A Love Sonnet To UCLA In The New York Times

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED … twice]

The Sunday New York Times Magazine will feature a long love song to UCLA, readable now here, singing the praises of its apparently successful efforts to skirt and evade Prop. 209’s prohibition of racial preferences.

I’ll have something to say about its arguments (I’m sure that will surprise no one) within a day or two. As this delay will indicate, I’m pretty busy at the moment; daughter Jessie has just passed her qualifying exam for her Ph.D. and is home for a week of rest, recuperation, and celebration. In the meantime, I thought some of you would want to read it before I get to it in more detail.

UPDATE [30 Sept. PM]

David Leonhardt is an economics columnist for the NY Times. The best thing about his paen to the continuing racial and ethnic preferences at UCLA is that he does not shrink from admitting that they may well be illegal.

The big question that hangs over U.C.L.A.’s success [in increasing the numbers of preferred minorities], of course, is whether the university broke the law. Looking at the numbers, it’s hard not to conclude that race was a factor in this year’s admissions decisions. The average SAT score for admitted African-American students fell 45 points this year, to 1,738. For Asian, Latino and white students, the averages were much more stable. “I’m quite confident that U.C. factors race in, in various ways,” said Sander, the U.C.L.A. law professor and affirmative-action critic. “There is no way to explain the disparities otherwise.” He has filed a public-information request that would allow him to examine the data more closely.

That small detail does not, of course, diminish in any way Leonhardt’s enthusiastic admiration for what UCLA is doing. His biggest regret is that so much of this activity has to occur under the table, behind the scenes, contracted out to private groups who, arguably (but also arguably not) are beyond the reach of Prop. 209’s prohibitions against racial discrimination.

There is no point to my taking issue with Leonhardt’s admiration for “diversity” by any means necessary, but I would like to point out and take issue with one of his assertions that, unwittingly, reveals how contemporary liberalism now takes as an article of faith an understanding of relatively recent history that, not to mince words, is simply wrong — not, let me be clear, an interpretation that is different from mine, but one that is plainly, flatly, demonstrably wrong:

Since affirmative action began in the mid-1960s, it has had both an explicit role and an implicit one in American life. Explicitly, it has been about race and, to a lesser degree, sex — a policy to make up for centuries of oppression and to ensure diversity. But there has always been a broader notion to affirmative action as well. It has been the most serious effort of any kind to ensure equality of opportunity, without regard to wealth or poverty. When all else failed — the War on Poverty, welfare, public schools — affirmative action would be there to help less-fortunate Americans overcome the circumstances of their origins. “Ability is not just the product of birth,” Lyndon Johnson said when he effectively created affirmative action during a graduation speech at Howard University in 1965. “Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with and the neighborhood you live in — by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child and, finally, the man.”

….

There are some big problems with this approach to affirmative action. For one thing, it rests on a very rickety base of political support. Colleges often resort to huge preferences to create a racially diverse student body, especially if they haven’t been giving any advantage to low-income applicants, who are of course disproportionately minorities. And many of the beneficiaries of the preferences end up being upper-middle-class minority students, since they tend to have better test scores than poor minorities. The helping hand that goes to these relatively well-off nonwhite students strikes many people as unjust. It makes it seem as if affirmative action isn’t making good on its larger promise. Affirmative action becomes about mere diversity — and not even all forms of diversity — rather than fairness. Politically, that has made it weaker and weaker.

This view of the history of affirmative action is so wrong I hardly know where to begin. First, as I have pointed out here too many times to cite, when “affirmative action began” — not, by the way, in the “mid–1960s” but with President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 signed March 6, 1961, and repeated by President Johnson’s almost identical Executive Order 11926 signed Sept. 28, 1965 — it was “[e]xplicitly” about race only to the extent that both Executive Orders stated clearly and unambiguously that employment and contracting decisions by the government must be made “without regard” to race. In short, when affirmative action morphed into race preference, it became the opposite of what it had been originally.

