Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

The Ups and Downs of Ending Affirmative Action Preferences

By Carol Allen

In their highly readable book on the California Civil Rights Initiative, co-authors Harry Glynn Custred, M. Aliz Raza, and A. Janell Anderson describe the Ups and Downs of Affirmative Action Preferences. Were they to write a sequel today, they might aptly title it The Ups and Downs of Ending Affirmative Action Preferences. With the decision this month to close down the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative campaign and last month’s similar decision in Oklahoma, it would seem that the battle to end race preferences is facing some major setbacks. Has there, perhaps, been a downturn in the popular support for this quest?

A good place to start in answering that question is with a brief review of the ten-year history of efforts to end affirmative action preferences (by voter initiative or legislation). In 1996, Californians voted decisively to end the use of such preferences in public contracting, education and employment. But, it is worth remembering that the progenitors of the California Civil Rights Initiative (Tom Wood and Harry Glynn Custred) had first tried and failed to place the question before voters in 1994. The setback that year did not deter their renewed efforts in 1996, which – with the added support of many other leaders (including Ward Connerly) – were met with success.

The CCRI victory inspired citizens and legislators in many states to emulate that success. Ballot drives were launched in Colorado, Florida and Illinois in 1997, but each failed. That same year, legislation to end or curtail affirmative action preferences was introduced in eleven states (Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina). Although these efforts also failed, the idea that preferences based on race, gender or ethnicity have no place in our democratic republic was embraced by a growing number of adherents.

The defeat of the Houston Civil Rights Initiative in 1997 (and earlier legislative failures in Washington state) did not discourage state representative Scott Smith and businessman Tim Eyman from launching a petition drive that year, modeled on the CCRI. With substantial support from Ward Connerly and the American Civil Rights Coalition, their campaign led 58 percent of the state’s voters to pass the Washington State Civil Rights Initiative in November 1998.

From 1994 through 2001, a series of appellate court decisions (including Podberesky v. Kirwan, Hopwood v. Texas, Smith v. University of Washington Law School, and Johnson v. Board of Regents of University of Georgia) began to curtail the practice of affirmative action preferences in college admissions and scholarships – at least in the regions directly affected by the rulings. Many colleges and universities outside those regions also chose to moderate their use of preferences in an effort to limit potential exposure to legal challenges. Opponents of race preferences saw some hope that the practice would be eliminated through the court system.

But, the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 23, 2003 split decision on the Gratz and Grutter cases made it clear that the courts seem unlikely to take a firm position on the constitutionality of affirmative action preferences in the near future. On the one hand, the Gratz ruling declared that the outright, systematic, and heavy-handed practice of race preferences in college admissions is unconstitutional. On the other hand, the contradictory ruling in Grutter left open the possibility that colleges and universities could continue to give preferences and make decisions on the basis of race – so long as it was done in a subtle manner. The nation’s institutions of higher education seized this opening and re-invigorated (and cloaked in layers of subtlety) their practice of granting preferential treatment based on race and ethnicity (and sometimes gender – but with the gender-based preferences in admissions now going to men).

Within weeks after the Grutter-Gratz decisions, state legislators Leon Drolet and Jack Brandenberg launched the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, with the support of Ward Connerly. Eventually – and under the leadership of Jennifer Gratz – their campaign led to a 16-point margin of victory at the polls in November 2006. But, that campaign had many setbacks also; in fact, the original plan was to place the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative on the November 2004 ballot.

What is the lesson to learn from this history? The clear pattern is that persistence will pay off. Popular support for ending preferences based on race and gender is widespread and it is growing. The American people have not lost their belief in the premise upon which this nation is founded: that all men are created equal. In the short term, activist groups on the left such as BAMN and ACORN can – through tactics of fear-mongering and deceit – temporarily thwart efforts to end the unconstitutional practice by the state of preferring one individual over another on the basis of that person’s skin color, gender, or ethnicity. But history plainly shows the long-term and progressive movement of the American people toward the goal of creating laws and adopting practices that entrench our commitment to the moral equality of all individuals.

Carol Allen is a research specialist in the Political Science Department of Michigan State University and the author of Ending Racial Preferences: The Michigan Story.

The Opportunity Gap: Racism in Education

By Julie Landsman

Instead of looking at the difference in test scores between white students and African-American and Latino students as part of an achievement gap, how about thinking about it as a reflection of an opportunity gap. It seems to me that all students are entitled to an opportunity to have an education that reflects their lives and cultures, their literature and history. Everyone has a story. Everyone has their own rituals, their own world-view. If students do not feel visible, if they are not reflected in the curriculum, on the walls, in the media centers, in the visitors who come to speak to them, then they are not receiving the same opportunity to learn as white students, who still find their lives visible in the texts and lessons taught by an overwhelmingly white teaching force.

