If There Is Still a Place for Affirmative Action in Education, It Lies at the Back End

Children read in the library at Yung Wing School in New York City on Feb. 2, 2022. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

Commentary

Affirmative action programs in education are being dismantled all around the country, and the new administration in Washington is promising to continue a major shakeup in this arena.

The highly politicized struggle over affirmative action has diverted our attention away from more critical issues that need to be addressed in these programs. To plot a more effective way forward in our nation’s efforts to bring the economic and social benefits of our system to all of its people, it is urgent that the focus should shift to the back end of the educational hierarchy.

Even before the Supreme Court issued its final ruling against affirmative action programs in higher education in 2023, many of us who were long-time college educators knew that something was not working as hoped for all students touched by that policy.

Much of the public has assumed that the key issues simply aligned with legal arguments about the Equal Protection Clause and fairness to all, but that doesn’t address something more fundamental for many in these programs. This is the inherent difficulty in trying to pluck students from backgrounds disadvantaged by substandard and underfunded primary and secondary schools, under-educated parents and guardians who couldn’t help with homework, homes broken by drugs or violence, etc., putting them into a competitive university setting and expecting them to suddenly perform in line with other students who did not face those challenges along the way. Many of the more severely affected students in these situations had fallen through the cracks long before they reached a college campus. Remedial programs in higher education can be good but are not optimally efficient that late in the game. The efforts need to start earlier.

I am writing to raise awareness of this problem so that it does not lose attention in any coming efforts to re-engineer educational protocols. I will illustrate this point with an encounter I had about 15 years ago teaching a university class on economic principles to several hundred students in a large lecture hall. At the end of the term, I gave a two-hour final exam consisting of 50 multiple-choice questions. After about five minutes, a young black woman seated near the front of the classroom folded her exam booklet, brought it up to the podium, handed it to me without explanation, and left. The exam was unmarked.

Later that day, she showed up at my office. She said that she had just come to thank me for the course and say goodbye as she would be leaving the university. When I inquired why, she said that she had been on academic probation and was not able to get off that status. I took out a copy of the exam I had just given, opened to the first page and asked her to tell me what confused her. She looked up and down the page for a few moments but made no comment, and finally she just looked up at me silently. At that point I realized that she could not read.

I marveled that she had managed to get this far being unable to read, but I do have some sense of this for my class at least. She was a conscientious attender, she sat near the front, and she apparently took in my verbal explanation of the material well. She had everything we want in student attitudes. She was also able to figure out the more straightforward mathematical problems from print. It was clear that she was very smart. I cannot imagine the sense of hopelessness that must have griped her when she looked at the 12 single-spaced pages of complicated sentences that she could not make out in that timed setting of the final exam.

I didn’t have access to this student’s admissions records, and I do not know exactly what role affirmation action played in her admission to the university, as all students were still required to meet basic admissions criteria. But this charge comes with many gray areas. In the case of my student, I would guess that she scored well on the quantitative part of the SAT and poorly on the verbal part. This was probably a tough decision for some admissions officer.

How does this story end? It was too late to arrange for an oral version of the exam such as the Office of Disabilities Services provides for students with dyslexia and other reading problems. So I assumed this role and read the exam to her. I took down her answers, and she passed fair and square.

I did not see her after that, and I do not know how or where she ended up. This appears to be a story about race, but at its core it is not about race. In my long years of teaching, I had students of all races and ethnicities who were in similar situations, just none that came to my attention in such a dramatic way as the case I have just related. All too often I saw these students gravitate toward less demanding majors where their anxiety levels were lower but their ultimate economic outcomes fell beneath the level of their innate intellect. I am not the first person to raise this alarm.

To accomplish meaningful change in these well-intentioned programs, it is critical that we begin a broad refocusing of our efforts on all aspects of the earliest years of school where they can provide the skills prerequisite for later success. No matter how the goals of affirmative action are addressed going forward, no child should be allowed to leave grade school without being able to read.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.