Second, when affirmative action began there was no concern whatsoever by the federal government, or anyone else, with it as a means to “ensure diversity.” “Diversity” as a concern of race policy did not emerge until Justice Powell’s decision in Bakke, whose nod to “diversity” as a tie-breaker in close cases enabled a generation of lawyers to get first the camel’s nose and then entire caravans of whole camels under the tent that had previously kept racial preference out in the cold.

Third, affirmative action has not been concerned, either originally or later, with attempting “to ensure equality of opportunity, without regard to wealth or poverty.” In its early states it was intended, and for all practical purposes intended only, to ensure equality of opportunity for blacks. Women were added as an afterthought, and in later years AA was radically expanded to include them as well, but by then the focus was no longer on “equality of opportunity” but something closer to representational parity.

Fourth, Leonhardt quotes, as nearly all preferentialists do, President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Howard University speech, but is wrong in asserting that in that speech “he effectively created affirmative action.” As noted above President Kennedy had issued an executive order implementing affirmative action four years earlier, and the president who really put some content into these paper pronouncements was Richard Nixon, with his “Philadelphia Plan” in effect requiring racial hiring in the construction trades.

(Still) Fourth, I have had occasion before to discuss how too much is almost read into, or out of, Johnson’s Howard speech, but since that speech has assumed such a central role in the defense of racial preferences, and since it has been two years since I discussed it at any length, I think it worth repeating now what I wrote then in response to a similar misinterpretation. The error of assuming Johnson was justifying racial preference policies, I wrote, is “quite common.”

It is based in large part of what I believe is a misinterpretation of Johnson’s Howard University speech of June 4, 1965. Here is the passage, under the heading “Freedom Is Not Enough,” often quoted to show Johnson’s support of what we now would (or should) call racial preferences:

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

Today we are accustomed to dealing with two very different standards to evaluate discrimination: an “intent” test, which requires finding a discriminatory intent in order to determine that a particular policy is discriminatory, and a “results” test, which does not require a finding of intent to determine that some “disparity” or “underrepresentation” is discriminatory. But that distinction had not emerged in 1965 when Johnson made his speech, and when he called for “equality as a fact and equality as a result” he did not mean proportional representation or an absolute equality of goods, money, assets, jobs, whatever that people mean today by “equality of results.”

What Johnson meant by “equality,” it is quite clear, is non-discriminatory equality of opportunity. The evidence? For starters, the very next sentence in Johnson’s speech, after the oft-quoted passage quoted above, states:

For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities–physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness. [Emphasis added]

True, Johnson then says in the next sentence that “equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough,” but in the remainder of the speech he does not really specify what more is needed, other than various forms of assistance there is no reason to assume would be conditioned on skin color as opposed to need.

Next, three months after his Howard speech, Johnson signed Executive Order 11246 which required “affirmative action” of government contractors. But note how “affirmative action” was defined:

The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. [Emphasis added]

Fifth, and finally, Leonhardt almost gets something right when he writes that heavy-handed racial preferences to upper class (and he could have added foreign) blacks

makes it seem as if affirmative action isn’t making good on its larger promise. Affirmative action becomes about mere diversity — and not even all forms of diversity — rather than fairness.

Note that I said “almost.” That’s because racial preferences, especially to rich or well off minorities, doesn’t make it seem as if AA isn’t making good on its “larger promise.” First, as we’ve seen, there has been no “larger promise.” But more important, preferential treatment doesn’t merely seem unfair. It is unfair,and is widely and justifiably so regarded.

Finally (really), the only “fairness” that affirmative action originally promised, and the only fairness it ever should have promised, is freedom from discrimination on the basis of race. In deviating from that promise it sowed the seeds of its own demise and dug its own grave.

UPDATE II [1 October]

A regular reader who prefers to remain anonymous (lest his colleagues in academia confirm what they probably already suspect, i.e., that he is capable of independent thought) sent the following comments on the New York Times article:

Even if U.C.L.A. tried to get around Proposition 209 by giving a big leg up to low-income applicants, it wouldn’t increase its black population very much. At every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the academic record of black students is worse than that of other groups. As Taylor says: “There is a great deal of pressure to look for a proxy for race. There is no proxy for race.”

