructive ‘victims’ that the pro-AA crowd is attempting to ‘help.’