Yet Another Way Affirmative Action Hurts

From Yahoo News:

Black and Latino students may be getting less critical, but helpful, feedback from teachers than their white counterparts, a new educational study indicates.

“The social implications of these results are important; many minority students might not be getting input from instructors that stimulates intellectual growth and fosters achievement,” study researcher Kent Harber, a Rutgers-Newark psychology professor, said in a press release.

This positive bias in feedback to minority students may be contributing to the achievement gap between white and minority students, a stubborn national problem, Harber said.

The study “tested” 113 white middle-school and high-school teachers in two public school districts, one middle class and white, and the other working class and racially mixed. Both are located in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area.

Harber and colleagues developed a poorly written essay that they gave to the teachers to grade, under the pretense that it was the work of a student. In some cases, the teachers believed the student was white, in others black and in others Latino.

The teachers believed their feedback would go directly to the student.

The researchers found that, indeed, the teachers were prone to give more praise and less criticism if they believed a minority student had written the paper, as opposed to a white student.

The researchers also considered the support the teacher received from colleagues and administration. This turned out to be an important factor if the teachers believed the student was black, with only teachers who lacked support showing the bias. However, when teachers thought the student was Latino, they showed the bias toward positive feedback regardless.

“These results indicate that the positive feedback bias may contribute to the insufficient challenge that undermines minority students’ academic achievement,” the researchers conclude.

The study appeared online April 30 in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Of course, the teachers may believe that minority students have had a tougher time in life, and that a poor essay represents a reasonable effort for them. But this pervasive belief that minority students are not “up to” the intellectual demands that white students can handle has more bad consequences than we can count.

Ward Connerly, Affirmative Action Opponent, to Speak at Law School

From Marquette News Briefs:

Ward Connerly, founder and president of the American Civil Rights Institute, will speak at the Law School on Thursday, Oct. 27, at 12:10 p.m. Connerly, who is speaking at the Law School at the invitation of the Federalist Society, will present “Affirmative Action: Is It Equality or Discrimination?” RSVP online by Thursday, Oct. 20. Space is limited.

Connerly is in fact an heroic figure, fighting to end racial discrimination in an era when the politically correct kinds of discrimination (anti-white, anti-male) are embraced (although heavily out of fear) by most powerful institutions in society.

The Racial Bean Counters

From Jeff Jacoby:

THE CENSUS BUREAU has begun rolling out state-by-state demographic data distilled from the 2010 Census. They include statistics on race and Hispanic origin that can be broken down with meticulous geographic precision. If you want to know how many African Americans live in Arkansas’s Benton School District (1,302), or whether Maryland’s white population has gone up or down since 2000 (down 0.9 percent), or which Vermont county has the most Hispanics (Chittenden, with 2,586), the Census Bureau can tell you. Spend a while with the census search engine, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the nation’s racial composition has never been defined with such pinpoint accuracy.

In fact, the nation’s racial composition has never been defined with less accuracy, and the margin of error is widening. Why? Because of the growing number of Americans like Michelle López-Mullins, who render the government’s racial categories meaningless or obsolete. The University of Maryland student was introduced last week in a New York Times story that illustrates the difficulties faced by the bean-counters in an increasingly post-racial society:

“The federal Department of Education would categorize Michelle López-Mullins -- a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee, and Cherokee descent -- as ‘Hispanic,’” Susan Saulny’s story began. “But the National Center for Health Statistics, the government agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would pronounce her ‘Asian’ and ‘Hispanic.’ And what does Ms. López-Mullins’s birth certificate from the State of Maryland say? It doesn’t mention her race.

“Ms. López-Mullins, 20, usually marks ‘other’ on surveys these days. But when she filled out a census form last year, she chose Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and white.”

Though most Americans may still think of themselves as belonging to a single race, the multiracial population is surging. Racial boundaries are more permeable and easier to ignore than they have ever been before.

Today, one in seven new marriages -- 14.6 percent -- unites spouses of different races, according to the Pew Research Center. The interracial marriage rate has doubled since 1980, and is six times what it was in 1960. For some combinations, the rate of increase has been even more rapid. When Barack Obama was born in 1961, less than one new marriage in 1,000 was, like his parents’, that of a black person and a white person. “By 1980, that share had risen to about one in 150 new marriages,” Pew notes. “By 2008, it had risen to one in 60.”