….

For one thing, the gap between white and black adults has narrowed significantly since 1970, according to work by the noted researchers William Dickens and James Flynn.

I think this is not Flynn’s current view and may never have been true as stated. The one standard deviation difference in the mean is constant. (See La Griffe du Leon.)

The more expansive idea of affirmative action as a counterweight to those “unseen forces” has become tightly linked to the self-image of American universities. Above all else, they are supposed to be meritocracies. To be truly meritocratic, a college must be diverse – or else accept that some groups in society have less merit than others and their underrepresentation can’t be helped.

Did this person attend a meritocratic college? So much for teaching logical thought! Merit is merit. Diverse is diverse. it is possible to have a diverse group of people of merit, but merit does not imply diversity unless merit as judged is found equally among various catagories of diversity

The University of California accepts far more transfer students, mainly from community colleges, than most colleges.

This is actually an extremely positive aspect of the California system. Students who meet appropriate academic standards in two years at a JC do have a priority for admission to UC. After all, they have proved they have the ability to do true college level work. It also allows many to have an essentially free first two years of college.

Berkeley, by contrast, had taken a more holistic approach, with a single reader judging an entire application, and Berkeley was attracting more black students than U.C.L.A. Why? Maybe the holistic approach takes better account of the subtle obstacles that black students face – or maybe the readers, when looking at a full application, ended up practicing a little under-the-table affirmative action.

Duuh, you think so?

Two applications readers I interviewed said that they had received clear, written instructions not to consider race and that they hadn’t. (There are 150 readers in all, a mix of university employees and paid outsiders.) On the other hand, applicants seemed to understand that something had changed. Daniel Fogg, a computer programmer in the admissions office and an application reader, told me that he noticed more students mentioning race in their essays this year.

And 1+1 =?

The big question that hangs over U.C.L.A.’s success, of course, is whether the university broke the law. Looking at the numbers, it’s hard not to conclude that race was a factor in this year’s admissions decisions. The average SAT score for admitted African-American students fell 45 points this year, to 1,738. For Asian, Latino and white students, the averages were much more stable. “I’m quite confident that U.C. factors race in, in various ways,” said Sander, the U.C.L.A. law professor and affirmative-action critic. “There is no way to explain the disparities otherwise.” He has filed a public-information request that would allow him to examine the data more closely.

In particular, U.C.L.A.’s experience suggests that some tension between race and class in the admissions process may be inevitable. Even as the number of low-income black freshmen soared this year, the overall number of low-income freshmen fell somewhat. The rise in low-income black students was accompanied by a fall in low-income Asian students – not a decline in well-off students. U.C.L.A. administrators say they don’t fully understand why.

Are administrators really this obtuse? BTW, the SATs average about 580, decidedly above the mean, but equally decidedly below the top 1/8 which is what UC is supposed to target.

UPDATE III [also 1 October]

See the superb long post on this article by Steve Sailer. Really, a must-read posting.

Say What? (9)

  1. E September 28, 2007 at 8:48 am | | Reply

    ARE UCLA AND UC BERKELEY BREAKING THE LAW BY TAKING RACE INTO ACCOUNT IN ADMISSIONS AGAIN??

    THE RISE IN LOW-INCOME BLACK STUDENTS WAS ACCOMPANIED BY A FALL IN LOW-INCOME ASIAN STUDENTS, BUT NOT A DECLINE IN WELL-OFF STUDENTS. Why????

