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New Policy Hides Public School Failure
By David Horowitz
Like every reform proposal since Proposition 209, the new University of California admission policies are the product of political blackmail, designed to circumvent the law. They are anti-Latino, anti-black and anti-poor. They will inevitably diminish even further the value of an education in the UC system, and thus are an attack on the citizens of California.
Under the comprehensive review policy, academic performance will be only one of three requirements for admission, which will now also include the absurdly subjective "life challenges" requirement. This is something that only God could judge with any justice, but which the UC Board of Regents has entrusted to ordinary bureaucrats, giving them 10 minutes per applicant to make a decision.
This hanky-panky is justified by a political fairy dust called "institutional racism," which allegedly denies equal access to a handful of minority groups, in a state where literally hundreds of different languages are spoken.
In fact, under the 1957 Master Plan for Higher Education, the UC was already an open system. The law guaranteed every California resident with a high school diploma the right to a place in the state's higher education system. This included a multi-tiered system of community, junior and state colleges that provided open and fair access to all its levels.
What was not guaranteed was an immediate place at the top without having earned it. Prior to the affirmative action movement, educators were guided by the quaint idea that education should be meritocratic, and that its rewards should not be distributed on the basis of racial prejudice or any other subjective bias.
Affirmative action aimed at destroying this system, justifying itself by unsubstantiated charges of university bigotry. But the efforts of Regent Ward Connerly and scholars like Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom have shown beyond reasonable doubt that racial disparities in UC admissions have nothing to do with what is preposterously called "institutional racism" (in plain English, racism without actual racists). They are the result of the failure of Latino and black applicants to meet existing academic standards. The reasons for this failure lie in the bankruptcy of the public schools, which the Democratic Party and the political left have controlled for half a century.
Recently, the Los Angeles School District announced that it would not be ending "social promotion," because that would mean holding back 350,000 children who were failing in its schools half the entire school population. (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 20, 2000).
This is a social atrocity. Two-thirds of these children are Latino; all of them are poor. Under the policy of social promotion, the school district lies to them and moves them along tocover up the system's failure. These lies are perpetuated by UC affirmative action policies and grade inflation, which are also designed to conceal failure.
No one ever achieved greater results by lowering the bar. The new UC policy is not designed to promote minority achievement but to get more minorities into the UC system without improving the public schools.
Benefiting from this system that robs poor, black and Latino children of their educational birthright, are adults Democratic politicians, teacher union socialists and education bureaucrats who are leeching off an institutional budget that is greater than the gross national products of most nations in the United Nations.
If the UC entrance requirements were strictly academic, the public would be forced to focuson the racist failure of the public schools rather than on fantasies of denial like "institutional racism" at the university level, which nobody can identify and therefore nobody can remedy.
The new policy is driven by the illusion that the deficiencies of the public schools can be corrected at the college level. Research by the Thernstroms has shown that the result of racially rigged entrance requirements is that black and Latino students in the UC system perform at the bottom of their classes and drop out in record percentages. These gaps will be perpetuated under the new policy. They create the perception among minorities and majorities alike that blacksand Latinos are intellectually inferior, thus stoking the very fires of racism that reformers pretend to be trying to eliminate.
They also create academic failure where none was necessary. If underachievers were matched with colleges for which they were actually qualified, they would do well, graduate in the same percentages as other groups and go on to equally successful careers. But the left sees advantage in perpetuating failure: the more human misery they can create for others, the better they feel about themselves.
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