Last week Governor Brown joined a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of California’s ban on racial affirmative action in public university admissions.
In his brief, Governor Brown argued that minorities face too high a barrier in efforts to overturn Proposition 209, due to it being part of the state’s constitution.
“By banning constitutionally permissible admissions programs, Proposition 209 violates the political-structure doctrine because it imposes unique political burdens on minorities,” Governor Brown’s legal brief claims.
According to an article yesterday in the Pasadena Star-News, minority enrollment in California public universities has plummeted, despite the increasing number of minority high school graduates.
The paper spoke to George Washington, an attorney with a group called the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights. He argues that the University of California allows special programs for a variety of group such as poor kids, rural kids, kids with learning disabilities, veterans, and other groups.
However, not minorities. “And the only group that cannot do that are Latino and black students because of Proposition 209,” he told the Pasadena paper, explaining that those students would need a statewide referendum to approve a special program.
He added, “We think creating a separate and unequal process for Latino and black students to seek change is the definition of a Jim Crow law.”
He believes that there will be a decision in the next six months to a year, and if the court agrees, Proposition 209 would be overturned without a referendum.
In the meantime, the Pasedena Star-News reports, California State Senator Ed Hernandez has been pushing SB 185 which would “authorize the University of California and the California State University to consider race, gender, ethnicity, and national origin, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions…”
Last year it was vetoed by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Both the bill and the lawsuit are based on the 2003 Supreme Court ruling. Reports the Pasadena Star-News, “In Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, the Court ruled the Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit a narrowly-tailored consideration of race in admissions decisions at a Michigan law school.”
They continue, “Writing for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reasoned that the Constitution did not prohibit a school’s use of race as a consideration ‘to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.’ “
USC law professor Daria Roithmayr told the paper that, despite the unsettled legal nature of this issue and its divisiveness, the legality of using race as a consideration in admissions is solid.
“It isn’t exactly clear in terms of what the high court ruled with regard to how you could use race as a factor in admission… but it’s pretty clear that you can use race,” Professor Roithmayr told the paper.
“There are some general things you can say: it can’t be the only factor – it should be one of many; you can’t use quotas, you can’t use point systems where you assign points for being member of an underrepresented minority,” she continued. “It’s a hot topic but its not an open question … there are a lot of people who disagree… but the Supreme Court has spoken on that question.”
What becomes less clear is how SB 185 will be affected by Proposition 209.
“I don’t think it is at all clear that this legislation is not in conflict with (Proposition) 209, particularly because it states that the intent of the legislature is that the provision be implemented to the maximum extent possible under Grutter,” she told the paper.
The conflict with Proposition 209 seems to be part of the strategy, however. The paper reports, “The idea seems to be to let the lawsuits come and view the measure as one step in a broader movement toward knocking out Proposition 209.”
“We have legislative counsel opinions that say this would not violate Proposition 209,” said Senator Hernandez’s spokesperson Pedro Salcedo.
“What we really did is thread the needle. It’s a very narrow channel of legal language that could raise concerns. And people have raised questions … but i think that’s really up to the opponents of the bill.”
For Hernandez, the paper says, “the issue is elimination of an obdurate barrier to diversity and economic health and a matter that hits close to home.”
“I am a product of affirmative action,” he said. “I think what kind of drove me to move this legislation – to look at this issue, but more so at issue of Prop 209 – is just kind of my personal story and how it reflects workforce (development) in healthcare.”
William Tierney, director of USC’s Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis told the paper he expects lawsuits and vigorous opposition to this move, but there are larger problems.
“My larger concern is that the state needs more people participating in higher education. These are the people who need to participate – and what we’re lacking from the governor is any sense of direction in terms of public policy for managing higher education in this state,” he told the paper.
He added, “”We also know as a state that we need more individuals participating in higher education… And, the state is broke. So for any new initiatives, you need to question where the money would come from.”
For his part, Ward Connerly, the former UC Regent who drafted Prop. 209, believes this is all strictly a political move by Governor Jerry Brown to satiate a base.
But that ignores the history. As Attorney General, he weighed in on a case where two white-owned contractors brought a lawsuit against San Francisco involving a 2003 ordinance that gave firms owned by minorities and women a 10 percent advantage in competitive bids.
At that time, he argued the 1996 ballot measure was unconstitutional “because it prohibits all affirmative action and fosters the discrimination it was supposed to eliminate.”
He noted that the Supreme Court has set strict standards for judging such programs: “They must be based on a history of discrimination against a group and must be designed to promote a legitimate goal, such as diversity in school enrollment, that cannot be met in other ways.”
Solicitor General Manuel Medeiros, however, argued that Prop. 209 went further to prohibit those programs that the Supreme Court ruled the US Constitution would allow.
“It closes a door to race- and gender-conscious programs that the 14th Amendment leaves open,” Mr. Medeiros argued.