Yet instead of shutting down the racial bean-counters, the government is giving them new powers. The Times reports that new Department of Education rules require any student who acknowledges any Hispanic ethnicity at all to be reported solely as “Hispanic” in federal filings. That doesn’t sit well with López-Mullins, whose Peruvian-Chinese-Irish-Shawnee-Cherokee family tree is considerably more diverse and interesting than the word “Hispanic” alone can possibly convey.

To be sure, some lobbies and grievance groups profit handsomely from aggravating racial distinctions. But most Americans have moved beyond the color-consciousness of generations past, and it’s time federal agencies did too.

The problem, and it’s a huge one, is that as American society is becoming more tolerant, more multi-racial and more diverse, a very large infrastructure exists to divide people and put them into categories. And people put into some politically correct victim category are supposed to nurse grievances against American society.

Thus, the bureaucrats and activists who talk most about “diversity” and “inclusion” have a vested interest in promoting social division.

And there are plenty of them at Marquette.

More Diversity Follies in Chicago

Thomas Evoy has become, virtually, our regular correspondent on the absurdity that is Chicago city government, and he sends this along:

Here’s a fun story-one of the Cook County commissioners wants to ensure that the public prosocuter’s office is racially balanced:

Beavers slams hiring in prosecutor’s office

Never mind the competition from PC law firms, get out there and hire! And hire for a job that’s probably pretty unpopular with minority “victims,” being the man and putting it to the downtrodden!

I have to wonder what’s next. We’d like to hire the most qualified doctor, but were already over budget on whites, hispanics and asians so everyone who needs brain surgery will have to wait until we find a black brain surgeon who wants to work for low wages at County Hospital. Will we need racially balanced garbage crews, tree trimmers, sewer workers and road crews?

The Cook County commissioner who’s making that absurd demand is the same one who tried to get his daughter elected as a Chicago alderman to follow him-she lost to Mrs. Jesse Jackson Jr.

Apart from that, in the “bad timing” department one of the Illinois courts handed down a soverign immunity decsion yesterday in a case about a porch collapse two or three years ago. Not too unusual except for the timing with the bridge collapse: and also the disclosures (after the porch came down) that Chicago had hired the 19 year-old son of a politically connected carpenter as a building inspector (with the excuse that he knew about buildings as the son & grandson of carpenters) and that some porch inspections were taking something like 10 minutes for a three-story structure serving six apartments.

Here’s a little bit from the Sun-Times GOSSIP columnist that I didn’t see before: the term “Superblack” as well as the idea that his own kid is already pulling down $70k/year.

“The hitch: Beavers may have a point! Turns out his own son, David, landed a plum job in that office as a $70,000-a-year investigator and is among the highest-paid employees in the state’s attorney’s capital litigation program!”

Letter to the Editor: Racial Gymnastics in the Chicago Fire, Police Hiring

The following from reader Thomas Evoy.

Read your recent reverse discrimination article. Don’t forget, it’s not just the people taking the tests-it is also the people who CANNOT take a test for years because of the holdups involved.

The Fire Department here in Chicago gave an exam a while back and graded the results, offering jobs to the top 30% or so of scorers in rank order. And that was uneven racially, and you know what happened next-- demonstrations, hearings, etc. No exams were given for about ten years-and people simply couldn’t join up without the exam. About half a generation of people couldn’t take the exam simply because the whole thing was in the courts -- as far as I know there are age limits for joining the fire department Our most recent exam had a different flavor: the cutoff was the top 70% or so of scores (presented to the public as the results of a “pass-fail” exam) and the hiring was done on a random basis from that pool. The usual whiners were a lot more satisfied: based solely on the numbers, of course. No comment on qualifications.

One of the most hilarious things in Chicago was the recent “testing” to decide who would be promoted from sergeant to lieutenant on the police force. Apparently in their zeal to bend over backwards in order to prove fairness, the testing group taped all the answers. And of course, some sort of foulup ensued, followed by the predicable lawsuit. So the solution to this problem was to re-administer the test. Using the very same questions. Yes, that sounds like a great way to figure out who can handle a volatile situation with a great probability of violence.

