Beyond Racial Preferences

...This is not about lowering,the gates,” says Cecil Lytle, the UCSD provost who introduced the idea...

...Military Academy Preparatory School (USMAPS) in Eatontown, N.J...

...Americans don’t believe in racial preferences, but they do believe in giving a hand to lads who live in constant fear of being shot...

...The Army, as a matter of fairness, made sure that performance would be the only measure of advancement...

...And some education researchers are skeptical about what the current crop of programs can do for lowincome students, particularly if they focus exclusively on remedial education...

...These numbers would appear to vindicate the prep school’s remedial mission, which has allowed West Point to maintain its high percentage of minority cadets without lowering its standards...

...Now we’re trying to give some substance to that myth...

...For many of these kids the most important step is just finding someone - anyone - who can point them in the right direction...

...Putting programs like that in place would be expensive...

...Sam Nunn of Georgia and Congressman Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma introduced a national service bill in 1989, it was attacked on the grounds that it would disproportionately benefit minority and poor kids...

...Affirmative action has not elevated the academic achievement of minority youngsters, and that’s what we’d like to do with this program...

...Of course, USMAPS is expensive: between $40,000 and $60,000 a year per student...

...Her solution was to bill the program as an elective offered during school hours rather than afterward, and to focus it on core subjects...

...So many of their parents are addicts or abusive or just plain absent, that lately Taylor has begun arranging for some of them to live at the homes of staff members, where they will at least be safe and able to do their homework...

...It breaks down stereotypes in an environment of common challenge...

...She had to find a way to create a forum for intensive academic work that the whole school would respect...

...Nor do the prepsters suffer any stigma when they arrive at the academy...

...Even their most ardent defenders admit that preference programs have done little or nothing for the truly disadvantaged black poor...

...True Colors On May 17,1965, Lyndon Johnson stepped into the Rose Garden to introduce a program called Head Start...

...And as it happens, the institution that produced Colin Powell - the US...

...Although the failure rate for minorities soon doubled, the policy stood until 1995, when the father of a white girl who had been rejected sued the school board...

...Enlisted “prepsters” earn higher GPAs at West Point than direct-admits, even though they start out with lower SAT scores and grades...

...Clinton seemed to think he had scored a home run...

...Classes focus on the basics, English and math, with an unapologetic tracking system: advanced, standard, and fundamentals...

...Many liberals would deplore this ruling as a return to segregation...

...And it led to an 85 percent increase in black college enrollment...

...Almost one in four American children under six years old is living in poverty today, a vastly disproportionate number of them black and Hispanic, but the programs that might give them a fair start in life are still underfunded...

...Bringing back mandatory national service - an idea this magazine has long supported - would make a full-scale equal opportunity program feasible by supplying some of the labor, and giving middleclass children a stake in the program...

...Under Pressure The Puritan elders who founded the Boston Public Latin School in 1635 never dreamed that it would someday run a “boot camp” for minority applicants...

...Established in 1916, USMAPS’ rigorous 10month program is designed to bring promising but low-scoring candidates up to speed for West Point, which is still the Army’s most prestigious source of commissions...

...The remedy, Berdahl added, lay in a redoubled outreach effort for poor and “underrepresented” students at schools like MLK, all the way from kindergarten through 12th grade...

...At mostly white campuses, the dropout rate for blacks and Hispanics is five times the rate for whites...

...Because like it or not, preference programs are collapsing like rotten timber in school boards and courthouses across the country...

...Especially, we might add, if the tree is left in a crumbling building full of crack addicts and gangbangers...

...They may have the rhetoric of high intention, but no system to help achieve it...

...With each passing year, students denied equal access to challenging classes and ultimately to college-prep courses see their chances of college admission decline...

...Preferential treatment,” writes essayist Shelby Steele, “no matter how it is justified in the light of day, subjects blacks to a midnight of selfdoubt, and so often transforms their advantage into a revolving door...