In the meantime, a federal appellate court nullified Michigan’s ban on affirmative action in higher education that is very similar to California’s Proposition 209.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the ban, arguing that it was “a violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause” and “unconstitutionally alters Michigan’s political structure by impermissible burdening [of] racial minorities.”
The LA Times in a Saturday editorial opined, “The Michigan decision poses a dilemma for this page. We opposed Proposition 209 and believe that some ballot measures, like Proposition 8, should be deemed unconstitutional by the courts. With anti-affirmative action measures, however, we believe the surest way to nullify them is to fight them at their source: the ballot box.”
While undeniably true, the courts have traditionally taken the role that minority rights are not subject to the forces of majority rule, and therefore they have the onus of protecting those rights even in the face of majority opinion to the contrary.
In the ideal world, the LA Times is correct, but given the state of minority enrollment in higher education, the world is not nearly as egalitarian as some would prefer.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
You should realize that this is aimed squarely at Asian Americans.
“whites” are not over represented at UC Davis. In fact they are somewhat under represented. It is Asian-Americans who study hard, on average, and are represented in UC beyond their numbers in the population.
In your non-ideal world, those who want affirmative action are calling for discrimination against Asian Americans, though they take great effort to avoid facing that fact.
Here is some data:
UC as a whole admits 34.9% Asian Americans and 34.3 % “white/other”.
UC Davis currently admits 38.5% Asian Americans and 36 % “white/other”.
Other campuses admit similar numbers. Berkeley 40 % Asian American. UCLA 43 %. UCSD 47 %. UC Irvine 49 %.
http://www.ucop.edu/news/factsheets/2011/fall_2011_admissions_table_3.pdf
Statewide, Asian Americans make up 12.8 % of the population, per wikipedia.
Non-Hispanic whites make up 40.1 %.
So calling for affirmative action based on race, as opposed to other factors such as available opportunities and family history, amounts to calling for giving more preference to whites and other under represented groups and for discrimination against Asian Americans.
To my mind, this is morally wrong. But that’s just me.
[quote]According to an article yesterday in the Pasadena Star-News, minority enrollment in California public universities has plummeted, despite the increasing number of minority high school graduates.[/quote]
Look no further than the new policy of going after out of state tuition as a reason there will be less minority enrollment…
[quote]In the meantime, the Pasedena Star-News reports, California State Senator Ed Hernandez has been pushing SB 185 which would “authorize the University of California and the California State University to consider race, gender, ethnicity, and national origin, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions…”[/quote]
How about we select the most qualified students for admission, instead of dumbing down standards to attain some impractical vision of “ethnic diversity? And how do we determine what someone’s ethnicity is? Will 10% minority do? And what is a “minority” ethnicity? This is just plain silly…
As JR above so eloquently points out, SB 185 is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to exalt some “minorities” over others – namely exclude too many Asian Americans. I had a friend who years ago told me of the severe discrimination against Asian Americans that was taking place in the CA college system. He and his brothers were subject to it… Seems like nothing much has changed…
When I was drafted in 1964, there was NO competition to put my butt on the line for the sake of my Country. I subsequently used the GI Bill to go to school. Is this “opportunity” no longer available to aspiring students, be they minority or otherwise!?!
Hey, Steve, the GI Bill is still around and even more generous. It is a great deal. Full tuition and fees plus a housing allowance that is based on the regional housing cost where you attend school. It is a great equalizer for educational opportunities: [url]http://www.gibill.va.gov/[/url]
Once again the underperforming minorities have found a new scapegoat for their woes… instead of looking into their own communities that worship failure and dereliction. Can’t wait to hear the logic behind dragging down one ethnic minority as being too academically prolific in favor of those that can’t get their acts together. Cry me a river…
[i]”In his brief, Governor Brown argued that [b]minorities[/b] face too high a barrier in efforts to overturn Proposition 209, due to it being part of the state’s constitution.”[/i]
I love the world of double-speak. In it, Asian-Americans are no longer racial minorities. Racism is somehow not racism if it discriminates in favor of the right races and against the wrong races.
[i]”According to an article yesterday in the Pasadena Star-News, [b]minority[/b] enrollment in California public universities has plummeted, despite the increasing number of minority high school graduates.”[/i]
More double-speak.
[i]He added, “We think creating a separate and unequal process for Latino and black students to seek change is the definition of a Jim Crow law.”[/i]
George Orwell could not have made this stuff up any better. When you have a system which treats all people without regard to race*, that is called ‘separate and unequal.’ When you have the racist system in place that he wants, that is considered ‘equal treatment.’
