By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments concerning affirmative action on Monday, October 31 and will rule before the end of June, 2023. Most news outlets are portraying the arguments for and against affirmative action to be a liberal-conservative issue focused on providing equity in educational access across various racial groups. This is not correct.
According to a poll by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Public Policy and Government, over 60 percent of respondents support eliminating race as a factor in college admissions. However, a similar percent also support programs that would increase racial diversity among college students, and recognize that having a diverse population on campuses is a good way for college students to understand others. And yet, 60 percent also did not consider it important that the student body of a state university match the state’s racial and ethnic proportions.
California would be considered a liberal state today, and it did have an affirmative action policy to maintain relatively proportional representation of various races and ethnic groups on state university campuses until 1996. Then Proposition 209 ended affirmative action in college admissions. Affirmative action had severely suppressed Asian-American enrollments and the result of removing it resulted in Asians being “over-represented” at universities in California, with nearly triple their share of high school graduates. A more recent Proposition 16 would have reinstated affirmative action in California college admissions—it failed to pass.
A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article included myriad graphs comparing the academic factors affecting white versus “under-represented minority” student groups, but failing to mention that there was one minority, the Asian-American students, who were over-represented in our state schools nationwide.
Today’s Education Schools refuse to admit that there is cultural variation in the extent various sub-groups value education. Asian-American students, despite being here for many generations, maintain a very high regard for education, called an educational “success frame.” Not 100 percent feel this parental expectation—where an “A-minus” is an Asian “F”—but it is well-documented and classroom teachers recognize it as well in most of their Asian-heritage students. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou detail this “success frame” in “The Asian American Achievement Paradox.”
Lee and Zhou also interviewed Hispanic, African-American, and working class white Americans in addition to Asian-Americans and found wide variations in cultural expectations of education. White working class families mostly have very low educational expectations for their children.
Recent arguments for affirmative action have been put forth in several books and articles asserting that the use of tests promotes a “myth of meritocracy,” and for the most part, it is merely helping the rich get their children into college by way of extra test-prep tutoring.
There is an irony in this argument, because the early Western world was ruled by a bureaucracy based on “patronage” where the rich became governmental functionaries without much education. That changed when the West adopted civil service examinations based on—you might guess it—a much older system of governmental exams established in China under the Sui Dynasty in AD 605. Such testing offered a route for children of the poor to have social mobility through education.
However, it would not be until the British Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854 that Her Majesty's Civil Service would be established, based on civil service exams, in part motivated by the chaos that occurred due to bureaucratic management of the Crimean War at that time!
This current U.S. Supreme Court will closely examine in detail the prior 2013 ruling on affirmative action in Fisher v. University of Texas. Yes, the court allowed affirmative action to stand, but it placed a burden on universities to prove that no viable race-neutral alternatives are available when the university uses racial preferences in admissions to increase diversity.
This is not a left-versus-right battle, but a return to rewarding those students, who study hard and demonstrate their knowledge and skills, the opportunity to move ahead in education and not be replaced by students with less study ethic. The future of a country depends on advancing its very best students.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities during 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.