...MESA arranges for buses to take children to the campus after school and on Saturday mornings, where an undergraduate or professor drills them on math and science...

...Not by a long shot...

...The university can’t make up for the failure of the public school system,” says Ryan Tate, a Berkeley senior who sat in on the UC Outreach Task Force, a 32-member panel charged with finding new ways to maintain student diversity without preferences...

...That’s true - and it’s a good reason to revive the idea...

...That’s why it might make a lot of sense for Clinton to propose them as an alternative to current forms of affirmative action...

...In the end, Vargas got a scholarship to a private school, but even afterward, “I needed to be pushed - there were some real gaps in my education...

...It is not an exaggeration to say the process of selection of who will go to college begins in the first grade,” declared University of California Chancellor Robert Berdahl at a press conference in January...

...It’s too soon to say what effects this will have in the long term, but Aldaco claims that 80 percent of the local minority hds in public schools who went through the MESA in its early years wound up in college, compared to virtually none of those who didn’t...

...The school staff will include undergraduate tutors who will get “public service” credit for their teaching...

...Many of them come from what headmaster James Taylor calls “very impacted backgrounds, like what you would see on a TV special about crime in America...

...To get an education, our kids have to go to one of the exam schools,” says Boston School Committee Chairman Liz Reilinger...

...Students at the University of Texas law school [where another landmark preference program was struck down] are going to get in someplace...

...The school’s graduates include John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Cotton Mather (Ben Franklin dropped out early to work for his father), and it is still the toughest of Boston’s three competitive-entry “exam” schools...

...We’re working under the assumption that all setasides will be removed,” says Mike Danziger, who runs a nonprofit that is working with Boston Latin on a supplementary boot camp that will start running at another local school this summer...

...And believe it or not, there’s every reason to believe the government can help us do that...

...Most programs for minority kids focus on weaknesses, and the kids never really become motivated to excel,” says Uri Treisman, a mathematician who has taught at Berkeley and recently won a MacArthur Foundation grant for his own educational program work...

...V i was getting his Als at his local public school when a teacher told him about Summerbridge, a nonprofit that seeks out children from lowincome families, puts them through tough after-school programs, and guides them through the bewildering process of applymg to competitive schools...

...But in fact, some very similar methods have been showing up in one of the oldest and messiest public school systems in the country...

...Mary Jo Ward, director of the Heads Up Literacy Project at New York Hospital...

...After he left office in 1968,Johnson would often drive across the creek from his Texas ranch to the local Head Start center to take the kids out for candy in his white Lincoln Continental...

...Some critics also claim that its successes are inseparable from the Army’s authoritarian and hierarchical nature, and can’t be replicated in the messier world outside...

...Now that preferences are all but gone, it’s time to start focusing again on the programs that will help to create something like a level playing field for all young people by the time they’re 18...

...Those aren’t exactly ideal conditions for learning to read and write...

...Expanding Head Start into a full range of boot camp-style assistance programs, with the goal of giving all children something like a decent shot at success by the time they’re 18, would do a lot more for the underclass than racial preferences ever have...

...They’re too small and too few, and they cannot do much more than skim off a group of students who might have made it anyway...

...And they stay: According to research by faculty at UC San Diego, 89 percent of AVID graduates stay on after two years, in a state where SO percent of college students drop out after freshman year...

...Instead of fighting the suit, the board admitted the girl and dropped its 35 percent quota in 1996...

...Instead, it seeks out promising young minority and low-income kids and enrolls them in aggressive, boot camp-style remedial programs - an example civilian schools and employers would do well to heed...

...Because blacks score on average almost 200 points lower on the SAT than whites, USMAPS has become an indispensable pipeline for bringing them into the officer corps...

...They step off the bus into an immaculate world of plazas and fountains, and walk into the Bechtel Engineering Building...