* The latest trick is to downplay grades and test scores. This has harmed Asians enrollment, helped whites and seems to have had no effect on others. Prior to that the created a 4% rule which allowed into UC the top 4% at each high school, even if that meant harming kids in the 12th to 15th percentile in better performing schools (like Davis High), in order to try to bring in more blacks and Latinos from lower performing schools. Admissions officers (since 209) have more highly weighted subjective standards, like overcoming some personal obstacles in life in order to gain admissions. That has had the pervers effect of keeping out some middle class blacks and Latinos who put in the work needed to succeed at UC, replacing them with kids who had often made poor life choices (like crime and premature parenthood) and are more likely to fail or drop out of school without a degree.
[i]In the meantime, the Pasedena Star-News reports, California State Senator Ed Hernandez has been pushing SB 185 which would “authorize the University of California and the California State University to consider race, [u]gender[/u], ethnicity, and national origin, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions…”[/i]
Forget that 185 is racist for a second. Mr. Hermandez wants to consider gender for enrollment? Girls dominate boys. It’s not even close. Every single UC campus has a female majority among undergrads. So the extreme left wants to end this by discriminating against girls who worked harder in high school than less-qualified, less well prepared boys did? Very strange.
[i]Reports the Pasadena Star-News, “In Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, the Court ruled the Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit a narrowly-tailored consideration of race in admissions decisions at a Michigan law school.”[/i]
I suspect the current Supreme Court would rule differently in the Michigan case, since O’Connor is off the court.
[i]”My larger concern is that the state needs more people participating in higher education. These are the people who need to participate – and what we’re lacking from the governor is any sense of direction in terms of public policy for managing higher education in this state,” he told the paper.[/i]
If we ‘need’ more blacks and Latinos in higher education (and I would include whites in that, because they too are ‘underrepresented’), then blacks, whites and Latinos need to work as hard as Asians work. There are plenty of examples of other groups who seem to be very successful in our education system: South Asians, Jews, North Africans, Arab-Americans, Persians, blacks from the Caribbean and Africa and so on. They work to prepare themselves for higher education. They need to be the role models for those who are not succeeding.
We would not have underrepresented minorities in anywhere near the numbers we have if those communities would follow what Bill Cosby has said: [quote] “For the last generation or two, as our communities dissolved and our parenting skills broke down, no one has suffered more than our young black men. There is one statistic that captures the bleakness. In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into” “two-parent home. Today, that number is less than two out of six. In poor communities, that number is lower still. There are whole blocks with scarcely a married couple, whole blocks without responsible males to watch out for wayward boys, whole neighborhoods in which little girls and boys come of age without seeing up close a committed partnership and perhaps never having attended a wedding.” [/quote] Why is that so important? [quote] Because children need the guidance. Because the other parent needs help as well. Because if a home is set with one parent, and then to other—an aunt, a caregiver—we’re in big trouble. But these families that we speak of are also included with homeless children, the number of homeless children we have. [/quote] Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School: [quote]I think, you know, right now that figure cited is 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers in the United States each year, and a lot of them are living in poverty because of that. And the boys and the girls don’t have fathers, and every study indicates that the involvement of fathers with their family, and particularly with their children, is very important to their good and healthy development. But that’s not happening. And many of these fathers don’t even know what to do as a father because many of them grew up in homes that were fatherless. So what’s the model for a, a two-parent home or for a family? They—many of them don’t have any. [/quote] We don’t just have a problem of too few blacks getting into UC. We have a broken family problem that disproportionately is found among blacks and Latinos (and increasingly among whites). It is for this reason we all need to look to Asians, who don’t suffer this broken family problem in large numbers (especially when Asian means Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese Americans).
Racism is alive and well and finds a comfortable nest in the Democratic party…
Gunrock, two great posts. Talk about telling it how it is.
Rich: [i]”We don’t just have a problem of too few blacks getting into UC. We have a broken family problem that disproportionately is found among blacks and Latinos (and increasingly among whites). It is for this reason we all need to look to Asians, who don’t suffer this broken family problem in large numbers (especially when Asian means Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese Americans).”[/i]
So we know this to be the case… then why are we not addressing the problem at the root cause? Why are we still looking for political bandaids that only perpetuate the problems?
Here is a simple challenge that can help you identify yourself as having destructuve racism glasses like Governor Brown… if you think afirmative action is justified, explain when and how it would no longer be justified.
Gunrock: “Racism is alive and well and finds a comfortable nest in the Democratic party.”
Racism and classism. To them, apparently, not all men are created equal.
The big question is: How do you fix a broken culture?
I think I know the answer. You need to give people the proper incentive structure to “do the right thing.” If done on a large enough scale, I believe it would change our sub-culture of poverty, which begets broken homes, which begets criminal and other anti-social behavior, which begets more poverty and on and on.
