| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondEssay" |
|---|
| | | Olympic runners Usain Bolt, Leo Manzano, and Galen Rupp walk to the starting line of their race. The gunman signals; they take their mark. 10 seconds pass; the gun goes off. It is time for all to run to the finish line, right? Wrong. Bolt is Black and Manzano is Latino; both are underrepresented minorities. They must wait for Rupp, their Caucasian peer, to go first, make his laps around, and usurp all the benefits. Time passes, which feels like a century, and it’s finally Bolt and Manzano’s turn to run in this race of inequity. While running, their feet are shackled by chains that accompany their status as underrepresented minorities in America. They are weighed down by redlining, the school-to-prison pipeline, and police brutality. But, they are expected to perform just as well as Rupp who not only started before them, but ran in the absence of impenetrable obstacles. Welcome to California’s Public Higher Education system: the race with the inherently unequal playing field. | |
<
< | As a native East Coaster, it may seem odd that I am writing about CA’s education system. However, I have known since high school that I ultimately plan to move to and build my roots in California following law school graduation. Due to my plans to build a family in the Golden State, I first desired to research about the state’s relationship to race and education. | >
> | As a native East Coaster, it may seem odd that I am writing about CA’s education system. However, comparing California's higher education results, due in part to Prop 13 and Prop 209, is interesting as it reveals an interesting comparative investigation between California's barrier to affirmative action and the lack there of in Eastern states, such as New York. | | | | |
<
< | I was disappointed. | >
> | This comparative investigation left me disappointed. Firstly, California's higher education realm is unique due to Prop 13 and Prop 209. Prop 13 engendered a decrease in property taxes and restrictions to annual increases of assessed value. Additionally, it led to the requirement of 2/3 majority in both houses for future increases in state taxes. Ultimately, this lead to Prop 13 limiting the use of property taxes in financing public education. Consequently taking California from among the highest ranked states in public education outcomes to among the lowest. To make matters worse, Prop 209 created a virtual prohibition of race-conscious decision-making in, among other roles, public education. The effects of this proposition are discussed below, but what must be acknowledge is the stark similarity between California's higher education results and New York's, a state that supports affirmative action within employment, higher education, etc.
NYU was recently hailed for admitting its most diverse undergraduate class (2023) in history, with 12% Black and 22% Latinx. However, is this rate all that good and does it demonstrate affirmative action is really working? When you look at the state of New York higher education, white students still occupy more than the majority (52%). This reality seems shocking when considering that, unlike California, New York has no barriers to affirmative action. I will next discuss the current status of California's affirmative action system. | | | Current Status of Affirmative Action in California
With CA’s ban on affirmative action (AA), we’re on a crusade to make America homogenous again. In 2017, Donald Trump had announced the administration'sinvestigation and potential lawsuit against universities who utilize affirmative action policies. He deemed it as a system of intentional race-based discrimination. | | | This goes beyond a moral inclination to do good. AA directly impacts your pockets. | |
>
> | *Despite its benefits, should we rely on a system created in the 1960s to rectify racism?
* | | | | |
<
< | It seems that CA universities acknowledge AA’s benefits themselves. UC Berkeley's mission statement calls for “open and equitable access to opportunities for learning and development”. Berkeley, albeit subconsciously, champions the importance of equal access to education for all, not just a segment of society. Maybe Berkeley and other UC schools have my back and the backs of other underrepresented minorities.
But they don’t.
Conclusion
Without AA’s implementation, California excludes underrepresented minorities just like the G.I. bill did.
The state cannot claim to be “the capital of Liberal America”, then turn around and whip us with instruments of injustice. We must take it beyond unfilled mission statements. The window to push for AA is wide open and the time is now. We need AA for justice, profit, and progress.
If you think your future and the implementation of AA are unrelated, just think about how without AA, this war on underrepresented minorities will lead to a stagnant and unprogressive America. Do we really want that?
I think there are two possible routes to substantive improvement here. | >
> | The dean of Wesleyan University stated, in reference to AA, ““I think it’s a fair question to ask: Did we really understand or know what we were doing, or could we have predicted what the issues would be?”. This dean is correct. As we see in the comparison between California and New York, it seems that a state not operating under AA and one that is elicits similar results. This may mean that AA isn't as effective. As a remedial arrangement, AA was shaped over sixty years ago and was not able to be formulated in a way that considered our changing socio, economic, political, and technological advances. All of these attributes relate to the racial gap and its widening, despite valid efforts. Due to the knee jerk reaction of 1960s political scientists and advocates of AA, it may be true that AA was a system that was influenced by "colorblind society" trying to fill quotas. However, this type of framework is dangerous when attempting to achieve racial equality, and we may be seeing this today in the effects of AA. Although the alternatives are costly, such as the lottery systems in Europe, this investigation made it clear to me that the current AA system may not be truly effective, as I once thought.
| | | | |
<
< | First, most of the statements made about California in this draft would be more or less directly transferable to any discussion about any other state's situation in its higher education system. Two elements are present in California's context that are relevantly special: the Prop 13 limits on the use of property taxes in financing public education, and the Prop 209 prohibition on race-conscious decision-making in, among other roles, public education. Prop 13 took California from among the highest ranked states in public education outcomes to among the lowest. After a quarter century under the effects of Prop 209, comparative effects should also be visible in relation to states, like NY, with large public higher education systems and no barrier to affirmative efforts to include all the public in the state's system of higher education. We are now half a century into the open enrollment system in the City University of New York, and that too might provide relevant points of comparison. | | | | |
<
< | Second, I think the draft can be improved by more carefully separating the goal, which—as you point out in an opening illustration that can be compressed—is the attainment of real social and economic equality from the remedial means, referred to as "affirmative action," largely developed in the 1960s. Although critics in the libertarian and socially conservative strands of American political conversation often decry "equality of results" instead of "equality of opportunity," the actual purpose of public education is precisely to achieve equality of outcome. Every child in society should have an equal education at the public's expense, and that education should be sufficient to offer all children the knowledge and skills they want to acquire to suit them for the lives they want to have. Continuing education should be equally available to all citizens throughout their lives, priced according to their individual ability to pay, so as to offer all an equal opportunity to learn, to think and publish, and to retrain and reskill themselves as they see fit. We can be sure that this level of acceptance of the public sphere's duty and value to the people will not be realized in my lifetime, though it could be in yours. In the meantime, we not only competitively allocate places in the higher educational system, but we do so on the basis of plainly unjust failures to provide equal primary and secondary education. Those unjust inequalities subsist in relation to historical inequalities of many sorts, as well as presently-existing social discrimination systems in a society becoming rapidly more unequal in distributions of income and wealth. | | | | |
<
< | Naturally, remedial arrangements shaped sixty years ago in the then-existing social and technological context will have some continuing value now, and likewise they will be largely outmoded and in need of replacement. Fighting with the "colorblind society" advocates over "quotas" and "preferences" might not be worth it in an information society context. UC as a whole and its component campuses can use far more advanced data-modeling systems to admit their students, in which a large number of components none of which are prohibited under Prop 209 are combined to create admissions profiles. Such a system could produce precisely the admissions distributions that make each class representative of California, without running afoul of Prop 209 or judicial rulings to similar effect. Or, like social democracies in Europe such as the Netherlands, we could conduct lotteries among all applicants for the fixed number of available places. (This is more equal, but in other respects more socially costly than the much more flexible US public higher education systems.) Focusing on the desired social outcome enables remedial creativity, which is both tactically and strategically important. | | |
|
|