The National Assessment of Educational Progress, as the tests are formally known, ranked fourth graders in only five states, plus Washington, D.C., at as low a level of math proficiency as California’s.

The latest round of nationwide fourth and eighth grade math and reading tests yielded disappointing results. Stacked up against other states, California hovered at the lower end of the scale. “Across California, scores stagnated since 2013 at all levels — there were some small dips, which were not statistically significant,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Laying blame

Although national and state officials alike cautioned that the trouble was hard to pinpoint, project, or trace back to root causes, some pointed the finger at the changes in testing brought on by this year’s shift toward compliance with the new Common Core Standards. “The NAEP tests aren’t completely aligned with the Common Core State Standards,” however, as state Department of Education spokesman Bill Ainsworth informed the Mercury News via email. “Consequently, we do not believe they are a good measure of California students’ progress.”

But the test results did also reveal significant racial and ethnic divergences. This year, added the Times, “between a quarter and a third of the state’s students performed at or above proficiency on the various tests; in fourth-grade reading, 4 out of 10 students were deemed to be below basic. And, fewer than 1 in 5 students of color or low-income students met or exceeded proficiency on any test.” What’s more, the paper noted, over the past three years, “California’s Latino students’ scores decreased slightly, but were flat in fourth-grade reading.”

For analysts focused on comparative racial test performance, the results turned back the clock. According to Education Week, “performance gaps between black, Hispanic and white students, in reading remained as wide in 2015 as they were in 1998. In math,” however, “the gap between black and white fourth-grade students has narrowed by about 10 points since 2000.”

Some analysts shied away from drawing too strong an inference even along lines of race. Brookings Institution senior fellow Tom Loveless told Education Week that “California’s demographics — including nearly 1.4 million students classified as English language learners — make it difficult to pinpoint the impact of the state’s school system versus other social and economic factors on results. In three of the state’s largest school districts — Fresno, Los Angeles and San Diego — achievement gaps between black, Hispanic, and white students have remained largely unchanged or even widened.”

Racial controversy

The intersection of race and education has recently occupied central, contested ground in California. In the wake of the Vergara case, which alleged civil rights violations against minority students as a consequence of protective teachers’ union policies, the political stakes have been raised in the debate over which disparities matter most and how they are to be corrected.

The controversy has magnified the significance of studies plowing similar ground. As Inside Higher Ed reported, a long-term analysis of SAT scores, released by the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, showed that “race and ethnicity have become stronger predictors of SAT scores than family income and parental education levels,” at least “among applicants to the University of California’s campuses.” The study’s author, Saul Geiser, concluded that admissions committees should offset the impact of the SAT by taking affirmative action criteria into account.

“When Luis Alejo applied to college at the University of California, Berkeley, admissions counselors could consider his race; when he applied to law school, it had become invisible.

“It was only after a string of rejections led him to beg for a face-to-face interview with an admissions officer, Alejo said, that he won a spot at the University of California, Davis, law school, launching a career that in 2010 elevated him to the state Assembly.

“The year Alejo was preparing for law school, voters altered his prospects by passing Proposition 209, California’s ban on race-inclusive admissions policies. Alejo and others unsuccessfully fought the initiative, a losing battle that he described as a formative political experience.

“’All our fears came true,’ said Alejo, a Democrat from Watsonville. ‘Once it went into effect, we saw dramatic drops in the numbers of students of color being able to attend some of our most prestigious graduate and professional schools.’”

But of course there haven’t been overall “dramatic drops” of “students of color” if you include Asian-Americans. They are the largest ethnic group at UC campuses — 35 percent at UC Berkeley and 33 percent at UCLA.

This is delicious and obnoxious at the same time.

What makes it delicious is that Alejo’s omission of Asian-Americans from “students of color” status so undercuts majority Democrats’ attempts to stop the Latino-Asian rift from growing.

What makes it obnoxious is that Alejo acts as if he holds the moral high ground in advocating for a return to UC admissions policies that punished Asian-American students with de facto quotas — in the name of atoning for white racism.

Racial justice? Social justice?

Joke justice.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/04/25/6355330/split-by-affirmative-action-bill.html#mi_rss=Latest%20News#storylink=cpy

“There is no authority in the federal constitution or in the [courts’] precedents for the judiciary to set aside Michigan laws that commit to the voters the determination whether racial preferences may be considered in governmental decisions, in particular with respect to school admissions….