To that effect, here is the test that would prove my belief, one way or the other:
1. Take two largely low-income schools with the same demographics and the same socio-economic status;
2. At School X, offer each girl, 14-years-old and older who comes from a low-income, single-parent family $100 every month she does not A) get pregnant, B) test positive for illegal drugs and C) get arrested for any serious criminal violations until she is age 24. If a qualified girl gets pregnant, does drugs or is arrested, she is dropped from the program. Each girl/woman who makes it all the way to age 24 under the terms of the program is then awarded $48,000, the price we pay to incarcerate one inmate for one year in state prison.
3. At School Z, offer no incentives for anything.
Then 30 years after the program ends, when the original 14-year-olds are 44, compare how the groups with the same demographic and SES backgrounds are doing in life. That is, see how many in each group is poor, how many graduated from college, how many are married, how many have jobs, etc.
My guess is that you will find the group from School X, which had a financial incentive to put off having children, to not do drugs and to stay away from crime will not only do much better than the other group, but the cycle of the poverty culture will affect their kids much less than it affects the others’ kids. The X group will have healthier children who perform better in school and later in life will have much lower crime and substance abuse rates and so on. The unincentivized group Z will fare far worse in every regard.
You could do the same kind of two-school study with boys. The difference in their case is it is harder to know about the pregnancy question. Maybe for the males the X-group’s monthly tests up to age 18 would be A) no positive drug tests, B) no criminal arrests and C) keeping up with grade-level work and graduating with your class from high school. After 18 for boys, part C) would be making progress toward a college or trade school degree or holding down a full-time job.
Again, I believe the group with a strong financial incentive to behave properly would have far better life outcomes than the other group at every age along the way and would have better adjusted children.
Because of the terribly high cost of prison and other societal costs from unruly youths, this kind of program would probably pay for itself very quickly. And in addition to a much better life, the $48,000 award at age 24 would, in many cases, represent enough financial capital to serve as a foundation for future prosperity.
When I suggested this sort of program in my column, I was castigated by the extreme left as a “racist.” It’s a false charge, of course. That Sharptonesque conclusion is made by people who offer no hope whatsoever to victims of the cycle of poverty and always assume everyone who does not agree with their tried and failed solutions has bad motives like racism.
My intent is to make life better for people born into poverty and a family structure which tends to harm its children’s outcomes. I have no intent to stop any minorities from reproducing*. But I think it is very clear that having fewer children and waiting until one is at least 24 years old is a good thing for our society at large.
*I don’t think our society would be worse off if children who come from the very worst circumstances–serious child abuse; serious drug-addicted parents; extreme poverty and malnourishment; and serious mental-health problems at home–do not reproduce ever. We would be better off with this outcome. However, I would never endorse in any way a program which forced anyone in his right mind into not reproducing. I am not in any sense a believer in eugenics. I do believe in helping people to make good choices in life for themselves and for their offspring.
I admire the thoughtful proposal by Mr. Rifkin, but sadly I think that anything along these lines would be turned into some government hash long before it saw the light of day.
In the end, the solution is simple. Government is not the answer, it is not a solution, it is not going to make things better. Get government out of the way and stop propping up a culture that worships losers. Step away. Step back and stop incentivizing failure. People will succeed or fail and live with the consequences.
Going to college is a privilege, not a right.
Do any of you believe that the child raised in inner city poverty has equal opportunity to the child from a rich family in Palo Alto ?
“Classism” can be viewed as the poor envying the rich and it can also be viewed as the rich and powerful utilizing their wealth to maintain their preponderance of power whether or not they actually earned the wealth.
And no political party has a lock on racism. Do you believe there would have been any question about Barack Obama’s birth place had both of hid parents been white ?
respectfully, I disagree that Obama’s race had ANYTHING to do with peoples discomfort with his birth.
I suspect it has far more to do with the unusual locations of his birth, upbringing, father, name changes etc. If he was born in Davis to two black parents and went to a US school and decided to run for President, I doubt anyone would have thought twice about it…
I too admire the creativity of Rich’s solution and I think it covers part of the incentive engine needed to motivate better behavior. However, there is more to human motivation than just being given money for doing something. Humans need to feel accomplished along the way in a constant path of growth until they reach some level of self actualization.
I am okay with handing out money for good behavior in lieu of other costs, but I also say we need to completely reform the education system to a brand new model that deals with the problems specific to the inner city and low income areas. This is best handled by private for-profit companies regulated by a Federal program in a true public-private partnership.
We also need to ramp up our economic development in these areas for jobs. This means a serious push to get grow more manufacturing jobs. We need to model what Germany is doing on the economic front (although their education system is coming under fire).
The other thing we need is more Bill Cosby leaders and zero Al Sharpton leaders. Likewise, we needed to retire all racism activists because it is the last thing an AA child needs to hear that his struggles in life are because of the white man is holding him down. For the same reason we need to completely delete affirmative action from our vocabulary. It is a handout, and handouts destroy self determination and will. Instead, we need “workouts”. The military and Americorps, and other similar programs are a great way for kids to earn the money they would use for college. Not only do they get the money, but they earn the pride of having done it themselves.
