ACTA's Must-Reads

What does it mean what a so-called scholarly organization gloats over the de jure criminalizaton of affirmative action in college admissions? ACTA of course offers no other insights about how to help economically devastated minorities achieve parity in higher education. So is ACTA celebrating the end of an unfair practice (affirmative action) or the beginning of an unfair practice (admitting rich students from private schools with private tutors and Kaplan training over poor students without these advatanges)?

Now, I oppose affirmative action in admissions in theory, simply because being an ethnic minorities does not make one disadvantaged. But ACTA isn't busy promoting class-based admissions policies, and such policies will be essential if equality of opportunity is to operate in higher ed.

The U of Michigan should completely revise their admissions process. All students should have to submit their parents' income tax records for the past five years. All high school transcripts should give school statistics: percentage of certified teachers and teachers with advanced degrees; student-teacher ratios; and so on. Students should be required by law to admit to any private tutoring and test tutoring they received.

Finally, ACTA should realize that the MCRI will ultimately do nothing to change admissions policies. Schools can find a reason to admit who they want. And let's hope Michigan isn't found admitting anyone simply because of a legacy or because the student's family donated a sack of cash to the school!

What does it mean what a so-called scholarly organization gloats over the de jure criminalizaton of affirmative action in college admissions?

"Criminalization" is a very odd way to describe the use of initiative-and-referendum by the public to prescribe admissions policies for public institutes of higher education, unless the text of the proposition specified that the dean of admissions in Ann Arbor should be clapped in jail. And what do race preference schemes do to advance specifically academic goals?

ACTA of course offers no other insights about how to help economically devastated minorities achieve parity in higher education.

Perhaps because social policy is not an aspect of ACTA's institutional mission. Dr. O'Connor and Anne Neal are not issuing statements on the complicity of university hospitals in the practice of abortion either.

That aside, it ought be noted think the per capita income of the black population is about 35% lower than the white population, which renders the measurable material consumption of that population similar to that of the white population ca. 1980. I was around in 1980 and can assure you that the general population was not economically devastated.

There are specific social problems that are more severe in the ambit of the black population but an address to those is rather distant from patronage doled out by university administrators.

So is ACTA celebrating the end of an unfair practice (affirmative action) or the beginning of an unfair practice (admitting rich students from private schools with private tutors and Kaplan training over poor students without these advatanges)?

People with sufficient passively-held assets to have a contextually-satisfactory standard-of-living as rentiers might constitute 2 or 3% of the working-age population. They are but a modest minority of the 60% or so of households that avail themselves of some sort of tertiary education for their post-adolescent youth. The subfraction thereof sufficiently near to the minimum standard of admission such that the elimination of race-preferences would be decisive is smaller still. A college admits 800 students, perhaps three dozen are authentically upper class, and perhaps three or four are sufficiently marginal to benefit from the elimination of racial preference schemes in the admissions process.

Has someone in the last quarter-century demonstrated that test-prep courses are at all useful? When I was looking into attending college, we were specifically warned off them by teachers who specialized in counseling students, with the advisory that the supposed improvements in test scores they induced were too small to be disentangled from an individual's normal variation in performance. (And implicit in some of their counsels was the idea that you do yourself no favors by attempting to insert yourself in the wrong league).

While we are at it, is it not the refrain of defenders of public education that the advantageous performance of private-school students is attributable to factors extraneous to the pedagogy of these schools?

The U of Michigan should completely revise their admissions process. All students should have to submit their parents' income tax records for the past five years. All high school transcripts should give school statistics: percentage of certified teachers and teachers with advanced degrees; student-teacher ratios; and so on. Students should be required by law to admit to any private tutoring and test tutoring they received.

I note your assessment of high schools is derived from measures of inputs. That aside, do the parents' tax returns give information about the academic competence of the students?

Finally, ACTA should realize that the MCRI will ultimately do nothing to change admissions policies. Schools can find a reason to admit who they want.

Did I just hear someone say 'massive resistance'?

When something is made illegal, it is criminalized.

ACTA is, of course, entirely concerned with social policy when it touches upon educational issues. Achieving parity in education should be one of ACTA'a concerns; instead, their ideological blinders ensure they spend more time pushing for better representation of Hayek on syllabi than America's poor in our universities. As with the cultural literacy debate and the culture wars in general, the Right seeks cultural solutions to economic problems, precisely because cultural solutions don't cosst anyone anything. Why talk about the lack of parity in American education when some conservative kid got a B- on his political science exam and cried bias?