“This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it.”

The decision involved an initiative Michigan voters passed that was similar to Proposition 209, which California voters passed in 1996. Prop. 209 was crafted to echo the civil rights legislation of the 1960s which banned racial discrimination. Unfortunately, since the 1960s affirmative action and other schemes have been used to bring back a racial spoils system.

Prop. 209’s language on the 1996 ballot read:

“Prohibits the state, local governments, districts, public universities, colleges, and schools, and other government instrumentalities from discriminating against or giving preferential treatment to any individual or group in public employment, public education, or public contracting on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

Opponents claim that past and current discrimination keep minorities from government jobs and college and university admissions places. Therefore, affirmative action, including quotas for minority members, is needed.

Affirmative action

In California, two recent events have shown the problems with affirmative action, and why a
“color blind” system is best, and most just.

Last month, Asian-American leaders in the California Legislature forced the Democratic leadership to back down on an attempt to reverse Prop. 209 and bring back racial quotas. The Asian-Americans saw that it would reduce the number of their kids in state colleges and universities.

And just yesterday, new admissions numbers showed that Hispanics this fall will outnumber whites among University of California freshmen. Asians will remain the top group. This showed that Hispanics can excel without the help of affirmative action.

The new numbers: 36.2 percent Asian-American, 28.8 percent Hispanic, 26.6 percent white, 4.4 percent black.

It’s true that Hispanics now make up about 50 percent of California high-school seniors; and blacks make up about 6 percent. So they are not going to UC at an equivalent rate. But the problem there, of course, is that so many schools Hispanics and blacks attend are among the worst in the state.

It doesn’t make sense to send to UC students who have not been properly educated by bad schools. It does make sense to raise standards, for example, by giving merit pay to the most effective treachers. But that particular reform still is resisted strongly by the teachers’ unions.

By effectively upholding Prop. 209, what today’s decision does is put the emphasis on helping Hispanic and black kids — and white and Asian-American kids as well — where it should be: on the schools.

But in the U-T San Diego, I made the case that another Democratic faction has far more reasons for dissent:

” … if any part of the Democratic coalition should consider bolting over basic calculations of self-interest, it is Latinos. They are poorly served by the state’s public education system — which is dominated by the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, the most powerful forces in the state Democratic Party.

“Everywhere around California, there is a cold war playing out between teachers unions and those who want to shake things up to help Latino students.

“In San Diego Unified and elsewhere, we see a renewed assault on charter schools that are often championed by minority parents unhappy with the status quo.

“In Sacramento city schools, an Obama administration-endorsed effort to improve the performance of struggling, largely minority schools is being sandbagged by the local chapter of the CTA — because the program seeks to determine which teachers are most effective in helping students from impoverished families.

“In Los Angeles Unified, this reflexive effort to protect veteran teachers above all else has long since left sanity behind. For the worst of many examples, a teacher who fed semen-laced food to his poor, mostly Latino elementary school students couldn’t be fired because of the immense job protections dictated by the local CTA chapter. Administrators had to pay him $35,000 to get him to resign.”

Teachers blame kids, parents — absolve themselves

“This disconnect between the interests of Latinos and the interests of the teachers unions that dominate California’s Democratic Party is hammered home by these unions’ increasingly open attitude of ‘don’t blame us for not being able to educate these kids.’

“Yes, of course, it’s going to be more difficult to help a student whose parents aren’t English speakers or who have other difficulties related to poverty. Nevertheless, it is a matter of fact that some teachers, schools and districts do objectively better at educating these students than others. Yet instead of supporting a “best practices” approach to help these kids — as Sacramento schools are trying to do — the CTA and CFT try to nuke any change in the status quo that might cost any teacher anywhere her or his job.

“If college admission policies drive a wedge between Asian-Americans and the California Democratic establishment, public education policies should be 100 times more likely to divide Latinos and state Democrats.”