[i]”Do any of you believe that the child raised in inner city poverty has equal opportunity to the child from a rich family in Palo Alto?”[/i]
I think that is a bad and misleading question designed to bias, because your dichotomy includes multiple variables which lie behind each circumstance. The rich family in Palo Alto–I happen to have relatives in Palo Alto who are rich–likely has two parents, both very well educated and well adjusted who are emotionally stable and who waited well past their teenaged years to bear children, who have no criminal records and who will instill in their kids the values and actions which led to their professional and scholarly success.
I think the right question along these lines is which children are likely to go on to success in school and later in life go on to make enough money to live well:
A) those whose 6-person family income is $25,000 a year, but they have a married mother and a father at home who instill Chinese “Confucionist” values regarding education; or
B) those whose 6-person family income is $25,00 a year, but they are headed only by a single mother and have the “broken family values” decried by Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint of the all-too-common lower-class African American household?
I would posit it is the latter.
I don’t know this, but I suspect it is true: that the median family income for University of California Asian undergrads who went to high school in California is LOWER than for most other groups, if not all other groups. What makes me guess that? Because Asian immigrants who themselves are generally not very well off yet, have high educational values and send their kids to the UC campuses at a disproportionately high rate. Among whites and blacks who are poor, I suspect the chances that their kids go on to UC is much lower than it is for Asians, due to the cultural difference. I would guess that despite a high poverty rate among blacks in California, a high percentage of the smartest black kids, children who grow up in towns like Davis and Palo Alto and who have parents with advanced degrees, who go to UC come from middle, upper-middle and rich black families far more often than they come from poor, broken families. And I would guess that is also true of whites. But I doubt it is true of Asians. Asians are like Jews were from 1900-1950. Poor Jews sent their kids off to the best colleges in the United States at rates as high or higher than other groups which had a lot more money.
JEFF: [i]”However, there is more to human motivation than just being given money for doing something. Humans need to feel accomplished along the way in a constant path of growth until they reach some level of self actualization.”[/i]
I very much agree with you on that point.
I recall hearing an NPR story–maybe 10 years ago–about a vocational education program in the Miami area which was far more successful than almost any other voc. ed program in the country for black and Hispanic boys who were in such a program.
What set this one apart was that it not only was a scholarship program–that is, the money part–but it was also a mentoring, role-model program.
It was run through a mainline Protestant church, either Methodist or Episcopalian or Presbyterian. (It was not fundamentalist.) Its funding was all private, I think from a foundation like Ford or Rockefeller.
What they discovered was that a lot of boys growing up in broken homes needed training for a career and needed an adult role model who was a professional in the same field. So the churches paired up each youth–I think they were all around age 16 and all had some sort of criminal records already–with an adult. If a kid joined a voc ed program in plumbing, he would be partnered with a journeyman plumber who would serve as his mentor, sort of a father-like role.
Each pair stayed together for a long time–I think 8 years or more. And the older one took classes to learn how to properly mentor and motivate the youth to do the right thing and follow his career path. In many cases, they literally worked together, where the kid would serve as an apprentice to his mentor.
I tried Googling this but couldn’t find anything. I’d like to know if it is still going. My recollection was that it was very successful, largely because the boys really needed a man in their lives to serve as a role model and that when that aspect was missing, these boys tended to quit the voc. ed program and get into trouble with the law and have other problems that their role models helped them steer clear of.
Oops: “I would posit [b]it is NOT [/b] the latter.”
What are the factors that can influnce success or failure?:
– Family support
– Family values
– Education
– Living environment
– Economics
– Culture
– Morals
– Biology?
– Politics
– Media
– Luck?
– Self determination
– Instilled work ethic
– Mentors
– Successes to build on
– Self confidence
I’m sure there are more to add. However, looking at this list only luck and biology are uncontrollable elements… and two that would seem to have the smallest impact.
Gunrock
“Get government out of the way and stop propping up a culture that worships losers. Step back and stop incentivizing failure. people will succeed or fail and live with the consequences. Or in the case od the children, die by them if their parents are unable to feed, clothe and house them. But don”t let that bother you. From your comments it seems fairly clear that you have never had to depend on a government program to survive. Having had that experience does not necessarily make one lazy or immoral, it may simply mean one was a child when their family catastrophe occurred.
“respectfully, I disagree that Obama’s race had ANYTHING to do with peoples discomfort with his birth. I suspect it has far more to do with the unusual locations of his birth, upbringing, father, name changes etc.”
So you think a white person born to an army father who was constantly moving around would be subjected to the same?
Boone: What do you believe the largest determinate of success is? I’ll answer it for you, education of the parents. When you want to control for variables, that is the easiest control value. However, the amazing thing is that even when you control for the education of the parents, race has statistical significance in a whole host of studies looking at anything from test scores to income. So the children of two parents, both of whom have post graduate education and good jobs, white kids score better in school and make far more money than black kids.