...But with over 500,000 public school students in the Bay area, there’s a limit to what Berkeley - or any UC campus, for that matter - can do...

...Thirty years later, Head Start is still underfunded...

...The president’s new program was designed to provide decent primary care for children who might not otherwise get it, and to start them reading early so they wouldn’t fall behind in elementary school...

...Eight years later, AVID is being used in 580 schools in 11 states and 13 foreign countries...

...Part of the genius of AVID,” says Treisman, “is that it’s riot focused on race...

...It would also build on the success of the GI Bill in helping poor kids pay for college...

...The End of the Rainbow Coaiition Most of the students at San Francisco’s Martin Luther King Middle School live in Hunter’s Point, a neighborhood that is dirt-poor, crime-ridden, and literally toxic: The air reeks with deadly fumes from an old Navy yard dumping-site...

...Beyond Racial Preferences A handful of programs are showing that there is life after affirmative action BY ROBERT WORTH LAST DECEMBER, AT HIS NATIONAL town meeting on race relations in Akron, Ohio, President Clinton had finally agreed to listen to critics of affirmative action...

...Buffalo Soldiers Most people know that the Army has been one of the great sources of opportunity for African-Americans, but few understand that it doesn’t actually practice racial preferences...

...They don’t believe in preferences.’’ Clinton, never one to miss a sound bite, thrust his oversized microphone into Thernstrom’s face: ‘Abigail, do you favor the U.S...

...Despite its proven success at helping poor children, it only serves about 40 percent of those who are eligible...

...But what does Powell say about how he got ahead...

...Swanson wanted to find a way to accommodate the torrent of poor, underprepared black and Hispanic students who were bussed into her school that year as part of a federal desegregation order...

...The program runs three hours a day, four days a week through the month of July and part of August...

...Now their treasured rainbow was about to wash away, or so it seemed, unless they could find a solution before the new rules kicked in for the entering class of 1998...

...military bases around the world...

...For kids who don’t have the good luck to get a scholarship to a private school, as Vargas did, the system is even less fair...

...What we’re really doing is opening up a whole new range of interactions between campuses and schools,” says Karl Pister, a UC emeritus professor who is overseeing the new plan...

...The question for us is, how are we going to get kids into the pipeline to go to college at all...

...The issue in the current case is whether we value diversity,” says Charles Ogletree, a Harvard Law professor who was on the committee that wrote the new policy...

...Critics have claimed that the IQ gains it brings to children tend to disappear a few years later...

...There isn’t a level playing field...

...As Sargent Shriver, the architect of Head Start, said: “If one plants a tree, for example, and gives it lots of nourishment at its beginning and then goes away and leaves it for the next five years, the tree will not grow as well as if the nourishment were continued...

...Boston Latin’s students go on to the nation’s best universities, while half of the city’s public school kids would currently fail the state’s new minimum graduation requirements...

...Instead of stumping for racial preferences, Clinton should focus on the words Powell used: equal opportunity...

...Their answer has been to unleash an army of tutors - both faculty and undergraduates - on local public schools...

...It was a slap in the face to see how far behind I was and how unfair the system was...

...Four years in, the entire school showed a 35 percent gain in basic math shlls, and a 46 percent gain in languages...

...In 1974 a federal desegregation order forced Boston Latin to modify its admissions process to ensure a 35 percent black and Hispanic student body...

...The Supreme Court recently refused to hear a challenge to California’s ballot initiative banning race and gender preferences, Proposition 209...

...Like USMAPS, it attacks the fundamentals - English and math - and is openly geared towards improving scores...

...She knew the program would never work if minority students felt stigmatized by it, or saw it as a “nerdy” activity better suited to whites and Asians...

...Some “prepsters” are enlisted men and women, others are high school graduates who have been identified as promising by recruiters...

...But that has less to do with Head Start than with the miserable quality of the public elementary schools most of these children attend...

...Five and six year old children are inheritors of poverty’s curse and not its creators,” he said...