    *QUOTES FROM “The New Affirmative Action”:*

    *You can make an argument, in fact, that the single most impressive university in the country today is U.C.L.A. It receives more freshman applications than any other — 50,744 this year — and, unlike many of its peers, it can legitimately claim to be an engine of opportunity. About 90 percent of its students, whether they enter as freshmen or transfers, eventually graduate. What City College of New York was to the 20th century, U.C.L.A. is to the 21st.*

    *This outsourcing was the second part of the task force’s two-pronged strategy. The group also urged U.C.L.A.’s faculty senate last year to alter the admissions process. In the past, the admissions office divided every application between two readers: one evaluated a student’s academic record, the other looked at extracurricular activities and “life challenges.” Berkeley, by contrast, had taken a more holistic approach, with a single reader judging an entire application, and Berkeley was attracting more black students than U.C.L.A. Why? Maybe the holistic approach takes better account of the subtle obstacles that black students face — or maybe the readers, when looking at a full application, ended up practicing a little under-the-table affirmative action.*

    *The big question that hangs over U.C.L.A.’s success, of course, is whether the university broke the law. Looking at the numbers, it’s hard not to conclude that race was a factor in this year’s admissions decisions. The average SAT score for admitted African-American students fell 45 points this year, to 1,738. For Asian, Latino and white students, the averages were much more stable. “I’m quite confident that U.C. factors race in, in various ways,” said Sander, the U.C.L.A. law professor and affirmative-action critic. “There is no way to explain the disparities otherwise.” He has filed a public-information request that would allow him to examine the data more closely.*

    *In particular, U.C.L.A.’s experience suggests that some tension between race and class in the admissions process may be inevitable. Even as the number of low-income black freshmen soared this year, the overall number of low-income freshmen fell somewhat. The rise in low-income black students was accompanied by a fall in low-income Asian students — not a decline in well-off students. U.C.L.A. administrators say they don’t fully understand why.*

    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30affirmative-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

    The New Affirmative Action

  2. eddy September 28, 2007 at 11:14 am | | Reply

    If institutions are “practicing a little under-the-table affirmative action” why wouldn’t it follow that the massess are then justified to retaliate through their own under-the-table discrimination?

    Aren’t the short term gains by diversity supremists offset in the long run by people recognizing that the game is fixed by those who consider themselves above the law? Neither the law nor morality will then serve as a check on an individual’s racial discrimination.

    Isn’t the goal of both sides color-blindness — one side wants it now, the other eventually? It’s delusional to believe that this cheating will go undetected and will breed racial comity. It will lead instead to justifiable resentment and an unwitting endorsement of black inferiority.

    The people who run these institutions feel judged by short-term metrics rather than long-term solutions so they aren’t concerned with the ultimate failure of affirmative discrimination policies. The veneer of looking fair trumping being fair only works in the short run. The net result is these institutions end up squandering any trust and confidence we had in them. They’re committing a slow suicide by flouting our laws against discrimination.

  3. Anita September 28, 2007 at 11:22 am | | Reply

    the first paragraph of the NYT magazine article: “In another time, it wouldn’t have been too hard to guess where Frances Harris would have ended up going to college. She has managed to do very well in very difficult circumstances, and she is African-American. Her high school, in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, was shut down as an irremediable failure the spring before her freshman year, then reopened months later as a charter school. Midway through high school, her father developed heart problems and became an irritable fixture around the home. She also discovered that he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy who, when her mother took Harris to see him, simply said his name was George and waited for her to leave. In Harris’s senior year, her mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for bankruptcy”

    This is a digression. I write it because after reading the first paragraph of the article I was reminded very strongly why I stopped reading the NYT.

    1. the unkind reference to the male figure who raised her – no sympathy for the man’s bad health, “an irritable presence” around the house, meaning what? was he abusive? probably not or the article would have said so. He is a man, therefore a pain in the you know what, according to NYT thinking.

    2.the man named Leroy the real father who rejected her. We are supposed to have sympathy. I do for the child, not for the mother. To have children by people you are not married to and barely know and then to move on to another relationship, which many involve a step father (by marriage or not) this has become normal among black americans. It does not produce good results for anyone involved, least of all the children. And it does not come about because of Bush or lighting bolts from the sky, but because people have bad values and make bad decisions

    3. the article is going to be about how this child did not do as well on tests as other children but because she is black and does not know her real father and her mother lost her job, she should be be given preference over others.

    in toto – this thinking is based on the notion that the lower acheiving persons will always be a minority. the day will come when half of the population will be minority of one kind or another, all entitled to preferences despite lower scores than others. how will that affect the country, when fully half the population is not required to know math or science or anything at the best level and are allowed to be mediocre or worse.