“You should realize that this is aimed squarely at Asian Americans. “
It’s aimed at increasing the number of African American and Latino students. If anything, it is not aimed at Asians at all, the people most likely impacted would not be Asians, but the more marginal white students. But I don’t look at it that way. UC wants to increase their admissions, to me if they want to expand the pie, why not expand it by adding more black and Hispanic kids.
“How about we select the most qualified students for admission”
As I’ve always argued, people who oppose Affirmative Action seem to believe that the admissions policy is somehow objective. It’s not. It’s built on arbitrary measures and there are other factors that should be considered that might change the calculation.
“Asian-Americans are no longer racial minorities”
Asians are racial minorities, they are simply not underrepresented. An Asian policy would be very complicated because there is an interesting dichotomy. There are a lot of poor and disadvantage Asians. It is a rising group in society. But from what I’ve seen, Asians would not be harmed by this policy, especially when you consider an expansion of UC entrance.
Rifkin: “2. At School X, offer each girl, 14-years-old and older who comes from a low-income, single-parent family $100 every month she does not A) get pregnant, B) test positive for illegal drugs and C) get arrested for any serious criminal violations until she is age 24. If a qualified girl gets pregnant, does drugs or is arrested, she is dropped from the program. Each girl/woman who makes it all the way to age 24 under the terms of the program is then awarded $48,000, the price we pay to incarcerate one inmate for one year in state prison.”
That is 2a. 2b should be, since it is unfair to put the onus on just the girls:
2. At School X, offer each boy, 14-years-old and older who comes from a low-income, single-parent family $100 every month he does not A) get a girl pregnant, B) test positive for illegal drugs and C) get arrested for any serious criminal violations until he is age 24. If a qualified boy gets a girl pregnant, does drugs or is arrested, he is dropped from the program. Each boy/man who makes it all the way to age 24 under the terms of the program is then awarded $48,000, the price we pay to incarcerate one inmate for one year in state prison.
And by the way, as much as I agree w what Bill Cosby preaches, I know for a fact he does not PRACTICE WHAT HE PREACHES, since he had numerous affairs during his marriage…
To dmg: You never answered my question – how is the ethnicity of someone to be determined? As far as your comments that this is not racism against Asian Americans – IMHO you are splitting hairs and not facing the truth. CA public universities have been discriminating against Asian-Americans literally for years…
To medwoman: College bound kids from inner city low income families already get preference with a free college education bc of the many grant programs…
Bottom line is we don’t want to dumb down standards to uphold an artificially and politically correct artifact that makes no sense and degrades education…
[quote]However, there is more to human motivation than just being given money for doing something. Humans need to feel accomplished along the way in a constant path of growth until they reach some level of self actualization.
I am okay with handing out money for good behavior in lieu of other costs, but I also say we need to completely reform the education system to a brand new model that deals with the problems specific to the inner city and low income areas. This is best handled by private for-profit companies regulated by a Federal program in a true public-private partnership.
We also need to ramp up our economic development in these areas for jobs. This means a serious push to get grow more manufacturing jobs. [/quote]
Nicely said!
[i]”What do you believe the largest determinate of success is? I’ll answer it for you, education of the parents.”[/i]
Maybe in this country, because our public education system is crappy. Also, because we lost the manufacturing industry and grew to an information-based economy that rewards the narrow band of intelligence and academic achievement that rich white parents and Asian parents and the crappy schools provide. If you want to blame someone for the plight of minorities with weak families, blame those white parents and tiger moms for setting a lower lazy-teacher bar by paying for tutors and supplementing their crappy public schools so their little darlings can take all those AP classes and get that 4.2 GPA so they get into the best colleges. Also blame the public sector workers for stuffing their pockets with obscene pay and benefits at expense of kids that could use wood shop, athletics and counselors that have been cut.
I was a reasonably good student who had zero help from either of my divorced or adoptive parents. I had my choice of colleges to attend in 1978, but today I would not be accepted. The reason for the difference is help of well-educated – and typically well-off – parents supplementing the crappy schools. This creates a much bigger education gap for the kids that don’t have well educated parents that have the time to constantly help their kids do math and write papers. In the past, this type of thing would not be so damaging to the parent-disadvantaged kids because they would get a blue collar job that paid well and many would end up being as prosperous as the higher-educated white collar kids. However, today with public sector jobs paying obscene pay and benefits and well-paying private sector blue collar jobs all but gone, these parent-disadvantaged kids are screwed by comparison.