...Students who last through the program end up with SAT scores that average 110 points higher than when they started...

...Thirty years after Martin Luther King’s stirring call for a color-blind society, the persistence of racial quotas strikes most Americans as an insult to his legacy...

...Some of our families have talked about putting out their lights at night, and crawling through certain rooms, because they were afraid of being shot,” says Dr...

...They can’t go for a quart of milk, because they’re afraid of never coming back...

...One of the few programs that has proved consistently effective with high school children is Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID, which was founded in 1980 by a high school English teacher in San Diego named Mary Catherine Swanson...

...Yes or no...

...Lytle wants other campuses, at UC and around the country, to follow suit...

...There they are met by two or three cheerful Berkeley undergraduates who will tutor them in math and science and assure them that they too, if they work hard enough, can go to college...

...What makes this unique is that you have a different responsibility at this level,” says Contompasis...

...Eighty percent of those kids are minorities, and 85 percent of them are poor enough to qualify for the free lunch program...

...Yale researcher Edward Zigler puts it more prosaically: “To continue the’momentum towards success, there must be a smooth transition from the preschool to the school environment and coordinated programming that builds upon prior learning...

...Ironically, Proposition 209 has strengthened support for more aggressive forms of outreach,” said one vice-chancellor who bitterly opposed it at the time...

...But by the ’60s the school’s lily-white racial composition was in stark contrast to nearby Dorchester, which is poor and mostly black...

...Ironically, this sudden hunger for equal opportunity grew directly from what most California liberals saw as a disaster: the UC regents’ 1995 decision to ban the use of race and gender in hiring and admissions...

...A recent study published by Harvard University Press found that the mere mention of affirmative action inspires racial animosity in whites...

...It’s no surprise that the Department of Defense took an interest in what AVID was doing with minority kids in 1990, and asked Swanson if she would extend the program to DOD schools at U.S...

...The only way to make sure that all poor kids have a fair shot at success by the time they finish high school is to start much earlier and push a lot harder...

...It was “not an affirmative action program,” she says, though its prerequisiteseconomic hardship, parents who didn’t go to college, low (but not failing) grades - landed her a majority of blacks and Hispanics...

...The results speak for themselves...

...Worst of all, affirmative action has sucked away political support for need-based programs that would address the most glaring realities of unequal opportunity...

...Unless we act, these children will pass it on to the next generation, like a family birthmark...

...Boston Latin headmaster Wchael Contompasis is putting his hopes into what he calls “academic boot camps” held during the summer between Sth and 6th grade, with another week of preparation at the start of the school year, just before the kids take the entrance exam for Boston’s three magnet schools...

...They’re already providing expertise for agriculture, law, medicine...

...In effect, that will mean helping out a lot of minority children - not because we want the world to look like an ad for the United Colors of Benetton, but because we believe in equal opportunity...

...The GI Bill was expensive, but it had the whole-hearted support of Americans, because they knew those veterans had helped to win the war...

...Army - has been leading the way...

...But its modified preference policy, which was designed to maintain an 18 or 19 percent minority enrollment, has also been challenged (the case is currently in court...

...But needs-based programs, however well-intentioned, won’t get far if ordinary voters see them as just another handout to the poor...

...Alrnost half of every freshman class was judged on race and ethnicity as well as merit - a process they defended in the name of diversity rather than past injustices...

...Of those students who go through the program, 93.8 percent go on to college...

...In the meantime, the death of affirmative action should give us cause for hope, not despair...

...UC San Diego is actually building a charter school right on campus, designed to boost under-performing children from poor families into the UC system...

...Consider, for instance, the US...

...But we’re not an affirmative action program...

...You’ve been given an extra push, so they expect that much more of you,” says one graduate...

...In other words, AVID is a kind of civilian analogue for USMAPS...