Career comes first. The kids? Bleep ’em

Instead, Latino lawmakers by and large never pick fights with the CTA and CFT. With the gigantic exception of former state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, Latino Dem electeds want to stay on the career-advancement gravy train. As I detailed in 2012, they’ll even put up with a CTA member feeding semen to Latino elementary-school kids:

“The Berndt case prompted state senator Alex Padilla, a Los Angeles Democrat, to introduce legislation that would have made it easier for districts to fire sexual predators. That bill never made it out of a state assembly committee. Lobbyists from the CFT and CTA portrayed it as an assault on teachers’ due-process rights, and legislators fell right into line with the unions. As for Berndt, instead of firing him, the union-dominated Los Angeles Unified hierarchy paid him $40,000 to resign.

“Siding with classroom sexual predators over Latino students and parents was no big deal for the CTA-affiliated United Teachers Los Angeles. Consider what happened in November 2009 at Gratts Elementary School (94 percent Latino enrollment) in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles. Latino parents who wanted to convert the struggling school to a charter and force out poor teachers were warned in Spanish-language fliers that they risked deportation for their efforts. UTLA denied any involvement with the scare tactic, but union members were the sole suspects.

“It might seem remarkable that the California legislature’s powerful Latino caucus tolerates union bullying and intimidation, but then most of the caucus members — including Assembly Speaker John Pérez, a former organizer for the United Food and Commercial Workers — ascended through the labor movement. By allowing the CTA and CFT to dictate the agenda, Latino legislators are keeping the best teachers out of schools where they’re most needed and helping channel the worst teachers to the most troubled schools. They evidently prefer keeping mum to risking teachers’ union support.”

To repeat a point I made in the U-T San Diego’s pages, many Latinos’ assumption that Republicans just don’t like immigrants or minorities or Latinos make it unlikely they would even consider switching parties. But should that anti-GOP view make them blind to the fact that when it comes to public education, California Dems are objectively anti-Latino?

Of course not.

After almost 18 years of a ban on using affirmative action in college admissions after the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, state Democrats set about working to overturn the law. The plan was for SCA 5, by state Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, to pass both houses of the Legislature and secure voter approval. It would have brought back affirmative action.

That’s not the way things are turning out, thanks to California’s Asian-Americans.

Last week, saying they had received thousands of calls and emails from constituents, state Sens. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco; Ted Lieu, D-Torrance; and Carol Liu, D-La Cañada-Flintridge, asked Assembly Speaker John Perez to stop the bill.

“As lifelong advocates for the Asian-American and other communities, we would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact our children,” they wrote in a letter to Perez.

Now, SCA 5 is dead in the water — much to the delight of Republicans, who have championed the affirmative action ban all along.

Asian-Americans

Key to the sudden momentum shift are the complex of interests and alliances surrounding Asian-Americans. The San Jose Mercury News notes that the group’s historic support for affirmative action led state Democrats to assume SCA 5 faced clear sailing. More than a few organizations, the Mercury News reports, tout affirmative action as a benefit to some Asian communities that remain statistically underrepresented in colleges and universities.

The cognitive dissonance playing out around affirmative action in California underscores what’s at stake as different activist and interest groups struggle to lay down clearer markets in the identity politics debate. “What we need now,” one Asian-American Studies scholar told The New York Times, “is not to group everyone together into some mythical model minority but to have greater nuance in understanding Asian-American groups.” Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders needed special attention, she added.

Different kinds of colleges and universities have different kinds of access to affirmative-action outcomes. Ivy League schools, for instance, pride themselves on admitting at least one student per year from every state in the union, and every corner of the globe. America’s elite universities often possess more than an interest in recruiting star applicants from far-flung locales. They often possess a unique ability to attract him or her.

For less prestigious institutions of higher education, checking the long list of identity-political boxes is a taller order. There, the process of ensuring the level of ethnic, national, and regional diversity demanded by advocates tends to give way to broader goals — adding to the Asian portion of the student body, for instance, instead of increasing the number of Pacific Islanders.

That’s a trend which increases the role played by ethnic studies professors and identitarian organizations, to whom college administrators look for approval when trying to determine whether campus diversity levels meet or exceed expectations.

Ironically, the predominantly Chinese opposition to SCA 5 reflects an attitude toward upward mobility and a college degree that compounds the anxiety facing less-well-off Asian-Americans looking for social advancement through education. The political push against SCA 5 played off of Chinese-American fears, as Steven Hsieh put it in The Nation, “that students would lose university spots to underrepresented minorities if affirmative action is reinstated.”

