Scrapbook
Scrapbook The Michigan Punt Regarding the administration's intervention in the Michigan affirmative action cases, we'll confess to being surprised—and disappointed. The big issue in the litigation...
...Toward the end of the 2000-2001 school year, Kaplowitz ushers one of his students to the door, as the boy insists on going to the bathroom, and places his hand on the boy's lower back...
...Call us naive, but we thought that was the question in the Michigan cases...
...Making matters worse, Emery's principal was unwilling to back teachers and deal with out-of-control children...
...As he tells the story in the winter issue of City Journal., Kaplowitz joined Teach for America in spring 2000 and found a job at the Emery elementary school in Northeast Washington...
...Kaplowitz is arrested, tried for assault, and acquitted after a very brief trial...
...But in its brief the administration offered no opinion on the constitutionality of the diversity rationale...
...And the Florida Line Too bad the administration evaded the affirmative action/diversity debate, because it's certainly never a dull one...
...FBI affidavits have itemized property seized from the homes of the former president Barbara Bullock, the former treasurer James O. Baxter II, and Bullock's former assistant, Gwendolyn M. Hemphill...
...In fact, any teacher who merely separated fighting students was likely to be investigated for the use of corporal punishment...
...Gangs roamed the halls...
...State of the (Teachers') Union Washington, D.C., has one of the worst public education systems in the country...
...Thus, we had hoped the administration might challenge the diversity rationale by exposing its creepy underlying assumption (namely, that students should not be considered as individuals but as interchangeable members of their racial groups) and by showing that it is a recipe for never-ending discrimination...
...The boy tells his mother that Kaplowitz violently shoved him...
...But then come the civil suits...
...teacher turn for some support, some representation, some justice...
...If the Court should accept the administration's advice, we can imagine Michigan doing away with quotas and trying race-neutral alternatives only to find that they don't produce the desired results...
...In which case, the school could again try race-based policies...
...The school system, along with the teachers' union, immediately settle for $75,000...
...the American Association of University Professors' magazine, former University of Pennsylvania psychology professor K. Edward Renner presents a novel liberal view of affirmative action: It hasn't helped integrate colleges and universities...
...A partial list of property seized from former president Bullock: 35 handbags (Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel, Fen-di, Louis Vuitton, Kate Spade, and on and on with the Chanel), 11 wigs, a 288-piece set of Tiffany silverware, Tiffany white pearl necklace, silver Tiffany ring, silver Tiffany watch, one black cashmere cape with fox trim, one long ranch mink coat, one mink 3-piece scarf set, 40 (yes, 40) pairs of shoes (mostly Bruno Magli and Salvatore Ferragamo), and much else besides...
...But they wouldn't exist in the first place unless they could be justified in terms Michigan thinks are constitutional, i.e., on diversity grounds...
...His second-grade classroom, and much of the school, was in a state of chaos...
...The problem with these arguments—and here lies the disappointment—is that they go only so far...
...Florida's plan is better in that it no longer accepts the lack of quality in the public schools that serve our underprivileged children...
...Almost every other item is listed as being in its original box...
...According to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Renner concedes blacks and Hispanics now go to college in greater numbers than in previous decades but argues that trends favoring whites have made the education gap no less daunting than it was 40 years ago...
...For while they may be enough to decide the cases at hand, they are insufficient to bring discriminatory admissions at Michigan (and elsewhere) to a halt...
...And while it addressed narrow tailoring to some extent, it was mostly interested— this was the surprise—in arguing against the Michigan policies on grounds (1) that they are quotas and (2) that school officials should have tried to achieve student body diversity (leaving aside whether that is constitutional) by first using race-neutral policies...
...Like most other universities with race-based admissions, Michigan asserts that maintaining a diverse student body is its compelling interest, and of course it believes that its use of race is indeed narrowly tailored to achieve that goal...
...The Michigan policies are certainly defective on that score...
...Two recent news stories— both of them corruption tales—help explain why...
...In the upcoming issue of Academe (Jan./Feb...
...Now, in such circumstances, where might a D.C...
...better because it recognizes the need to provide mentoring, tutoring, and other extra attention to those underprivileged children and their teachers . . . better because it looks forward to a day when racial classifications and separate standards are no longer deemed necessary by anyone...
...As this Court noted in Miller v. Johnson, when a state actor makes an assumption that members of a particular race think alike or share the same political views it engages in 'racial stereotyping at odds with equal protection mandates.'" Though Jeb approvingly refers to his own state's "race-neutral" Talented Twenty Percent and Talented Five Percent programs—which in fact are government programs designed to foster racial diversity—he says rightly that the focus should be on the primary and secondary schools...
...In the first, Joshua Kaplowitz, a recent Yale grad "with a strong sense of social justice," gets a job teaching fifth graders in the inner city and ends up getting sued for $20,000,000...
...That question in turn would depend on whether the State had asserted a compelling interest (and whether its use of race were otherwise narrowly tailored...
...Of the many eye-popping items in the FBI affidavit, one detail keeps jumping out in the list of the former union president's "property": boxes...
...We didn't think the administration would support the Michigan policies (see "Race and the Republicans," Dec...
...Which means, if the accusations are true, that while Joshua Kaplowitz's parents were running up legal bills to defend their son, the union officials who should have been defending him were so busy stealing they hardly had time to unpack the loot...
...Meanwhile, Florida governor Jeb Bush, in his amicus brief in the Michigan case, staked out a position to the right of his brother's administration, arguing that seeking racial diversity without regard to individual applicants' opinions and backgrounds is never a compelling government interest and that it perpetuates old notions of racial difference: "Respondents' assumption that efforts to provide racial diversity equate to viewpoint or academic diversity is problematic...
...Children disrupted class without any fear of being disciplined...
...The big issue in the litigation is whether under the Court's equal protection jurisprudence Michigan's use of race (by the admissions offices of its undergraduate and law schools) is "narrowly tailored" to achieve a "compelling interest...
...30, 2002), but we worried that it might confine its argument against the policies to issues of narrow tailoring...
...He specifically blames alumni preferences, but also prepaid tuition plans and "the current movement among many public colleges to tighten admissions standards...
...Here's hoping the justices reject the counsel found in the footnote's concluding sentence: "The Court need not reach that question in this case...
...Kaplowitz, however, stands firm, refusing to pay a dime, to his credit and to his parents' credit (they're the poor souls picking up the legal tab...
...In which case, as footnote 7 in the law school brief recognizes, "the question whether race could ever be a consideration would arise...
...Three former union officials are under investigation for looting the union treasury of $2 million...
...Not the teachers' union, it turns out, which has problems of its own...
Vol. 8 • January 2003 • No. 19