"Economically devasted" is an adjectival phrase modifying "minorities." Which is to say that not all minorities are economically devasted. Instead, the entire phrase refers to those minorities who *are* economically devastated. Art Deco of course doesn't seem too concerned that the average minority family makes a third less than the average white family. But according to the Census, "Black households has the lowest median income in 2005, $30,858, which was 61 percent of the median for non-Hispanic Whites households, $50,784." Art Deco's point about 1980s earning power makes little sense: every recent decade in America has seen an increasingly bi-polar economy, and the poor have been screwed more or less. consistently. $30,000 is not much to raise a two- or three-kid family on. And if $30,000 is the average, just imagine how many black folks in America are earning *less* than that.

But as I also wrote above, the whole problem with affirmative action is that it is race-based and not class-based. Of course adding black kids doesn't necessarily make a school more diverse. Diversity talk was a form of class war that was more palatable to the American populace than actual talk of class. Now it's time to move away from race and diversity talk and bring class to the forefront.

At the U of Michigan (in 2004), .9% of the student population came from families earning less than $10,000/yr; 51.1% from families earning between $75,000 and $199,999/yr; 19.5% from families earning over $200,000. The U of Mich statistics release ironically doesn't include the percentage of students from families earning between $10,001 and $74,999 per year, but we can do the math: 28.5%. So that means that well over twice as many students came from families earning over $75,000 as earning less. Which means that most of the students at U of Mich come from families making well over the average median income in 2005. (And the U of Mich is far more class-biased than other highly selective universities, which admit nearly half the number of students from families earning over $200,000 as does U of Mich. See http://www.crlt.umich.edu/gsis/StudentProfileData2004.pdf for more details)

These statistics reveal that working class kids are completely under-represented at good state schools like U of Michigan (let alone at Ivy League and highly selective small liberal arts schools like Swarthmore or Bryn Mawr). Of course, it's hard to earn a 4.0 when you babysit your siblings all afternoon and evening while your mother works a second shift at Wal-Mart. Or when you're hungry at school. Or hungry after school. Or you're trying to studying in an apartment without heat, owned by a slumlord. A poor kid with a 3.0 probably worked far harder -- and is far more academically competent -- than a middle-class or rich kid with a 4.0. Kaplan guarantees higher scores, but a kid with the time and money to take a Kaplan course clearly has many other advantages over a kid without that time and money. The high school kid who has to work to help support the family also can't volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or FrontPageMag.com, and so on paper won't look as good as the rich kid who was a candystriper every summer.

Finally, tax returns don't give evidence of academic competence, but they do correlate exactly with standardized test scores.

The playing field is nowhere near level. And many kids begin the race by being kicked in the groin and hobbled. And there cannot be liberty and justice for all when a large section of the population is basically screwed from birth.

Is the 1964 Civil Rights Act "criminal" too? That's where the language came from. It takes singular confusion to denounce equal protection by the law as some form of discrimination.

You are further confused when you attempt to use race as a proxy for wealth. Most poor people are white for the simple reason that most people in the country are white.

Fed Dog: read closer. As I wrote originally, class-based admissions policies should replace race-based policies, precisely because poor whites need help to achieve equity while middle-class and rich blacks, Hispanics, and Asians do not. That's why in my second comment I look at U of Michigan's admissions stats as regards family income and not ethnicity or race.

And Fed Dog, certainly you know the difference between "criminalize" and "criminal." The former is a verb, the latter (in your use) an adjective. The MCRI *criminalizes* race-based admissions policies, which is simply to say, it makes them illegal. The 1964 Civil Rights Act criminalized discrimination and segregation. Of course, neither act is "criminal."

I shouldn't need to waste my time repeating points I made quite clearly the first time.

"When something is made illegal, it is criminalized."

Wrong. Any action brought under the MCRI would be a civil action, not criminal. Both civil and criminal offenses are illegal, but only criminal offenses are criminal.

When something is made illegal, it is criminalized.

As has already been remarked, there is a distinction between substantive criminal law on the one hand and education law, administrative law, civil practice, constitutional law and any other department of law that might be implicated with this statute. One might also note that it would be eccentric to refer to the previous regime of admissions standards as one that "criminalized admission according to an index of grades and test scores".