For many Chinese-Americans, college is not just one option among many for the rising generation, but a make-or-break experience against which family success must be judged. As San Gabriel city councilman Chin Ho Liao bluntly argued, “Other ethnic groups don’t put their kids’ education as number one priority. You don’t realize how much Asian parents sacrifice.”

Case study

Protracted debates continue to swirl around just how much it benefits kids to be admitted into colleges where, for any reason, success eludes their grasp. As the Los Angeles Times reported in its 2013 case study of UC Berkeley freshman Kashawn Campbell, enrolling students in the quest for optimal diversity can usher in a host of unintended consequences.

The consequences include the kind of quiet contempt among fellow students that encourages campus thought policing to an even more unfortunate sense of inadequacy and fraudulence among affirmative-action beneficiaries.

Given the durability of the status quo in California, the U.S. Supreme Court offers a few useful guidelines:

• In Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke, the court outlawed explicit racial and ethnic quotas.
• In Grutter vs. Bollinger, the majority affirmed that taking diversity into account was still acceptable.
• In last year’s Fisher vs. Texas ruling, the court insisted colleges and universities demonstrate that looking at race was essential to increasing diversity.

Now, a decision is soon to come down in Schuette vs. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, where justices have considered whether a Michigan ballot initiative may make it illegal for state officials — including at public universities — to “discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

Outreach

Among states potentially impacted by the Schuette ruling, California is already ahead of the game in one sense: the state’s Early Academic Outreach Program, first established in 1976, has become an effective means of boosting diversity by targeting economically disadvantaged students. A survey of the program at The Atlantic summarized the program’s results:

“The percentage of Latino and Chicano resident freshmen admitted to UC has increased, from 11.9 percent in 1998, two years after the affirmative action ban, to 27.6 in 2013. The increase of African American resident freshmen admits was more modest, from 3 percent, in 1998, to 4.2 percent in 2013.”

EAOP hasn’t restored minority admissions to the levels attained before California’s affirmative action ban. But it has increased them in a manner more consistent with state and federal law.

Surveys and anecdotal evidence show that Asian-Americans are generally more entrepreneurial and more suspicious of government, which should incline them to the GOP. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

Now, however, we’re seeing just the sort of fracture we would expect if Asian-Americans acted in the traditional, what’s-in-it-for-me? way of interest groups. They’ve figured out that affirmative action in college admissions punishes Asians in the name of atoning for the history of white racism. Check out the lead paragraph of this Pasadena Star-News story — the Vietnamese-American reporter isn’t buying the “racial justice” sales pitch at all:

“SAN GABRIEL — Asians in the San Gabriel Valley and beyond joined forces Friday to rally against a proposed Senate constitutional amendment that they said would punish their children for working hard to achieve the American Dream.

“Olivia Liao, president of the Joint Chinese University Alumni Association, said Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 5 is racist because it allows public education institutions to give preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.

“'(Legislators) feel like the Chinese-American community isn’t paying attention to politics,’ Liao said. ‘We are concerned citizens. We need to stand up when things are not right; we need to be heard. We shouldn’t have any (exceptions) related to race. After all, America is a free country.’

 “State Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, is sponsoring SCA 5, an amendment that would repeal portions of Proposition 209, which prohibited discrimination against people based on their unchangeable identities. If passed, the amendment would allow public education institutions to give preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.”

Affirmative action = racial preferences

Wow. That’s as free of lefty spin as any news account I have ever seen of how California’s college admissions practices worked before Prop 209’s passage in 1996.

To paraphrase and condense what I wrote back in 2012, what the media almost never point out is that the UC admissions status quo before 1996 indisputably punished a minority. This is from the March 31, 1996, N.Y. Times story about UC’s adoption of a plan that even before Prop. 209 was passed would have phased out the use of race as a factor in deciding college admissions by spring 1998:

“An internal [UC} report in May 1995, based on a computer simulation, predicted that such a change would result in a 15 to 25 percent overall rise of Asian-Americans at the University of California, and as much as 25 to 35 percent increase at Berkeley and U.C.L.A., where 75 percent of students would be admitted on merit. The number of whites would remain about the same, but Hispanic students would dip 5 to 15 percent and African-Americans would drop somewhere between 40 and 50 percent.”

