As Ward Connerly prepares for a state Supreme Court review of his
initiative to ban racial preferences in Florida, Republican governor Jeb
Bush is scrambling to defuse the issue. According to a report in the
St.
Petersburg Times, he will propose granting automatic admission to public
universities for all students graduating in the top 20 percent of their
high-school class. This mimics the strategy of his brother, Texas governor
George W. Bush, who reacted to a federal court decision ending race-based
admissions in Texas by implementing a 10-percent plan. (California, which
banned racial preferences in a 1996 initiative, currently has a 3-percent
plan.)
The Bush strategy has formal color-blindness going for it; any policy that
no longer asks applicants the color of their skin is an improvement. Yet
it hardly solves the problem, and may even make it more intractable.
Racial preferences perform an enormous disservice to many of the people
they are supposed to help because they promote certain students to levels
at which they cannot compete. In other words, kids who belong at a
community college find themselves suddenly elevated to the University of
Florida because they help the school's racial balance sheet. They benefit
from racial preferences at the admissions office, but not in the
classroom. Studies have shown repeatedly that students admitted with lower
standards also graduate at a lower rate. The Bush plan won't be so
obviously color-conscious, but it also won't change this deadly dynamic.
Admissions still won't be based on individual merit. Students will find
themselves in academic settings for which they have not been adequately
prepared. Worse yet, the schools that failed to prepare them won't have
any incentive to improve--no matter how bad they are, 20 percent of their
graduates have guaranteed spots in college.
Jeb Bush has been a leader in the school-choice movement and must know
that competition is the surest way to making public schools improve. This
20-percent plan is a step backward.
Everyone's a media critic these days. Eric Alterman has a media column in
The Nation, and he's using it to promote Bob Somerby's media column at
dailyhowler.com. Here's a tip for any budding media critics among our
readers: When you spend a three-quarters of a page on Somerby's defenses
of Al Gore, you might want to mention that he was Gore's Harvard roommate
instead of just saying "Somerby says he is not a Gore man."
DEPT. OF GLOBALONEY
The Better World Campaign had a lobbying ad in the
Weekly Standard calling
for America to pay its "debt" to the United Nations. The magazine has
endorsed that call, and there are reasonable arguments for it. The seven
former secretaries of state, "18 deans and scholars from the nation's top
foreign policy schools," and business leaders who signed the ad can't be
rejected out of hand. But then there's this remark: "The UN can be
frustrating, but it works: Resolving conflicts, confronting terrorism,
preventing world war." Preventing world war? When? How? Maybe these guys
can be dismissed out of hand after all.