Combining the unwelcoming, and discouraging effect of a classroom that excludes them, with the lack of resources many students of color possess given our history of racism and its connection to present day poverty, there must be no question that many students of color today are working without the same opportunities as many white students. To compare test scores of a young man with a family computer at home, a college education provided for by his parents, a school with a full science lab and many AP courses, a building that is clean and safe and with teachers who look like him, to those of a young man who goes to school in a building with no computer lab, few books in the media center, (if there is a media center) and class sizes of over 40 students per hour, is a false comparison. Combining racism and poverty, it seems self-evident, that the problem is not in the child, but rather in the system that perpetuates the lack of opportunity many urban students of color experience.

I believe every student must have the opportunity to attend a school where she sees herself everywhere in the building and in the readings and in the high expectations of demanding classes and firm teachers. In order to close the gap white teachers need to begin by thinking of each of these children as their own child, not as someone else’s child, and thus seeing each of their students as someone who has the same brilliant potential to achieve as their own.

In order to close the real gap, gifted programs. AP and IB classes must reflect the population of each school system and not continue to be white enclaves. Such a move would go long way to eliminating the re-segregation of students once they are enter the school room door. Each student, white, black, poor, rich, middle class, must have the opportunity for small class sizes, resources, textbooks, science equipment, in order to provide comparable opportunities for all students. When we can put the onus of the problem on the system that continues to disenfranchise students of color through institutional racism and economic disparity instead of on the low test scores of the children, then we will be one step closer to closing the real gap in education—the opportunity gap.

Julie Landsman is a retired public school teacher and consultant on multicultural education and building inclusive classrooms and is the author Growing Up White: A Veteran Teacher Reflects on Racism.

On Single-Sex Education

By Frances R. Spielhagen

It is no surprise that single-sex classes have emerged as a school reform that might foster student achievement. However, single-sex classes are not a “silver bullet” that will solve all problems associated with student achievement. Ideologically driven reform does not take into account the caveats that must accompany efforts to implement single sex classes.

Do single-sex classes work? The answer is a complex “Yes, no, and maybe.” While single-sex classes are not a panacea for the social ills that beset young adolescents and affect their academic performance, recent research that has examined the implementation of single-sex classes in several districts across the nation suggests that such arrangements work for some students, both boys and girls, in some academic areas. Single-sex class arrangements seem to be most effective when related to the developmental needs of the students. In fact, the younger the student, the more likely that being in a single-sex class will be a positive experience. Moreover, simply grouping students according to gender will not automatically enhance their achievement. Teachers must understand the ways in which they can address and actualize the various ways in which students learn. Such training takes place over time. There are no quick-fixes here. Finally, it is essential that equal curriculum opportunities be offered to all students, both boys and girls. The slippery slope to a curriculum that provides shop classes for boys and home economics classes for girls is dangerously real if one begins to believe that differences in style equals difference in capacity!

Should all students be taught in single-sex classes? Of course not! The very complexity of student personalities and populations precludes any “One size fits all” approach to education, especially in the middle grades. However, the more pertinent question is whether single-sex classes should be offered as a viable choice for students, parents, and teachers who strongly favor them and want to be involved in them. The answer to that question is a resounding “Yes.” Schools must involve parents in decision-making about single-sex classes. Moreover, students who opt for single-sex classes may benefit from the arrangement simply because they chose it. Their success may well be related to the chicken/egg symbiosis of choice and efficacy. Nevertheless, it is still success for those who choose the arrangement. As schools across the nation struggle to address declining achievement among all students, success is welcome wherever it can be found. Researchers who have examined the schools that have implemented single-sex classes can attest to the complexity of results that derive from separating students in any way.

Frances Spielhagen is currently an assistant professor of education at Mount Saint Mary College, in Newburgh, New York and is the author of Debating Single-Sex Education: Separate and Equal?

Book Review of Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes's The Three Trillion Dollar War

By Gerald L. Houseman

Truth is an inevitable casualty of war, and the war of choice undertaken in Iraq is no exception. Lawrence Lindsey, an economic adviser to Bush in 2002, was fired for giving the press his estimate of an overall cost of $200 billion for the this war; Defense Secretary Rumsfeld oracularly declared this to be “baloney.” At the moment the total expenditure is in the neighborhood of $800 billion, but Stiglitz and Bilmes, as their title indicates, say a conservative estimate of the final cost will be $3 trillion. Any reader of their discouraging tome would be justified, all the same, in concluding that the tab, for a wide assortment of reasons, will be considerably higher.

Few will be surprised to know that the Bush Administration hides the figures. The “emergency” funding system adopted in place of a regular appropriation escapes normal scrutiny or budget caps. The “Decider’s” government also mocks the truth with its secrecy assault on the number of casualties, including those occurring during non-combat operations, even though these are vital for budgeting; and it works hard to insure that its expenditures for those infamous mercenaries, the 140,000 or so contractors and sub-contractors, must be the subject of guesswork as well. Then there are the endemic problems of Pentagon accounting, which has been in need of an overhaul for several generations. And cost estimates are also made impossible by being hidden in other parts of the Pentagon budget and in other agencies of the government.