So without affirmative action, white student numbers would have been unchanged, but Asian-American student enrollment would have exploded. For some reason, in 1996, this didn’t resonate with California’s Asian population. Now it seems to be.

Good. As John Roberts said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Senate Constitutional Amendment 5, by state Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, was just introduced in the Legislature. It would allow the University of California and California State University again to use race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin as a consideration for accepting students into the schools.

It effectively would repeal Proposition 209, an initiative California voters passed in 1996. The official Prop. 209 ballot summary read by voters said:

“Prohibits the state, local governments, districts, public universities, colleges, and schools, and other government instrumentalities from discriminating against or giving preferential treatment to any individual or group in public employment, public education, or public contracting on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

So far, laws and initiatives similar to Prop. 209 have been passed in seven other states.

But Hernandez believe Prop. 209 has stifled diversity in CA higher education.

“Enrollment decreases [of Latinos and African Americans in state universities] have become steeper and are not keeping pace with the changing populations,” Hernandez said Thursday in the Senate. “It was a mistake in 1996 and we are still suffering consequences of that today. SCA 5 will simply allow California’s public universities to compete for students with the best and brightest backgrounds, so we can keep our academic excellence here in our state, and not in some other state.”

Connerly

“I hope Sen. Hernandez and members of the Latino Caucus really take a leadership role and explain [SCA 5] to their constituents,” said Ward Connerly, president of the American Civil Rights Institute. He is the author of Prop. 209 and has helped pass similar initiatives in Michigan and other states.

Connerly said the motive behind SCA 5 and previous bills is to try to get more Latinos into UC schools. “The Latino Caucus is dominant in the Legislature,” he said. “The [university] admissions people will have to do what they want.”

Indeed, the discussion on the state Senate largely involved members of the Latino Caucus.

Hernandez said that, in 1995, prior to Prop. 209’s enactment, 38 percent of California high school graduates were minorities, while 21 percent of freshmen in the UC system were minorities. By 2004, minorities accounted for 45 percent of high school graduates, but just 18 percent of freshmen in the UC system.

“A blanket prohibition on consideration of race was a mistake in 1996, and we are still suffering the consequences from that initiative today,” Hernandez said. “You cannot address inequality by refusing to acknowledge it.”

Of particular issue with lawmakers is the dominance of Asian students in UC and CSU schools.

Currently, UC freshmen are 36 percent Asian, 28.1 percent white, 27.6 percent Latino and 4.2 percent African American.

Yet California’s population is 13.9 Asian, 39.4 percent “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino,” 38.2 percent Latino, and 6.6 percent African American, according to the U.S. Census.

Hernandez and legislators representing minorities want the state’s college admissions to reflect the population more closely.

“We need to do a better job ensuring our students of color feel welcome at our public universities and colleges,” said Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens. “And that students represent our changing population.”

“Prop. 209 created a barrier for people of color to access higher education,” said Sen. Ben Hueso, D-San Diego. “We didn’t apply the rule to include high schools. Yet with these prohibitions, we have seen a stark reduction to access of higher education by people of color, only leading to a sense of hopelessness within this community, creating a high condition of inequality in our society.”

K-12 problems

“Our problem is K-12,” charged Sen. Mark Wyland, R-Escondido. “There is already data before Prop. 209 that many of those students admitted experience failures, and it changed their lives because they failed,” Wyland added. “We can solve the problem we’re after if we can get K-12 and the Community College system prepared. We’ll have a lot better outcome.”

Prop. 209’s defenders also point out that the state’s Latino and African American children especially are shortchanged by a state school system that regularly scores near the bottom of the 50 states on national tests. This is shown on federal statistics for the National Assessment of Educational Progress on mathematics achievement, a crucial component of success at the university level. It found:

“In 2013, Black students had an average score that was 33 points lower than White students. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1990 (38 points). 

„”In 2013, Hispanic students had an average score that was 28 points lower than White students. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1990 (34 points).”

Numerous K-12 reforms in public schools over 23 years at the federal, state and local levels have done nothing to close the performance gap. Prop. 209’s defenders insist that more rigorous reforms — such as school vouchers — are needed to advance the performance of Latino and African American children. In California, the teachers’ unions vigorously have opposed vouchers in two referendums that voters defeated.

