Hi all,
A few weeks ago I was asked to testify before the Office of Civil Rights on what policy wonks call the mismatch theory of affirmative action--i.e., because of affirmative action, students of color are admitted to institutions for which they are not truly prepared, which leads to their failure. The OCR staff expressd concern that affirmative actin was inadvertently harmful to those it sought to help. This argument was put forth in a recent paper by Richard Sanders, a law prof at UCLA. The article below is a reexamination of that data. Both papers raise issues relevant to our study of readiness and degree competion.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/03/affirm
Uri
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3 comments:
PBS also has been running specials on affirmative action during the NOW programming. The story is available through:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/434/index.html
I don’t think access guarantees anyone success in higher ed, but I’m hard pressed to conceive of any reason that access is a disservice to minority law/college students. Yoon and co miss the point that we have systematically inhibited the preparedness of minority/low-income students in three ways:
1. We have failed to respond effectively to school resource inequities affecting student achievement. Schools with predominantly minority/low-income populations are becoming more segregated and have problems attracting quality teachers. Poor districts are disproportionately plagued with high teacher turnover and low student achievement. In the long-run, even high achieving students at these schools perform more poorly than their high achieving peers in property rich districts.
As our Ready for Tomorrow reading indicated, “teachers in schools with minority enrollments of 50 percent or more leave their positions at twice the rate of teachers in schools with relatively few minority students. Without the hope of attracting high-quality teachers, poorly performing schools are unlikely to have the capacity to improve student achievement.”
Moreover, “low-income students are less likely to be enrolled in the college-preparatory program than their middle- or high income peers (28 percent, compared with 48 percent and 65 percent, respectively). African American and Hispanic youth are similarly disadvantaged (25 percent and 22 percent, respectively, compared with 34 percent for white students and 42 percent for Asian students).”
In short, the absence of human capitol and disparate resources among schools allows place and income to adversely impact the opportunity/access all students, but particularly low-income and minority students have to a rigorous curriculum. Affirmative action provides access to higher ed, but does not eradicate the effect of place, income, academic background on student achievement. Those inequities have yet to be truly addressed.
See: http://www.forumforeducation.org/resources/index.php?item=427&page=32(Forum for Education and Democracy 2008)
See: http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/14211.html(Harming the Best by Erik Hanushek 2008)
2. We have only recently begun the process of aligning our educational system and our educational standards differ by state. How can we hold students accountable for meeting a myriad of disparate standards? High Schools should ensure curriculum requisites produce graduates prepared to deal with the rigor of university studies no matter where their students go. We need a national curriculum….ala federal/state Tough Choices Tough Times.
3. We also not truly enforce higher ed accountability. Colleges and universities receiving state funding should be accountable for ensuring all graduates interested in advanced studies are prepared for them. This starts by collaborating with secondary institutions to ensure income classes are equipped with the skills they’ll need to succeed in college courses.
G.
Gilbert, I agree with your comments and strongly believe that the entire educational pipeline has many holes that are being patched up as a reactionary response.
When things go wrong, we have new programs established and money allocated for efforts that are viewed as remedial and/or temporary. We are at a point where it is essential to create systematic efforts throughout the entire pipeline to ensure that ALL students have the opportunities and support available to succeed.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, we have not effectively resolved the issue in order to provide scaleable change. We also see that time needs to transpire before we see the changes, which also implies that we need to be tracking our progress and evaluating our efforts in order to continue improving our programs.
More importantly, I believe this article does not convey the lack of support at some of these institutions. It is not enough to simply provide or give an opportunity. When you take a student who may not have the social capital and experiences that other students have had, it makes it difficult to navigate a new environment. So programs, people and structures need to be in place to help students be successful in school. ALL students!
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