...The deans at Berkeley had spent the previous decade crafting a multiculturalist paradise by cutting the percentage of white undergrads in half and swelling the size of the Asian, Latino, and black presences on campus...

...There are lots of smart kids in the public schools who just don’t have any idea they could go to college,” says Joel Virgas, the son of poor Mexican and Chinese immigrants and now a doctoral student at Harvard...

...Another cadet recalls: “When I showed up at West Point the squad leader took me aside and said, ‘I expect you to help me carry my squad through...

...Why not use them to improve the schools...

...Still, programs like AVID will never fill the gap left by the eclipse of preferences...

...Army abolishing the affirmative action program that produced Colin Powell?~Yeso r no...

...Every major city has four or five major universities right in the hood,” he says...

...But on Saturday mornings a bright yellow school bus stops in front of the front doors at MLK and picks up about a dozen students to drive them over the Bay Bridge to Berkeley...

...In fact, the court has been moving slowly but surely towards a ruling in favor of Title VI15 original meaning: Race and gender discrimination is illegal, unless it is intended as a remedy for specific prior injustice...

...Clearly, there’s a need for programs that would do more than shoehorn a few bright kids into an exam school...

...You often hear people talk about the educational continuum, but there really hasn’t been one...

...Americans believe in affirmative action,” said Abigail Thernstrom, a demure middleaged author with silver hair...

...If anything, they’re held to a hgher standard, thanks to their early taste of military rigor...

...You can smell the hype, but beneath it is a real ferment of ideas about reaching out to low-income students...

...With only three exam schools and a student population of over 63,000, the odds for success are pretty bad...

...When Sen...

...It’s not just the schools that are bad...

...In the workplace, preference programs brand minorities and women as mere tokens, and they may well help to maintain the “glass ceiling” on minority promotions that they were designed to remedy...

...We think we’re the answer now,” says Mike Aldaco, statewide director of the Math, Engineering, Science, and Achievement (MESA) program...

...Maybe so, but the school board isn’t counting on it...

...If the end of preferences has the same effect everywhere, bring it on...

...Some of the deans at the University of California have started admitting, however grudgingly, that ending preferences has pushed them towards a fairer admissions policy...

...They’re trying so hard to make up for 209, but there’s a real danger that they could try to do too much and spread themselves too thin...

...On entering the prep school’s gray cinderblock compound, everyone gets the same rude awakening: reveille at 530 a.m., followed by a fierce succession of classes and athletic programs, right up to taps at 11:OO p.m...

...And if we really value diversity it will be reflected in a student body that looks like the Boston public school system...

...Essentially, the regents took away a tool for maintaining diversity, so the key for us now is working intensively with minority students at the precollege level, making sure they can clear the bar by a healthy margin...

...The students involved would end up studying fewer subjects and knowing them much better...

...They would have to be tough, and they have to find ways to maintain a broad base of support...

...In the meantime, a number of UC campuses are already running a number of programs for local schoolchildren on campus...

...Above all, black prep school graduates have a higher graduation rate from West Point than any other group, despite the fact that outside the military the black college dropout rate is 22 percent higher for blacks than it is for whites...

...I benefited from equal opportunity,” the general wrote in his 1994 autobiography, “. . . but I was not shown preference...

...He was intensely proud of the program, which reminded him of the lessons he had learned about “the high price of poverty and prejudice” as a young schoolteacher in a town near the Mexican border...

...some children never even get that far...

...Nat Hentoff, who attended five decades ago, remembers it as a melting pot heated by fierce academic standards: “We were all at risk of not making the grade, and that created a bond among youngsters who otherwise were from neighborhoods often engaged in tribal warfare...

...we’re open to all kids who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity...

...But the fact that Bill Cosby’s children still have a government-sponsored advantage over those of a white welfare mother makes most voters furious...

...That’s very dangerous...

...Nor has affirmative action really helped those it was meant for...

...That may sound like mission impossible, but it’s been done before...