Columnist Walter Williams argues that the debates about the use of affirmative action--or,if you prefer, racial preferences--in college admission are smokescreens that work to distract us from the real issue at hand: the "fraudulent education" delivered by predominantly black high schools.

Williams quotes damning numbers:

At 12 of [Washington, D.C.'s] 19 high schools, more than 50 percent of the students test below basic in reading, and at some of those schools the percentages approached 80 percent. At 15 of these schools, more than 50 percent tests below basic in math. And in 12 of them, 70 percent to 99 percent do so. Each year, more than 80 percent ó and up to 96 percent ó of high-school students are fraudulently promoted to the next grade.
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...In Philadelphia's predominantly black high schools, combined SAT scores of its seniors average between 590 to 800 out of a possible 1600. I suspect there's little difference between these education outcomes and those in other predominantly black school districts. Indeed, nationally there's more than a 200 SAT score gap between blacks and Hispanics on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other.

For Williams, affirmative action is a belated and inadequate non-solution to a problem that only gets worse the longer it is ignored. Worse, affirmative action and the debates around it operate to distract us from the real issues at hand: the failure of public schools to provide proper training to underprivileged kids. In this logic, affirmative action emerges not as a means of redressing oppression (as its defenders would have it) but as a tool of oppression; likewise, supporters of affirmative action come off not as progressive, but as deludedly complicit with the system they want to change.

The good news: Williams profiles a predominantly black school in Harlem that really is doing a good job preparing kids for college and beyond. 98% of kids who attend the Frederick Douglass Academy graduate, and 95% go to college. The school was listed by Newsweek as one of the top schools in the country. The secret? High expectations and no pandering. As the school principal explained, "You have to demand more of your students, while providing them with the structure to meet those demands. The more difficult the curriculum, the greater the likelihood your students will be successful."

And the more successful students there are, the more "diversity"--that demographic holy grail of college admissions offices--will take care of itself. Williams' column offers more than just a fascinating angle on the problem of black underachievement and the ongoing debates about affirmative action; it also shows how advocates of "diversity" may also be defenders of merit-based admissions and hiring systems. In other words, Williams' column punctures one of the central arguments in the Michigan case (an argument echoed by the many universities that have lately filed amicus briefs), and in so doing recasts the issue in crucial ways. The question is not whether we need racial preferences to create and maintain diversity, as Michigan and many other schools would have it, but why we want to engineer a false diversity rather than create the conditions for an authentic one.

In Tennessee last year the voters approved a state
lottery(I dissented),with proceeds going to fund
scholarships to state colleges.HS students would have to meet some modest requirements,such as a
3.0 GPA.Well,very quickly some inner city legislators(here in Memphis,mostly)moved to lower
the standards.Memphis schools are a horror,as is
the scholorship therein,and they're afraid not enough black kids will get grants.That's probably true,but their solution is a fraud.Reforming
the grotesque Memphis City School system and expecting something out of the students besides
just showing up for roll call would be the real answer.But...that's not faiiirrr!

It's the parents and then the teachers who won't stand up to the stupid parents. Parental neglect of the schools in black areas is 95% of the problem. Can you imagine a white area putting up with this stuff? An Asian area?

I remember some years back when school construction had passed by a school near my neighborhood. One morning a bunch of heavy equipment showed up at the school together with union crews. This was organized by the parents, several of whom were contractors. They did a "photo op", dug a preparatory hole and the school district caved that morning and fixed the school. At another school a few miles away the parents just showed up and painted the place. The school district tried to have them arrested, charged with tresspassing, etc., but two hundred parents, some of whom were pregnant, couldn't be arrested.

This is the way to take over the system and improve it. DEMAND excellence and then back it up from home. Parents patrolling restrooms, halls, and studyhalls would fix things faster than anything.

"Williams' point: that the outrage in the black community about the University of Michigan lawsuits is accompanied by a "deafening silence about the day-to-day sabotage of black academic excellence by the public schools that most black students attend." "

The flip side of this is that the outrage in the conservative ranks about affirmative action in college admissions is accompanied by a "deafening silence" when it comes time to ensure that the public schools that most black students attend have adequate resources.

Oh, please, Mark.

Why is it that as spending goes up, test results go down? We already spend far too much money on the public schools for far too little return. If I heard that the schools needed more money to improve teaching - you know, things like higher standards, teachers who actually understood their subjects, rather than educational cant, then, and only then, I might be induced to fork over some actual dough. Sadly, this will happen when Noam Chomsky becomes a patriot.

"Why is it that as spending goes up, test results go down? We already spend far too much money on the public schools for far too little return."

Oh please, yourself, Eric. There is plenty of research demonstrating a positive link between school spending and student performance.

Here's a book-length study published by the RAND Corporation entitled "Improving Student Achievement" which documents how several types of school spending affect student performance. The link is to a table of contents--the entire book is available online via the table.

http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR924

And for good measure, here's a link to a concise summary of the RAND study's findings:

http://www.newohio.org/PRIMER/august_2000_primer.htm

Princeton economist Alan Krueger has done some research on this issue as well. Here are links to a couple of his relevant papers:

http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/366.pdf
http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/427.pdf

Finally you might track down a paper published in the "Educational Researcher" in 1994 by Hedges and Greenwald, entitled "Does Money Matter?" which answers the question affirmatively. I haven't been able to find this one online yet.

I'm sorry - but 50 years of an increasing educational budget combined with 50 years of worsening education in this country is more than enough to convince me that more spending on education is NOT the answer. Added to that are the fact that City of Atlanta [Atlanta GA} schools spend nearly $11,000 per student to educate it's kids to some of the lowest levels in the entire country while I send my kid to a private school for only $7K a year. What's up with that?