This follows the much earlier(perhaps the 1980’s) police test that was announced with great fanfare-huge cost, guaranteed to be fair, outside consultants, etc. The results came in that one race was overwhelmingly overrepresented (vis a vis the police department stats as well as the city demographics) among the most qualified. Huge demonstrations, city council hearings, etc. If I recall correctly, the thing was tied up for years in court and in politics.

We can say only one thing good about all these gymnastics: it is good that they used them instead of out-and-out racial preferences and quotas.

Still, how much healthier would it be if a clear standard of non-discrimination prevailed. Would blacks forever and always be unable to meet the standard?

Only a racist would believe that. But a lot of race card players and politically correct whites are, somewhere down deep inside, racist.

The More Things Change . . .

Racial Discrimination in the Marquette Law School?

We just came across something that we should have noticed over a year ago. But we’re going to post it now, since it raises a recurring issue -- the claim that the Marquette Law School is “too white.”

In the wake of a directive from the American Bar Association -- which has become increasingly activist and politically correct -- that American law school enroll more blacks and other minorities and break state law if necessary to do it -- Marquette Law Professor Christine Hurt posted the following on the blog Concurring Opinions.

This week’s events (the promulgation of new rules by the ABA on diversity admissions, publication of David Bernstein’s op-ed, Affirmative Blackmail, and the ensuing blogospheric discussions) have prompted me to post on a topic that I have been ruminating about for some time: admissions. At the Glom last year, I blogged a series of advice posts (here, here, here and here) from information gleaned after my first year on admissions committee. This is my second year on that committee, and I have to admit that the shiny has worn off a bit for me. I wanted to be on the admissions committee because I wanted to find out why we had classes with low percentages of minority students. Surely there must be some subconscious, yet insidious discrimination creating this result. I was going to ferret out this bias and squash it like a bug.

Presumably, Professor Hurt is saying this for rhetorical effect. She could not possibly have believed her Law School colleagues are a bunch of racists, could she?

What I found was a problem that I couldn’t fix. The problem is math. Prof. Bernstein and Thom Lambert point out that the ABA’s new rules show that the ABA has a conscious disregard for the rule of law. I would add that the rules also show a conscious disregard for math. For schools like Marquette, in the middle of the rankings, with a small faculty, administration and budget, cold, hard numbers are our problem when it comes to increasing diversity. Putting aside debates as to whether affirmative action is good, bad, constitutional, unconstitutional or whatever, the most affirmative action-minded admissions committee has to make very difficult choices in an environment of scarcity. Scarcity of applicants; scarcity of dollars.

Marquette’s problem is not that we don’t admit minority candidates. The percentage of minority candidates in our “admit” pool is larger than the percentage of minority candidates in our “applicant” pool. In fact, the percentage of minority applicants who become admits is larger than the percentage of nonminority applicants who become admits. However, the yield on minority candidates in our “admit” pool is quite low. These candidates have a lot of other opportunities. We do what we can: phone calls, scholarships, letters, emails, dinners, etc. I soon found out that to say that we discriminate against minority candidates is to say that we discriminate against candidates with 170 LSATs. We don’t end up with a lot because we don’t start out with a lot. And, no matter how many 170 LSATs we admit, our yield on 170 LSATs is very low, similar to our yield on minority candidates. These people have other opportunities, and our recruiting activities don’t change that much. If we were ranked higher, our yield would be greater. If our yield were greater, we would be ranked higher. See how that works, ABA?

However, the ABA now says that we are required to do more than just work with what we have. We need to commit resources to increase the number of minority applicants in our applicant pool. For instance, we could have a dedicated diversity admissions person, we could recruit in person at historically black colleges, we could hold minority applicant fairs, and we could have more minority scholarships. At present, our admissions office has one assistant dean and one office administrator. To comply, we would need to basically double our admissions budget. And our scholarship pool.