ACTA is, of course, entirely concerned with social policy when it touches upon educational issues. Achieving parity in education should be one of ACTA'a concerns; instead, their ideological blinders ensure they spend more time pushing for better representation of Hayek on syllabi than America's poor in our universities.

If they are concerned with the content of the curriculum, their concerns are cultural, not social. The implications for social policy are incidental.

As with the cultural literacy debate and the culture wars in general, the Right seeks cultural solutions to economic problems, precisely because cultural solutions don't cosst anyone anything.

Is that what I'm on about?

Why talk about the lack of parity in American education when some conservative kid got a B- on his political science exam and cried bias?

I cannot help but note you have justaposed a reference to a general condition to a particular instance of a different sort of condition. A more appropriate juxtaposition would be that of complaints that educational institutions are not serving equalitarian goals (on the one hand) to that of complaints that educational institutions are not fulfilling their contractual obligations to students (on the other). ACTA will have to speak for themselves with regard to their particular priorities.

"Economically devasted" is an adjectival phrase modifying "minorities." Which is to say that not all minorities are economically devasted. Instead, the entire phrase refers to those minorities who *are* economically devastated. Art Deco of course doesn't seem too concerned that the average minority family makes a third less than the average white family. But according to the Census, "Black households has the lowest median income in 2005, $30,858, which was 61 percent of the median for non-Hispanic Whites households, $50,784." Art Deco's point about 1980s earning power makes little sense: every recent decade in America has seen an increasingly bi-polar economy, and the poor have been screwed more or less. consistently. $30,000 is not much to raise a two- or three-kid family on. And if $30,000 is the average, just imagine how many black folks in America are earning *less* than that.

I was referring to general increases in the level of affluence in the United States over the last 25 years. Changes in per capita income have since 1929 have averaged about 2% per annum. That translates into a trebling every 55 years, or an increase in the quantum of goods and services produced (per captita) of 67% over a period of 26 years. One should take care in using economic statistics to read the fine print about just what is being measured (cash income v. total income, income v. consumption, & c.) what base year monetary values are being used, & c. Per capita income (not household income) at current prices about $40,000 per annum in the United States today, though much of that is not experienced as disposable income by households because these households experience utilities from fringes and collective consumption (law enforecement, public roads). There has been since 1969 a change in the income distribution in an inegalitarian direction and a decline in the proportion of income that is in the form of returns to labor rather than capital or land. That having been said, it has not been so radical as to offset the total improvement in real income levels. Again, the ratio of disposable income (per capita) of the black population to the white population has seen a slow upward crawl over the last fifty years while the mean real income levels have been increasing. Blacks are less materially affluent than whites, but the quantum of goods and services they have the potential to consume is similar to that of whites about a generation ago. The country was less affluent in 1980 than it is today. It was not devastated, economically or otherwise. I should note that no country has a bimodal income distribution.

Disparities of income between ethnic groups are of concern when they are indicative of systematic injustices which can be corrected by public policy which does not compound the injustice. Jews and Chinese in this country are more affluent than my own ethnic group. It does not concern me. What does concern me about the condition of the black population is the insufficiency of certain public goods and merit goods, which are part and parcel of disparities far larger than those of real income or personal disposable income. Various social indicators adhering to the black population distress me but I can think of nothing much to be done about them.

Now it's time to move away from race and diversity talk and bring class to the forefront.

If you think you can sell it. Ralf Dahrendorf once contrasted the 'dichotomous' vision of society (an above and a below with one conceiving of oneself as part of one or the other) with the 'hierarchical' ('stratigraphic' might be more precise) in which one conceives of society as consisting of onself as occupying an individual position with others above or below one. He offered that in Germany the 'dichotomous' vision prevailed among workers and the 'hierarchical' among the bourgeoisie. I have a strong suspicion that wage earners in this country hold to a 'stratigraphic' view, and distribute their votes and attention and energies according to concerns other than class. Union vehicles like the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota and the American Labor Party in New York were the last mass movements derived from a solidaristic working-class element. The former was digested by the Democratic Party and the latter dissolved in 1954.