Such obstacles do not leave these co-authors clueless, however. They provide a list of considerations far too long to set out here, but these include the cost of replacing equipment, the inefficiencies of relying so much on the National Guard, the full costs of health care and disability payments for thousands of returning veterans, restoring and re-structuring the Army, inflation, interest (because the war is largely debt-financed), and of course the macro-economic effects felt and endured by the populace. Stiglitz and Bilmes do not go into detail on that king of boondoggles, the Vatican-sized embassy now under construction in Baghdad, and they have little to say about the complex of bases Bush has proposed to build — and is now building — to protect Iraq’s (and our Texas-led and-centered) oil domain.

All of this can seem a peripheral concern when one remembers the massive numbers of horrors and deaths visited upon the people of that unfortunate country; and it goes without saying that the budgetary and accounting horrors pale for anyone who, like myself, has visited a VA facility and has observed a maimed young person trying to cope with a new and unfamiliar kind of existence.

Despite such obvious considerations, we must salute Stiglitz and Bilmes for performing a yeoman service. This is a time in which information blanks appear to be far more abundant than facts, when knowledge is thwarted by secrecy and executive orders, and laws are made up to serve expediency without benefit of much or even any review. Pentagon budgetary affairs are addressed on occasions too few and far between, and these hard researchers (and good websites like the Center for Defense Information) strive to give us some kind of a handle on what is going on.

Stiglitz and Bilmes can in no way be regarded as coldly detached. They point out that most Americans have failed to realize the costs of the Iraq war unless they are family members involved with the voluntary military. Their taxes have not been raised to pay for the war, and the rich have actually enjoyed tax cuts, a previously unheard-of benefit in wartime. But deficit spending cannot be ignored forever, and the nation’s gas pumps now display the cost of the weakened dollar, which in its turn is one of the costs of deficits and the war. And that’s not “baloney.”

Gerald L. Houseman is the author of Economics in a Changed Universe: Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization, and the Death of "Free Enterprise".

Immigration and the 2008 Presidential Campaigns

by Margaret Sands Orchowski

Washington DC. Democratic leaders don’t want to talk about immigration issues right now. Neither do Republican leaders. Unfortunately for them all, however, immigration hot buttons underlie almost all the big issues in this election from universal health care to national and economic insecurity. Once the Democrats choose their Presidential nominee, candidates’ stances on immigration will become an election issue, like it or not.

Why do both parties’ leaders treat the immigration issue like the plague?

The truth is that both parties are split over immigration. Or rather, they are split over one major point in the immigration reform debate: whether or not Congress should legalize millions of foreign nationals currently living and working in the country illegally, and allow them to earn U.S. citizenship if they meet certain conditions. In other words, the split is over conditional amnesty (is there any other kind?).

Throughout 2006 and 2007, Republican President Bush urged Congress to support his Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) bills which included “a pathway to citizenship”/amnesty. The bills were co-sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Teddy Kennedy (D-MA). But the majority of Republicans (and some Democrats) insisted that existing and enhanced immigration laws should be enforced first, before deciding what to do with the estimated 12-20 million illegal immigrants who came and stayed in the U.S. after the last amnesty bill of 1986. The CIR failed in Congress. So McCain (the presumptive Republican Presidential candidate) changed his mind. “I get it, I get it,” he repeats constantly. “Enforcement first. Legalization later.”

Now the Democratic split over immigration is becoming more visible. On the one side are the “Blue-dog, moderate Reagan-Democrats”. Congressman Heath Schuler (NC), a 2006 “Blue-Pup”, has introduced the SAVE Act -- an “immigration enforcement only” bill. But Congressional Hispanic Caucus leader Luis Gutierrez (Il) insists that there can be no Democratic immigration bill that is not “comprehensive” (the buzz word for “includes amnesty”). Democratic leaders are scheduling hearings for these bills in eight! different committees – enough time to probably stall any floor vote until after the election, if then.

So far both Democratic Presidential candidates have ignored immigration questions unless asked directly. Then, differences appear. While both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have admitted that they do NOT include illegal aliens in their universal health care plans, Barack favors giving drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants while Hillary is against it. But Barack also told a Texas audience of Latinos that “the first bill I will sign as President is the DREAM Act” – a proposal to give instate college tuition and public scholarships to young adults illegally in the country who have graduated from an American high school. Hillary has not made so public a stance for the DREAM Act, which has never passed a Congressional committee nor a chamber vote, and which many states’ laws prohibit.

Barack’s stances on immigration place him on the most “libertarian” end of the immigration political horseshoe. It puts him at odds with many moderate middle class blue collar workers -- voters he already is struggling to win over.

For Democrats hopes in 09, however, McCain is their biggest danger on immigration. The Arizona Senator manages to straddle firmly both sides of the immigration amnesty line-in-the-sand.

Margaret Sands Orchowski is the Vice President of Programs of the Woman's National Democratic Club and the Washington correspondent and columnist for the Hispanic Outlook on Higher Education and is author of Immigration and the American Dream: Battling the Political Hype and Hysteria.