Initiative

If SCA 5 passes, it could be put before voters this November, essentially making it a referendum on Prop. 209. SCA 5 next will be heard the Assembly.

In 2011 Hernandez authored the controversial Senate Bill 185, which was also an attempt to repeal Prop. 209. SB185 passed both legislative houses but was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown, who said he agreed with the goals of affirmative action but that it was up to the courts, not the Legislature, to limit Prop. 209.

In both 2000 and 2010, the California Supreme Court ruled that Prop. 209 was constitutional.

Supreme Court

At the federal level, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed down several decisions that have not definitively determined the constitutionality of affirmative action. A new case expected to be decided this year is described by NPR:

“The U.S. Supreme Court takes up the issue of affirmative action again … but this time the question is not whether race may be considered as a factor in college admissions. Instead, this case tests whether voters can ban affirmative action programs through a referendum.

“In 2003, the high court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policy. The next day, opponents of affirmative action launched a referendum campaign to bar such programs, and in 2006, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to ban affirmative action programs in higher education.

“Michigan’s state colleges and universities promptly abandoned any use of race or ethnicity to promote diversity, and minority enrollment plummeted. In 2012, a federal appeals court ruled that the referendum itself was discriminatory, and the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to decide the issue.”

The case has obvious implications for Prop. 209 and explains why Gov. Brown, also a former California attorney general, based his veto on waiting for the courts to decide the matter.

The case is expected to be decided by June. Oral discussions by the court last October seemed to indicate that it would uphold the state bans on affirmative action. But the court can be unpredictable.

By Josephine Djuhana

A resolution that seeks to amend the California Constitution and undo the work of Proposition 209 for institutions of higher education is making its way through Sacramento and will likely be placed on the ballot in 2014.

SCA 5, authored by Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, proposes “an amendment to the Constitution of the State, by amending Section 31 of Article I thereof, relating to public education.” Recently re-referred to the Senate Committee on Elections and Constitutional Amendments after passing the Committee on Education, the resolution specifically exempts public education institutions of higher learning from the requirements of Proposition 209.

In other words, SCA 5 allows schools to use race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin as a consideration for accepting students or hiring employees. Using such criteria currently is banned by Prop. 209, which voters passed in 1996.

Janet Chin, a media spokesperson for Sen. Hernandez’s office in West Covina, told me the resolution would take steps to “ensure that universities reflect the diversity of the state.” She said long-term benefits would include creating equal opportunity for all Californians by having a “well-trained, diverse workforce” that is needed to compete in the global economy.

“Campuses have become less diverse” since Prop. 209 passed, Chin said. “Qualified individuals have been looked over.” Since Prop. 209, she said, minorities have been “underrepresented” in universities, and SCA 5 seeks to correct this error by securing the best and brightest students.

Prop. 209 and measures of merit

Ward Connerly, founder and chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, told me Chin’s reasoning was “nonsense.” He sponsored Prop. 209.

“If they want the best and brightest, they will use merit,” Connerly said of university admissions processes. “They have the right to do that right now, free of any race consideration or discrimination.”

Connerly, a former University of California regent, highlighted higher education in the Golden State, starting with the UC system — in his words, “a very prized system” — which regularly secures the top 12.5 percent of students from California high schools. He also pointed to 23 campuses in the Cal State system, many of which, he said, were “equally as good as some UC campuses”; and to our community college system, with more than 100 college campuses across the state. “It defies logic,” he said to me, “for anyone to say that anyone in California doesn’t have a chance to get an education.”

“We’re a pluralistic society in California, probably the most on the planet,” he said. “We have to learn to treat everybody equally and not allow anybody to have any preference from any public institutions. It’s a mistake to now flirt with changing that and empowering public institutions to discriminate.”

Prop. 209, said Connerly, was the product of a very contentious battle in the state back in 1996. The ballot measure explicitly denied public institutions, including state and local governments, as well as universities, colleges and schools, the ability to discriminate against or give “preferential treatment to any individual or group in public employment, public education, or public contracting on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

The results of Prop. 209 were robust. In fact, minority graduation rates actually increased after Prop. 209 was implemented. The measure “led to a more efficient sorting of minority students” according to research by Duke University:

“To address the robustness of the positive effects on graduation and the role of matching, we analyze unique data for all applicants and enrollees within the University of California (UC) system before and after Prop 209. The positive Prop 209 effects on minority graduation rates persist, even after controlling for observed and unobserved qualifications of UC enrollees. We present evidence that certain institutions are better at graduating more-prepared students while other institutions are better at graduating less prepared students and that these matching effects are particularly important for the bottom tail of the qualification distribution.”

