Texas Diversity Plan Under Attack

In order to eliminate affirmative action, but still ensure that poor minorities get a shot at college, Texas adopted a creative plan: the top 10% of all high school graduates are guaranteed a spot at a public college. Sounds like a reasonable solution, but now wealth parents are complaining that their children are not getting a fair chance at college.

The New York Times reports:

Parents whose children have been denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin, the crown jewel of Texas higher education, argue that some high schools are better than others, and that managing to stay in the top 25 percent at a demanding school should mean more than landing in the top 10 percent at a less rigorous one. ... Any change in the rule raises the touchy subject of class, because those demanding change tend to be concerned about students at the state's elite high schools in wealthy areas, while defenders of the rule say they are worried about students from poorer rural and urban neighborhoods.

It may be true that the coursework at a demanding high school is harder than at other schools — but the general conditions at other schools may make it more difficult to get good grades. Students at the more demanding schools don’t have to deal with as much crime, poverty, drug abuse, etc. Thus, whether they have to work harder in order to get their grades is highly doubtful.

Sally at “Is That Legal?” posts some passages from a book by Lani Guinier:

"The challenge for us is that we have to be diligent about reframing the narrative of success and failure and we have to use race not as decoy but as a diagnostic tool. How? Think about the affirmative action narrative. A white working class student doesn’t get in. What they did in Texas when they were told by the 5th Circuit when Hopwood came along [Cheryl J. Hopwood v. State of Texas, 1996], that it was unconstitutional to consider race, they began to reframe. A group of black and Latino activists and legislators and professors started to challenge the frame of merit that was being used not only to reject Cheryl Hopwood but being used to admit most of the students who were in fact monopolizing access to the school. They found that 150 or 10 percent of the high schools were furnishing 75 percent of the freshman seats at the state university. Nationally 74 percent of college students come from the top 25 percent socioeconomic class at the 146 most selective colleges and universities. The top 20 percent is families making $160,000 a year.

"Of the students at the 146 most selective high schools, three percent come from the bottom 25 percent of socioeconomic indicators. Ten percent come from the bottom half of the indicators. Conclusion: public education is a gift from the poor to the rich. Hopwood, Grutter [see University of Michigan Affirmative Action Lawsuit], and others have a complaint. They are from working class families being locked out of this educational opportunity. They simply have the wrong diagnosis of the problem.

"We need to help them understand that this is a problem affecting poor people. The problem is that the standards for so-called merit have enabled those who are already privileged to perpetuate their own privilege in the name of merit. And the danger is not only that they are monopolizing more than they should, but the message they are sending the people who are being rejected. It’s one thing if their goal is simply to use college as a means of perpetuating wealth. Just ask them to submit their tax returns. At least that is honest. Now we use the equivalent, your SAT scores, but SAT scores correlate more strongly with your grandparents’ socioeconomic status than they do with your first-year college grades. We use these scores and we call it merit, so if you don’t get in it’s not that you’re poor, you’re stupid.

"That’s the frame that the people in Texas challenged effectively. They said if 10 percent of the high schools are providing 75 percent of the student body, then why don’t we redistribute that and say anybody in the top 10 percent of any school in the state is eligible.

"That’s the plan that was passed and signed by Gov. Bush. Passed because this group of canary watchers were able to show that what was happening to blacks and Latinos in terms of making it difficult for them to get into college was also happening to poor and working class whites, especially those in rural parts of the state. So you had a coalition being built between urban and rural Texas. The deciding vote came from a Republican legislator who represented a rural district in west Texas because he had been shown that none of his constituents had been admitted to the UT Austin in the period prior to the Hopwood decision.

Very interesting comments, and the responses to the Texas 10-percent plan are worth pondering. They sound a lot like reactions to traditional affirmative action plans, even though this plan isn’t race-based.

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