Affirmative Action - The Battles Against Race-based Educational Plans E

Affirmative Action - The Battles Against Race-Based Educational Plans Californias decision in 1996 to outlaw the physical exercise of race in worldly concern college access codes was widely viewed as the beginning of the end for affirmative fill at national universities all over the fall in States. But in the four years since Californians passed trace 209, most states sur dedicate agreed that killing affirmative action outright would deepen companionable inequality by denying minority citizens access to luxuriouslyer education. The half-dozen states that atomic number 18 very thinking about abandoning race-sensitiveadmissions policies are themselves finding that the still way to flesh out the minority presence in college without such policies is to improve dramatically the public schools that most shady and Latino students attend. As a result, these states are keeping a close eye on California, Texas and Florida, where pctage systems have sprung up to repla ce affirmative action. Under these systems, students who achieve a specified be in their high school graduatingclasses are guaranteed admission to state colleges. In California, for example, the so-called 4 percent plan guarantees college admission to everyone in the cover song 4 percent of high school graduating classes statewide. Minority registration, which crashed after Proposition 209 passed, has rebounded at thesecond-tier colleges. But the decline has continued at the flagship colleges, U.C.L.A. and Berkeley -- largely because the high schools in black and Latino neighborhoods routinely fail to offer the modernistic placement courses that are readily available inwhite neighborhoods and that are taken into account when the elite colleges make admissions decisions. The American Civil Liberties coupler of Southern California has challenged this arrangement in a class-action lawsuit. Having eliminated the race-sensitive policies that once equilibrize for these ine qualities, California is now being forced to deal withthe inferior public schools that made those policies necessary. The University of Texas has learned a similar lesson since a federal romance ruling forced it to abandon race-based admissions policies in 1996. Black and Latino enrollment dipped precipitously in the first year, but rose once more after the legislature passed alaw guaranteeing college admission to all students who grad in the ... ...no children to fall behind. Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida is currently embroiled in a fight over an executive order that outlaws race-based admissions at the state universities -- charm guaranteeing admissions to the top 20 percent of high school classes. Mr. Bushs order was meant to render moot a ballot initiative on affirmative action that Republicans feared would heighten black turnout in this years presidential election. The 20 percent rule seemed non-controversial and even generous -- until Governor Bush found that close to two-thirds of additional black students who might benefit from the rule had been so overleap in high school that they had failed to graduate with the necessary credits for admission to the state university system. The state is now pushing public schools that serve black students to provide better course offerings. What all these states have learned is that the only real way to make race-sensitive policies unnecessary is to guarantee black and Latino children from poor communities a realistic chance at a becoming education that prepares them for college. To kill the policies before those guarantees are in place is to apostrophize civic disaster.