The research also clearly demonstrated that students admitted with lower qualifications than their peers ended up learning less and had a drop out rate disproportionately higher than science majors.

“Sen. Hernandez is behind the times,” said Connerly. “It’s not forward-looking for him to inflict on the people of California another meaningless battle.”

Striving for diversity doesn’t solve the problem

Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told me the UC system has “already been violating the spirit of Prop. 209 by importing obvious surrogates for race into its so-called ‘holistic’ admissions process.” The Hernandez bill, she said, would simply “open the floodgates of blatant racial references once again and allow UC to discriminate without apology.”

“There are high quality students that are not getting into these schools because there is already an informal quota,” she said.

The Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin case brought national attention to similar issues. The Supreme Court recently decided in a 7-1 ruling that the federal appeals court was wrong to dismiss Abigail Noel Fisher’s case, in which she argued that the University of Texas illegally discriminated against her because of her race.

The ruling written by Justice Anthony Kennedy essentially stated that diversity must not be an ultimately deciding factor in university admissions processes. “The reviewing court must ultimately be satisfied that no workable race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity,” Kennedy wrote.

“Attaining diversity for its own sake is a nonstarter,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion. “The pursuit of diversity as an end is nothing more than impermissible ‘racial balancing.’”

The San Francisco-based Asian American Legal Foundation, in their amicus brief filing for the Fisher case, underscored the problems with having such racial quotas. Asians, they write, have “historically been, and continue to be, denied access to public schools due to overt racial and ethnic prejudice as well as ostensibly well-intentioned ‘diversity’ programs such as the program at issue here.” The brief went on to explain:

“UT Austin is engaged in racial balancing without any remedial purpose. It is similarly denying applicants access solely because they are of the ‘wrong’ race or ethnicity. And it is proclaiming that its good faith should excuse the fact that it is trammeling on applicants’ civil rights.”

The same is essentially happening in California’s higher education system behind closed doors.

In regards to admissions, Ward Connelly echoed the majority opinion of the Supreme Court and said officers must “use neutral measures first” and “exhaust all avenues of race neutrality” before considering employing policies of racial preferences.

But exempting universities, colleges and schools from the requirements of Prop. 209 would do exactly the opposite.

Connerly and other critics insist that SCA 5 would create the framework for an even broader scope of racial discrimination against qualified students, regardless of their achievements or merit.

By Chris Reed

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in Fisher v. the University of Texas, the latest big affirmative-action case to reach SCOTUS. Conservative justices used their questions to establish how intentionally slippery and vague UT officials are in explaining how race is included as a factor in deciding admissions to their first-rate public university. Here’s a mainstream media account that doesn’t capture the verve with which John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy went after the University of Texas’ lawyer.

To students of California politics and academia, what should be especially interesting is how the justices deal with the claim that fuzzy, “holistic” judgments that lead to less-qualified minority students being admitted over much more-qualified white or Asian students are somehow less objectionable than hard quotas. In California, this “holistic” approach to college admissions was long ago revealed as an explicit attempt to game Proposition 209, the 1996 state law which bans racial quotas in state government.

The N.Y. Times figures out the UC ploy

And which journalistic outlet made this point best? The New York Times! Economics columnist David Leonhardt wrote a long piece in the Sunday magazine on Sept. 30, 2007, explaining how the UC system, especially UCLA, used fuzzy talk to advance a clearly racial agenda — one with far more benefits for the kids of affluent blacks and Hispanics than poor Asians (or poor whites).

Here was my take then:

“One of the aspects of the University of California system/affirmative action debate that consistently gets short shrift in media coverage is that in the old quota system, African-American and Latino students with less impressive scholastic records weren’t bumping white students, they were bumping Asian-American students. So Asian-Americans paid the biggest price for a policy that has as its central rationale the need to remedy the dominant white culture’s historic discrimination against minorities. Huh?

“So when I saw the long New York Times magazine article … I wasn’t sure what to expect. Here’s what I got: a 4,800-word article explaining and implicitly praising the possibly illegal ways that UC officials got around Proposition 209 and its ban on racial considerations in admission.