  4. Al September 28, 2007 at 3:10 pm | | Reply

    Revealed preference rebuts this argument; only look at the schools with high diversity indexes. If students valued diversity, they would apply to these schools. But, glancing at the list of diverse schools, one sees they have poor academic quality and receive relatively few applications. Application numbers, that is, show weak demand for diverse universities (excluding California universities with large Asian populations). Thus, the market for colleges reveals that students do not value diversity as much as other factors, such as academic quality.

  5. David Nieporent September 28, 2007 at 11:06 pm | | Reply

    Mazel tov on Jessie.

  6. revisionist September 30, 2007 at 8:59 pm | | Reply

    Maybe one could excuse the unfairness of racial preferences if they had at least truly helped underrepresented groups. But we have had over 40 years of such preferences, and the illegitimacy rate among Blacks has increased to 70% and graduation rates seem to have decreased. In Detroit for example, only 25% of Black students graduate from high school.

    The problem of academic disparities has only worsened since the 1960s. The racial/ethnic group now targeted for preferences the most by colleges (Latinos) is arguably doing the worst academically. Despite massive outreach efforts and in-situ high school programs run by the University of California, the dropout rate among California Latinos is about 50%.

    It does not matter if UCLA has 100 or 200 Black Freshmen, or if every university has a Black or Latino president, preferences at elite academic institutions are doing nothing to help those groups who are struggling the most.

    We should be listening to Bill Cosby instead of Lee Bollinger.

  7. Anita October 1, 2007 at 9:55 am | | Reply

    I gave in and read this. The writer admits openly that the black students score lower, much lower, than whites and asians on all the tests that are used to measure suitability for college. But let them be admitted anway, he seems to say, because they are black. Why not just reduce the qualifications for everyone. Then race will not be an issue. But of course nobody wants that. One thing the writer should have said was that those that don’t get into the ivies or elite colleges can go elsewhere. 99% of us do not get to go the “best”.

    Reading the entire issue, I was struc, by how much we all live in our own little worlds, no matter how liberal we are. One article talked about how going to college is the first freedom Americans get and how life in his suburb was a prison. Freedom at the cost of $30,000 a year, someone is paying for it. And if an american suburb is a prison, what should we make of a village in africa where children start working at seven and its work or starve, if you are lucky. Or what about an american who has to get a job early in life or work and go to school at the same time. We are all bounded by our own experiences.

  8. leo cruz October 1, 2007 at 9:31 pm | | Reply

    AS i had pointedout in another website, I can understand why low income

    Asians suffered the highest decrease in the freshman class

    of UCLA 2007. UCLA could not decrease the number of middle class and rich blacks in the freshman class because it will

    entail a lower SAT average for blacks in the freshman class.IT has already been proven that increasing the number of poor blacks at UCLA meant a dcrease in the entering SAT average of blacks in the freshman class.Decreasing the number of middle class and rich whites in the UCLA freshman class would decrease the average SAT score of the freshman class. And decreasing the number of middle class and rich Asians will even be more awkward since Asian UCLA admittees have higher average SAT scores than white UCLA admittees. So the natural target of decrease and diminiuition are low income Asians who have the least political connections and the one going to make the least political outcry.

  9. E October 2, 2007 at 3:18 am | | Reply

    To Leo Cruz

    1. SOCIO-ECONOMIC BASED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION WILL NOT WORK TO INCREASE THE NUMBERS OF BLACKS.

    2. THE ONLY WAY TO INCREASE BLACK REPRESENTATION IS TO BETTER PREPARE THEM AT THE K-12 LEVEL OF EDUCATION BY FIXING THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM.