At the U of Michigan (in 2004), .9% of the student population came from families earning less than $10,000/yr; 51.1% from families earning between $75,000 and $199,999/yr; 19.5% from families earning over $200,000. The U of Mich statistics release ironically doesn't include the percentage of students from families earning between $10,001 and $74,999 per year, but we can do the math: 28.5%. So that means that well over twice as many students came from families earning over $75,000 as earning less. Which means that most of the students at U of Mich come from families making well over the average median income in 2005. (And the U of Mich is far more class-biased than other highly selective universities, which admit nearly half the number of students from families earning over $200,000 as does U of Mich. See http://www.crlt.umich.edu/gsis/StudentProfileData2004.pdf for more details)

Again, I would read the fine print on the compilation of these statistics before making too many assertions.

These statistics reveal that working class kids are completely under-represented at good state schools like U of Michigan (let alone at Ivy League and highly selective small liberal arts schools like Swarthmore or Bryn Mawr). Of course, it's hard to earn a 4.0 when you babysit your siblings all afternoon and evening while your mother works a second shift at Wal-Mart. Or when you're hungry at school. Or hungry after school. Or you're trying to studying in an apartment without heat, owned by a slumlord. A poor kid with a 3.0 probably worked far harder -- and is far more academically competent -- than a middle-class or rich kid with a 4.0.

Malnutrition due to deficits in income in this country is not a problem the wage earning element (who constitute about 60% of the population) experience. I believe it is now the case that annual working hours are no longer correllated with occupational status, but I do not have a citation for you. Mean annual working hours per labor force participant are now about 1,900 per year in this country. (And I can find you the article in the Journal of Economic History where that datum is located). I grew up in the Genessee valley, which encompasses the City of Rochester, suburban tracts appended thereto, and rural areas and small towns tributary to Rochester. The population of this area is about a million. The slum neighborhoods in Rochester have fewer than 90,000 residents. Slum residency is uncharacteristic of working-class life in this country.

Kaplan guarantees higher scores,

My question to you was: "'sez who?" (other than their sales force).

but a kid with the time and money to take a Kaplan course clearly has many other advantages over a kid without that time and money. The high school kid who has to work to help support the family also can't volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or FrontPageMag.com, and so on paper won't look as good as the rich kid who was a candystriper every summer.

What is the correllation between occupational status of fathers and mothers and the labor-force participation rates of youths in today's America, strong, weak, non-existent?

Again, there are just not that many rich kids, properly understood. We are talking about the distinction in prospects between the children of wage-earners on the one hand and the children of salaried employees and small business on the other, and the distinction in prospects between different substrata of each.

Finally, tax returns don't give evidence of academic competence, but they do correlate exactly with standardized test scores.

And the pathways of causality here are what?

The playing field is nowhere near level. And many kids begin the race by being kicked in the groin and hobbled. And there cannot be liberty and justice for all when a large section of the population is basically screwed from birth.

The only people deprived of their liberty are minors under parental tutelage and criminals in prison.

Fed Dog, when an employer discriminates racially, we say he committed a crime, not an incivility. You're free to make pedantic legal points, but they're not terribly stimulating to the larger debate!

Alvin, the situation undoubtedly varies from state to state, but proceedings in front of administrative tribunals and civil courts, not criminal courts, are the norm for violations of labor law. Civil courts are understood to adjudicate disputes between persons, not violations of public order.

Alvin,

I'm sorry, but that is incorrect, and the mistake is not trivial to understanding the law (and people's rights under it). If someone commits employment discrimination, that person has committed a civil rights offense, not a crime. The difference between civil and criminal offenses is important because it determines who can bring suit and remedies available. If someone is damaged under the new law, that person has standing to bring suit to enforce his rights because it is a civil matter. That is an important part of this law and why it is cast as a civil, not criminal, offense.

Fed and Art: You're right. I hereby change my word. Now what about the actually substance of the issue?

"Now what about the actually (sic) substance of the issue?"

What about it? There is nothing unlawful about prohibiting state preferences based on race, ethnic background, or sex. End of story.

Fed Dog: Wow. Maybe those statistics about reading comprehension *are* true. Has anyone in this comment thread -- me included -- argued that there *is* something unlawful about ending race-based admissions? No. What I wrote was that MCRI *criminalized* race-based admissions, but my vocab was corrected: MRCI incivilized race-based admissions!

The substance of the issue is that race-based admissions was an attempt to ensure equality of opportunity in higher education for the ethnic underclass. They were deeply flawed because of their emphasis on ethnicity and not class -- but Americans remain more committed to preserving identity than fighting inequality. As the statistics I cited above clearly demonstrate, U of Michigan is a state school that doesn't serve the state very well: most of its students come from the privileged classes. And while ACTA-types will demand more Hayek on syllabi, they seem perfectly content that the working class is screwed by state schools like Michigan. Disturbing priorities, to say the least.