I teach corporate law, so I follow the recent white-collar prosecutions. Bernard Ebbers was criticized, and eventually punished, for blithely telling subordinates to “hit the numbers” without regard to the consequences. The ABA is also blithely telling law schools to do something without regard to the realities of numbers. I understand that in some situations, schools may have money, time and resources that they don’t want to commit to a laudable goal and will not until forced to do so. However, my impression is that many schools like Marquette will be caught in the middle because they actually do not have unlimited money, time and resources.

Being willing to “commit the resources” is a euphemism for giving black (and perhaps Hispanic) students more generous scholarship offers to induce them to come to your school.

Of course, in academia, prestige is also an important currency.

Marquette’s Law School, which is hanging by its fingernails at the bottom of the second tier of the nation’s law schools, can’t compete terribly well here either.

When Harvard Law School admits minority students who aren’t as academically capable as the white students they admit, they are still going to have pretty good minority students.

But when minority students who should be at Madison go to Harvard, and minority students who should be at Marquette go to Madison, Marquette has to accept minority students who belong at schools low in the third tier or in the fourth tier.

Or else fail to meet some quota.

Ultimately, shuffling minority student populations around does little good, although it serves the career interests of university bureaucrats and makes politically correct faculty feel all warm and fuzzy.

Until minority students graduate from high school with the same qualifications as white students, “diversity” is never going to be anything but a cynical con game. And of course, the problems begin long before high school.

Jesse Jackson: Demanding Affirmative Action in Major League Baseball

Jesse Jackson is doing his usual shtick, but this time the target is a Major League Baseball team.

Upset over the lack of African-Americans on the Braves roster, members of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow-PUSH Coalition asked for a meeting with team officials. They got one Monday.

Joe Beasley, Southern Regional Director for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said he and Dexter Clinkscale, the director of sports for the organization, met Monday morning for nearly two hours with Braves general manager John Schuerholz, assistant general manager Frank Wren and three other Braves officials.

“The team slipped . . . down to [no African-Americans]; it wasn’t something that just happened,” Beasley said Monday afternoon. “I think it was a lack of diligence on the part of the Braves to recruit African-American players. There’s not diminished enthusiasm for African-Americans playing baseball. It’s simply the opportunity hasn’t presented itself.”

Schuerholz acknowledged the meeting Monday but declined further comment, saying in a statement: “We had a meeting with Mr. Beasley and another member of his organization this morning and discussed a variety of topics.”

Less than 10 percent of major league players are African-Americans. In a recent interview on the subject, Schuerholz said: “You go to where the talent leads you. Finding major league-caliber baseball players is far too difficult if you try to narrow your criteria down to demographics.”

Countered Beasley, “As I expected, [Schuerholz’s] idea is the bottom line: I’ll put the best 40 men I can get wherever I can get them from on the field, and that’s fair. But the fact of the matter is if they put resources into recruiting here in the United States, and more specifically here in Atlanta, there are talented players here.”

The issue was brought to the attention of the Rainbow-PUSH Coalition during the 60th anniversary celebration of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier. The Braves and Houston Astros did not have any African-American players on their 25-man rosters at the time. The Braves’ total grew with the promotion of left fielder Willie Harris, who is from Robinson’s hometown of Cairo.

This is a far cry from 1947, when Jackie Robinson and a whole cohort of black players broke the “color barrier” in Major League Baseball.

There was never any doubt that they fully deserved to play in the major leagues.

But, of course, society changes. Most relevant here, fewer black youth live in rural areas, towns and small cities where baseball diamonds are common. (Hank Aaron, for example, grew up in Mobile, Alabama.)

More black youth live in large cities where playgrounds have basketball hoops.

The result: fewer blacks in baseball, but blacks dominate the NBA.

Objecting to that is about as sensible as objecting to the fact that Canadians dominate professional hockey.

If we are going to have affirmative action quotas, we’ve got to replace a lot of blacks in the NBA with whites.

Interestingly, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution offered an online poll, asking readers what they thought about the situation. The question:

Why do the Braves have so few African-American players?

