Florida Gov. Jeb Bush wants to replace affirmative action on his state’s campuses with a new scheme that could provide even more racial, ethnic and cultural diversity.
It’s a great deal for the state and for students who graduate from Florida’s less-privileged high schools. But don’t expect Jeb’s good deed to go unpunished.
Critics already are lining up to complain that his scheme asks too much or not enough. A movement to ban affirmative action statewide, as California and Washington have done, speeds ahead.
But for those who seek a sane, sensible way out of the nation’s most vexing and volatile racial dilemma, the Bush plan offers welcome remedies.
Borrowed in many ways from his brother, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Jeb wants to offer automatic admission to his state’s universities for the top 20 percent of the state’s high school graduates, regardless of their standardized test scores.
A similar scheme has worked remarkably well in Texas, where a federal court banned race as a consideration in college admissions three years ago.
In its second year, a program approved by George W. guarantees the top 10 percent of Texas high school graduates admission to the public university of their choice in Texas. As a result, the racial mix at the state’s top universities has been restored to what it was before affirmative action was overturned.
As an added benefit, opportunity also has grown for white students in disadvantaged districts, mostly in poor rural areas.
With a broad coalition of benefactors like that, it is small wonder that the Texas program has proved popular enough to draw admirers across the country.
In California, where Proposition 209 outlawed affirmative action, Democratic Gov. Gray Davis has promised admission, although not a choice of any particular campus, to each California student who ranks in the top 4 percent of his high school class.
Judging by the public reaction, which has been generally favorable, this shift from race and toward economic class is beginning to look like a trend. It also points the way to a new stage in America’s long march toward racial equality.
More Top Picks Air Mattresses Campings
It is the sort of “new political strategy” that Harvard poverty expert William Julius Wilson calls for in his new book, “The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics.”
The movement for racial equality needs a new strategy, Wilson writes, that will “appeal to America’s broad multiracial population while addressing the many problems that afflict disadvantaged minorities and redressing the legacy of historic racism in America.”
Wilson’s latest book reports data that confirms a trend he spotted in his controversial first book, “The Declining Significance of Race,” in 1978. Since then, affirmative action has lost much of its appeal to whites, even though whites show a growing acceptance of racial equality and integration.
At the same time, income inequality has been growing for all racial groups in ways that provide a new unifying issue that can benefit all groups.
Instead of “preferential” racial policies, Wilson advocates “opportunity-enhancing” programs, which enjoy much wider support among all races.
Although Wilson does not discuss the idea of preferential enrollment for top high school achievers, the concept illustrates the advantages and some of the questions raised by attempts to equalize opportunity by class, instead of race. For example:
– Will consumers or employers be cheated out of having the best and the brightest college graduates working for them? No. How a student got into college is far less important to consumers or graduates than how he or she got out. Once students are admitted, by whatever means, they must all meet the same graduation standards.
– Will students from poor-performing high schools be put at a disadvantage among so many kids from wealthier districts? Yes, but remedial classes can be set up, as the University of Texas has done, to help such kids catch up.
– Will students who have scored high by national standards, but not at their particular school, be penalized? The answer is, yes, maybe. But pressure also will grow, as it has in Texas, to improve all schools regardless of whether they are in the ghetto, the barrio or the suburbs.
Besides, we have to decide, as a society, which group of hard-working student achievers represent a greater need to be remedied: the ones from prosperous neighborhoods who have many opportunities in life or the ones from low-income neighborhoods who have very few?
Despite the nay-sayers, most Americans still seem to cling to what Martin Luther King called a “dream as old as the American Dream,” a dream of equal opportunity for all. The question is not whether, but how can we best achieve it.
That raises political questions. Politics is the art of compromise. Neither side gets everything it wants, but in the end, both sides come out ahead.