"Has anyone in this comment thread -- me included -- argued that there *is* something unlawful about ending race-based admissions?"

Has anyone argued that someone did (please see your first sentence and reflect on it for a moment)? I simply stated that the long and short of the issue is that there is nothing unlawful about the MCRI.

Further, if your goal is to equalize the playing field, you should be concentrating on reforming the grade and high schools, where that problem takes root and flourishes. By the time people get to the point of applying for college, it is too late to eliminate devastating remediation problems that afflict the poor. No form of discrimination -- based on race, or income, or anything else -- suffices to make up for damage done during over a decade of lower-level training. Simply admitting people who lack even basic skills at the college level does nothing to address the underlying problem. On the contrary.

Why equalize the "playing field?" Do you want your brain surgeon to be someone who has a degree because he benefitted from "equalizing the playing field?" Do you want your air traffic controller someone who received his degree/job/certification because of this? What about the people who are launching a rocket for NASA? What about people who are managing your money?

Using merit communicates an important value in our society. It says that your genital morphology or skin pigmentation does not qualify you to be "smart" or an expert in anything. Rather, you must perform to end up in a position of responsibility and authority.

If the lawfulness or constitutionality of the MCRI was never an issue in the discussion, then your comment about that is basically irrelevant.

And of course, equalizing K-12 education is necessary. But more than that, real redistribution of wealth is the only way to ensure the American ideal of equality of opportunity. As it is now, we unfairly punish those born to poor families. But your additional comments on the issue are illogical. Just because someone is poor doesn't mean s/he lacks basic skills. In college admissions, it comes down to fairly common decisions: Do we admit the rich kid who got a 1400 on his SATs and a 3.8 at his private school, or do we admit the poor kid who scored 1180 and maintained a 3.2 GPA? What if the rich kid volunteered for Meals on Wheels and the poor kid did no volunteer work? What if the rich kid played for his school orchestra while the poor kid had to work at McDonald's after school and on weekends? Chances are, the rich kid will get in over the poor kid, even though the poor kid might be far more academically capable. No one is saying that colleges should admit illiterates ('tho they clearly do: I've taught Ivy League legacy children who couldn't tell the difference between a complete and an incomplete sentence). Many colleges also need to increase the support given to "at-risk" college students.

And as state school tuition goes up; and as sources of needs-based scholarships dry up; poor kids continue getting screwed.

"Further, if your goal is to equalize the playing field, you should be concentrating on reforming the grade and high schools......to eliminate devastating remediation problems that afflict the poor. No form of discrimination -- based on race, or income, or anything else -- suffices to make up for damage done during over a decade of lower-level training."

Right. I agree. Now what's your solution? The tremendous pressure for 'Affirmative Action' comes from the very situation your describe. Unless and until grade and high schools can provide the same educational opportunities to all, there will be tremendous pressure for AA based on race and/or class. You can denounce AA as invidious discrimination until you're blue in the face, and pass initiatives until the cows come home, but you will not stop, or even decrease, the pressure for AA until secondary schools are made equal across the entire country.

"Now what's your solution?"

Impose standards at the elementary and high schools levels so that graduates possess the skills necessary to legitimately gain college admittance. Assure competent faculty and adequate support to do so. Simply admitting unprepared students into college to mask abysmal failures at the grade and high school levels is like trying to mask a sucking chest wound with a bandaid. It is also distracting people from the damned hard (and often thankless) work necessary to assure even the poorest a shot at a decent education.

It's easy and self-serving to sign a college admittance letter, and then publicly congratulate yourself on your compassion and superior morality. It's much harder to pull the grunt work in the trenches necessary to actually help those people. The former is moral preening born of overweaning narcissism; the latter, ethical commitment to social reform.

That President Coleman should be allowed to use state-funded legal staff to contest a state-wide citizens' initiative that duly passed is disgraceful; the U of Michigan board of trustees should reconsider her position immediately.

My thanks and best wishes to Ms Jennifer Gratz, Professor Carl Cohen of the U of M philosophy and law departments, Mr Ward Connerly and the sensible citizens of Michigan who passed the MCRI and ended the vicious and corrupt system of racial preferences in the state.