This all comes back to the crappy schools. We need a complete overhaul of how we educate kids. It needs to be blown up and reformed to a completely different model. It needs to be privatized because the public teachers unions have proven they will block and delay reform to protect their adult jobs program at the expense of the kids. In the end, there needs to be more choice, more tutoring, teachers that are rewarded and fired based on performance, students and parents treated as customers not irritants to the adult jobs program that public education is today. The primary goal of middle-school through high school should be preparing kids for the working world… based on the unique needs and abilities of each kid. Community colleges should be free and accessible and provide a long list of two year certificate programs to put the capstone on the skills required for kids to get a damn job.
We also need to boot our all the illegal immigrants and close the borders so some of these jobs start paying better wages. I worked on a ranch/farm while in high school, then a restaurant then in residential construction out of high school while I attended evening classes at American River JC. I was able to support myself. Now most of those jobs pay minimum wage because of the large supply of cheap immigrant labor. And don’t give me crap about the cruelty to Mexican immigrant families. Mexico has plenty of resources to take care of its people. If we stop allowing them to sneak over the border to siphon $50 billion a year from our country to send to their families in Mexico, the Mexican government would have to answer to it and clean up the corruption in government and their judicial once and for all. Illegal immigration is more a Mexican political pressure release valve than it is a real financial necessity. The cruelty is for us to continue to allow it so the Mexican government continues to remain incompetent and corrupt.
Germany has an education model that works better, although it is somewhat in decline and I would only take ideas from it and not try to match it.
We also need to reboot our manufacturing base. Again, Germany has a good model… most of their manufacturing jobs are small businesses doing niche manufacturing. They are always looking for these niches and are good at changing with the markets. We need to redirect money being spent on social programs to economic development. It is the classic “feed a fish, or help create a fishing business” argument.
The black family situation is a mess… 70+ percent of black kids in single-parent households… many young men without father figures or strong moral male role models. We cannot fix that overnight. It will take an army of community activists (through churches and charities… not government) to start making a dent in this. The best way to expedite the corrections is through a completely changed education system. One idea I like is a boot-camp ROTC high school run by the US military or a private company that employs ex-soldiers. More young inner city men and women would like be saved by a program like this. Then they go on to break the cycle of dysfunction that has plagued generations of their family.
[i]”Then they go on to break the cycle of dysfunction that has [u]plagued generations[/u] of their family.”[/i]
One point Cosby amd others make is that from roughly 1960 to roughly 1970, the black family completely fell apart. It happened in a very short period of time. It did not take “generations.” We went from a very high percentage growing up in two-parent households with normal American values to a very high percentage growing up in one-parent households utterly lacking any kind of traditional family values.
What accounted for that sudden change?
Most economists who have studied it–I should say every economist I know of who has studied it and most prominently Daniel Patric Moynihan who gave the phenomenon publicity–say the answer is we changed the economic incentive structure for those with low incomes*. That is, we gave poor women for the first time a strong incentive to have children outside of marriage at a very young age or to get a divorce and we gave poor men financial incentives to abandon any family responsibilities.
It probably will take much longer to repair the damage. However, I think giving people the proper incentive structure to make responsible choices is an important first step.
*The same break-down in family structures happened with whites in the same period, as well. The big difference is largely that blacks had, when the policies changes, much higher rates of poverty.
To Rich Rifkin and Jeff Boone: I would say our “sexual revolution” and permissiveness about sex outside of marriage (e.g. hooking up), the bleeding of the porn industry into legitimate television/movies, and that sort of thing certainly has not helped keep the marriage model alive and well in our country…
Elaine: I will have to think about that some. I think after WWII through the early 70s it was more likely for husbands to have affairs but for marriages to not fall apart because of it. Socially, culturally, legally and economically, there was less wives could do about it. Then the hippies and free love and the women’s movement… and everyone seemed to be sleeping around, and the options expanded for wives to kick their unfaithful husbands out of the house.
I have been together with my wife for 31 years. We took our vows of faithfulness and have stuck to them. There were periods of time when our kids were younger where I would say I was at my lowest “marriage value” point. I could feel us drifting apart. A few things saved us. One was our work ethic and commitment to our children’s well being over our selfish needs. Another was the rational understanding that time for each other would eventually arrive (the days are long and the years are short theme). However, I think the biggest reason our marriage stayed together and strong was Dr. Laura Schlessinger. She is a woman that progressive women seem to hate. However, my wife read her book “The Care and Feeding of a Husband” and what she learned and practiced (without my knowledge she was doing so) essentially rekindled the attraction and bonds between us. I brought home flowers one night after work, had arranged a baby sitter and we went to dinner together. At dinner she told me about the book and how it had worked like magic.
What my wife had learned and I agreed with, was men are simple beasts and women are full of more complex emotional needs. Dr. Laura notes a big reason many marriages fall apart is that women tend to make the fulfillment of their needs a prerequisite for taking care of their husband… and husbands start to feel confused and neglected and then grow resentful… and then they start to wander. What Dr. Laura proposed was that wives nurture their husbands first and that husbands will naturally start to try and please their wives. The basic concept is that men are generally easy to emotionally please… and they need the motivational gas in their tank to figure out the more complex puzzle of a woman’s emotional needs.