    I personally favor socio-economic AA and a race and ethnic group BLIND admissions process. However, even socio-economic AA will not solve the problem for increasing the small numbers of blacks in elite schools, because the poorest Asians/whites from families with annual incomes under the poverty line and parents with only a high school education or less, OUTPERFORM on objective measures (SATs, and most of standardized testing, academic achievement, etc..) the richest blacks from families with annual incomes of over $70K or more (in 1995 dollars) and parents with college degrees. Therefore, if one is to use socio-economic factors, without the use of race, black numbers will still be low.

    So, what is one to do? Obviously, the applicant, regardless of race, should be better prepared at the k-12 level before entering the Ivies/Elites. This is the only way to solve the problem. The causes for the underperformance of rich and affluent blacks, despite their abundance of financial and academic resources, are unknown and more research needs to be done to find the causes. These causes may include the “culture” of blacks in general, but for one to suggest cultural differences between different racial and ethnic groups as a cause will most certainly elicit charges of racism from the race preferentialists and pro race based AA advocates. Even for one to ask blacks and others to change their cultures is politically incorrect and don’t even think of suggesting “innate differences” between the groups.

    Elite college admissions are not only decided upon with the use of the SAT I and II tests, but also with the holistic approach. You must ask the question, “Why were higher performing and academically more proficient dirt-poor Asian Americans denied in favor of lower performing rich affluent blacks/Latinos in admissions?” This was the case when the “Comprehensive Review Admissions Policy” was examined at UCLA. This policy is similar to the one used at the Ivies.

    The use of holistic factors and other “soft factors” in admissions is biased against Asian Americans, mainly because of the stereotypes used against them by the admissions committees, with no basis in truth. These schools will tell you that better academically prepared Asians are not as well rounded or cannot write a better essay, have less outstanding extra-curricular activities, and are less passionate and motivated, and possess less character than less academically prepared, race-preferred black or Latino applicants, and EVEN white applicants who are less qualified by objective measures in their biased opinions. This, of course, is an outright lie due mainly to racist stereotyping and cultural bias against Asian American applicants. Also, the outcomes of the students who are better academically prepared graduate at a much higher rate than the less prepared. The less prepared, if they graduate at all, will graduate at bottom of the class, taking the least rigorous courses of study. The Asian/white FAILURE TO GRADUATE rates are 1/2 the black FAILURE TO GRADUATE rates. The Asian graduation rate is even higher than the white graduation rate. This is generally true in the Ivies/Elites and even in the US service academies, such as the US Naval Academy.

    Please also click on:

    http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm

    STANDARDIZED TESTS: THE INTERPRETATION OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC GAPS

    1. Black children from the wealthiest families have mean SAT scores lower than white children from families below the poverty line.

    2. Black children of parents with graduate degrees have lower SAT scores than white children of parents with a high-school diploma or less.

    3. More SAT data may be found in Appendix B. There, you will discover that Asians mostly sit on top of the heap; that whites, Mexican Americans and blacks follow in that order. Some details prove interesting. For example, whites enjoy a verbal advantage over Asians that disappears at high levels of income and social advantage. Regrettably, the College Board no longer discloses these data. In 1996, they stopped publishing performance by income and parental education disaggregated by race and ethnicity.

    Please also click on:

    http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

    Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

    “The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test”

    Explaining the Black-White SAT Gap

    There are a number of reasons that are being advanced to explain the continuing and growing black-white SAT scoring gap. Sharp differences in family incomes are a major factor. Always there has been a direct correlation between family income and SAT scores. For both blacks and whites, as income goes up, so do test scores. In 2005, 28 percent of all black SAT test takers were from families with annual incomes below $20,000. Only 5 percent of white test takers were from families with incomes below $20,000. At the other extreme, 7 percent of all black test takers were from families with incomes of more than $100,000. The comparable figure for white test takers is 27 percent.

    But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board’s 2005 data on the SAT:

    • Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.

    • Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.

    • Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000.

Say What?