“I understand why some people might think this is a good thing. But I cannot understand why Leonhardt would mention the following pretty much in passing:

“Even as the number of low-income black freshmen [at UCLA] soared this year, the overall number of low-income freshmen fell somewhat. The rise in low-income black students was accompanied by a fall in low-income Asian students — not a decline in well-off students. So under the old quota system, Asian-American students in general paid the price for society’s attempts to atone for white racism. Now under the new surreptitious affirmative-action program, poor Asian-American students are paying the highest price. If this is social justice, count me out.”

The Connerly perspective

Here is part of Ward Connerly’s take on Leonhardt’s telling essay on race and UC:

“‘The most useful lesson to be learned from Leonhardt’s article is that it would be prudent for those on both sides of the race preferences in college admissions debate to work toward some acceptable compromise for the good of our nation. …  We must also understand the national imperative of providing access to low income students and to those who are confronted with disadvantages that impede their ability to lead productive lives and to demonstrate their potential value to American society. It is not in our national interest to have hordes of people standing on the sidelines seething with anger because they cannot obtain a ticket to gain access to a better life in America. That ticket for most of us is higher education. Thus, those of us who believe in academic meritocracy must broaden how we view ‘merit.’ That largely means empowering admissions officers to search for talent from among all students and not just the “A” average, high SAT students. In short, socioeconomic ‘affirmative action,’ in a colorblind admissions process, can be that compromise.”

One factor or the factor?

This crucial detail in how affirmative action, disguised or otherwise, works was a focus of Justice Alito in Wednesday’s questioning:

“JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I thought that the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, but you make a very different argument that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.  The top 10 percent plan admits lots of  African Americans — lots of Hispanics and a fair number of African Americans. But you say, well, it’s — it’s faulty, because it doesn’t admit enough African Americans and Hispanics who come from privileged backgrounds. And you specifically have the example of  the child of successful professionals in Dallas.  Now, that’s your argument? If you have -­you have an applicant whose parents are — let’s say they’re — one of them is a partner in your law firm in Texas, another one is a part — is another corporate lawyer. They have income that puts them in the top 1 percent of earners in the country, and they have -­parents both have graduate degrees. They deserve a leg-up against, let’s say, an Asian or a white applicant whose parents are absolutely average in terms of education and income?”

Like Jews and the Ivy League in the 1930s

Alito tied the University of Texas’ attorney in knots. I suspect the U.S. Supreme Court will end up limiting or killing affirmative action on a 5-3 vote next June (Elena Kagan recused herself). If that is what happens, California’s long, miserable record on affirmative action will have helped drive its demise.

This record goes back well before Prop. 209. By a quarter-century ago, it was apparent that innocent Asian-Americans were the victims of affirmative action in UC admissions, not historically oppressive whites. This is from a September 1987 Los Angeles Times story:

“There may be a parallel between what is happening to Asian-Americans now and what happened to Jews in the 1920s and 1930s at some Ivy League schools. … And, like Jews before them, the members of the new model minority contend that they have begun to bump up against artificial barriers to their advancement.

“Casual inspection of the Berkeley campus … makes any suggestion of anti-Asian bias seem implausible. Asians represent 6.7% of California’s population, but they account for 25.5% of the Berkeley student body. …

“But … the percentage of Asians in the student body might be even higher, the critics contend, if admissions were still based strictly on merit. Since the mid-1970s, both Americans of Asian descent and immigrants from Asia have so outperformed Caucasian, black and Latino students in high schools that universities have manipulated admissions criteria to hold back the Asian influx, say the critics.

“‘As soon as the percentages of Asian students began reaching double digits at some universities, suddenly a red light went on,’ said Ling-Chi Wang, a peppery Chinese-born professor of ethnic studies at Berkeley and one of the university’s severest critics. ‘Since then, Asian-American admissions rates have either stabilized or declined … university officials see the prevalence of Asians as a problem.'”

Affirmative action is a much easier sell when it is built on abstract talk about the historical effects of white racism. But when its reality is punishing another ethnic group in the name of atoning for white racism, it looks shabby — or, to use Chief Justice Roberts’ term, “sordid.”

This ugliness first became clear in California a generation ago.