Most of my friends and family that are divorced got divorced because they cheated or their spouse cheated. However, in talking to them it is clear that their husband-wife relationship was providing minimal intimacy. The person that cheats on a spouse is the one to blame, but I wonder if more wives could have saved their marriage by reading Dr. Laura’s book and following her recommendations. I really don’t think access to porn has much to do with fidelity… although cavalier attitudes about sex outside of relationships certainly do.
JB
” The person that cheats on a spouse is the one to blame, but…..”
Wonderful Jeff. Now you have managed to blame women who have honored their vows for their husbands lying, cheating failure to honor their own because of ….please…. confusion and feeling resentful! In my opinion, there is nothing confused about a philandering male. He knows exactly what he is doing and chooses it anyway, over his oath, over his commitment to his wife, over his commitment to the well being of his children. An unhappily married man has many options other than betrayal of his family and yet that is the choice these faithless men make. I can’t help but wonder why you think it is the sole responsibility of the woman to essentially cajole her husband into remaining faithful since that is exactly what Dr. Laura’s book suggests. And yes, I have read it. Disgusting ! And what about the woman who does all that and he still cheats. Are we going to blame her for not being subservient enough for his poor battered ego?
medwoman: I’m just explaining things the way I see it and the way it works for me and many others. Look at it this way… men are dogs. So how do you train a dog? Maybe you don’t like dogs… no problem.
JB
I would have hoped for better from you after all of your many posts about those whose values are somehow inferior to yours. Seems like you believe after all that the entire burden for maintaining the family belongs to the woman. I thought that you frequently portrayed that of the position of people from lesser cultures than your own.
JB: [i]We also need to boot our all the illegal immigrants and close the borders so some of these jobs start paying better wages.[/i]
Illegal immigration from Mexico continues decline
[url]http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/jul/07/illegal-immigration-mexico-continues-decline/[/url]
Looks like things are heading in the direction you want.
JB: [i]It needs to be privatized because the public teachers unions have proven they will block and delay reform to protect their adult jobs program at the expense of the kids.[/i]
Did you ever get around to reading The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch?
Do you know that non-union states often have “crappier” schools than the strong union states. If your statement were true, then I think you’d see a better correlation to educational performance and teachers unions.
[i]”I would have hoped for better from you after all of your many posts about those whose values are somehow inferior to yours. Seems like you believe after all that the entire burden for maintaining the family belongs to the woman.”[/i]
I’ve been unable to respond to this due to travel, but I wanted to. First, obviously I hit a nerve here. There is some heat coming from your responses.
Back to the topic and the connection… I think we were talking about the connection to higher academic performance and stable marriage. More specifically the academic performance results for certain minorities and their notable behaviors related to marriage and family values.
My comments were general. I completely agree with the point that not all marriages and divorces fit the same template. My own experience with friends and families that that have divorced and stayed together supports the principles that Dr. Laura teaches.
Frankly, I see three types of marriages:
1 – Strong partnership – where the force of the entity of marriage is as strong or stronger than the force of filling the individual needs of each spouse… where the wife generally takes the lead in caring for the family and paying attention to the husband and the husband reciprocates with care and attention of the wife.
2 – Resigned and whipped husband – where the man has given up his natural wiring to feel in charge and in control of his family in order to satiate the individual needs of the wife in order to keep the family together.
3 – Roaming husband – where the previous leads to time when the man decides he is unhappy enough that he seeks other women to provide him the feedback and attention he lacks at home.
There was a line in my “Big Fat Greek Wedding”… “The man is the head of the family but the woman is the neck and turns the head”. I think this quip is right on in terms of a key attribute that most long-standing marriages seem to have in common. Of course there are other things… and other reasons marriages end.
I spent 10 years in California prisons and know the Pelican Bay SHU personally. I wrote a drug war novel Roll Call by Glenn Langohr to show the public the path we are on by incarcerating petty criminals is only breeding bigger ones who are displaced from society when they are released. The U.S is not the leaders of the free world; we are the leaders of the incarcerated world! I started http://www.lockdownpublishing.com when I got out of prison to help other prisoners change their lives through writing. http://youtu.be/jEQ8Gh1-bFs Here is the NY Review Kirkus Discoveries, Nielsen Business Media
discoveries@kirkusreviews.com
A harrowing, down-and-dirty depiction—sometimes reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic—of America’s war on drugs, by former dealer and California artist Langohr.
I’m also writing over 50 California prisoners to inspire them to turn their lives around through writing. I want interviews and publicity as I am broke out of prison and can’t afford the regular channels…
Thank you and God Bless Glenn 949 357 7465
TIME TO PROTEST THE C.C.P.O.A –Coming soon