The responses:

• There aren’t enough African-American prospects out there -- 13.04%
• The Braves aren’t trying hard enough to bring them along -- 3.05%
• Some of both of the above -- 4.61%
• I don’t care who they are as long as they’re good players -- 79.29%

Quote obviously, the vast majority of the people who voted have the sensible view of the issue.

Getting Beyond Race in College Admissions

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal ponders the legacy of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and takes issue with her view of affirmative action.

It’s true that O’Connor is not a fanatical quota advocate. She has said that racial preferences should be seen as “a temporary bandage, rather than a permanent cure.”

What’s disturbing is that liberals were saying the same thing in the early 1970s, when the first racial preference cases were coming to the Supreme Court. The “temporary” expedient isn’t looking so temporary today, especially when there is a whole cadre of activists, affirmative action bureaucrats and liberal politicians supporting it.

Fund continues:

She seemed strangely unaware, however, of the growing evidence that racial preferences might have actually decreased the likelihood that blacks and Hispanics will graduate from college. Put differently, if the body of evidence is correct, the whole affirmative action enterprise has been deeply and tragically flawed from the beginning, failing to achieve its most basic aim: increasing the number of minority college graduates, doctors, lawyers and other professionals.

Other panelists at the Powell symposium discussed the work of UCLA law professor Richard Sander, which shows that minority law students in California who attend law schools at which their academic credentials do not match the credentials of other students are less likely to pass the bar exam than they would have been if they had attended less prestigious law schools where their academic credentials would have been closer to the norm. As a result, according to Mr. Sander, there are fewer minority lawyers than there would have been under colorblind admissions. Justice O’Connor did not attend the rest of the symposium and made no reference to the Sander study in her remarks.

Moreover, Justice O’Connor’s comments about UCLA obscured an important and promising real story. While it’s true that black and Hispanic enrollment at UCLA and Berkeley went down after Prop 209, these students simply didn’t just vanish. The vast majority were admitted on the basis of their academic record to somewhat less highly ranked campuses of the prestigious 10-campus UC system, which caters only to the top one-eighth of California’s high school graduates. In the immediate wake of Proposition 209, the number of minority students at some of the nonflagship campuses went up, not down.

This “cascading” effect has had real benefits in matching students with the campus where they are most likely to do well. Despite what affirmative action supporters often imply, academic ability matters. Although some students will outperform their entering credentials and some students will underperform theirs, most students will succeed in the range that their high school grades and SAT scores predict. Leapfrogging minority candidates into elite colleges where they often become frustrated and fail hurts them even more than the institutions. It creates the illusion that we are closing racial disparities in education when in fact we are not. While blacks and Hispanics now attend college at nearly the same rate as whites, only about 1 in 6 graduates.

Affirmative action often creates the illusion that black or other minority students cannot excel. At the University of California at San Diego, in the year before race-based preferences were abolished in 1997, only one black student had a freshman-year GPA of 3.5 or better. In other words, there was a single black honor student in a freshman class of 3,268. In contrast, 20% of the white students on campus had a 3.5 or better GPA.

There were lots of black students capable of doing honors work at UCSD. But such students were probably admitted to Harvard, Yale or Berkeley, where often they were not receiving an honor GPA. The end to racial preferences changed that. In 1999, 20% of black freshmen at UCSD boasted a GPA of 3.5 or better after their first year, almost equaling the 22% rate for whites after their first year. Similarly, failure rates for black students declined dramatically at UCSD immediately after the implementation of Proposition 209. Isn’t that better for everyone in the long run?

Then there is the claim that affirmative action preferences benefit the “disadvantaged.” After all, aren’t all blacks disadvantaged?

Racial preferences were intended to help disadvantaged minorities, but in reality they have been turned into a spoils system for the privileged. “Most go to children of powerful politicians, civil-rights activists, and other relatively well-off blacks and Hispanics,” says Stuart Taylor of National Journal. “This does nothing for the people most in need of help, who lack the minimal qualifications to get into the game.”

This situation reminds us of the old quip that foreign aid is a subsidy from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

And indeed, Fund produces statistics to show that disadvantaged whites have been hurt by race-based preferences, while privileged black students have -- if not exactly been helped -- gotten into schools beyond what their qualifications justified.