In 1998, Californians passed by a 61-to-39 percent margin Proposition 227, Ron Unz’s “English for the Children” ballot initiative. This effectively replaced “bilingual education” with structured English-immersion programs, since the former — while popular with the multicultural Left — does not succeed nearly as well as the latter in accomplishing the single most important job of public schools in immigrant-rich schools, namely teaching non-English-speakers how to speak English.
Unfortunately, and despite the great success of Proposition 227 in California, Governor Jerry Brown now has before him a bill that would put a repeal measure back on the ballot. In this op-ed last week in the San Francisco Chronicle, education expert — and Center for Equal Opportunity board member — Rosalie P. Porter explains why the governor should veto it.
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Read carefully the two sentences below from this news story:
A survey conducted by MTV asked 3,000 Millennials ages 14 to 24 their thoughts on race-related issues, including affirmative action for college acceptance, in May. And what it found was seemingly paradoxical: 90 percent of Millennials surveyed “believe that everyone should be treated the same regardless of race,” yet 88 percent opposed affirmative action.
Uh, what’s “paradoxical” about the overwhelming majority of people being opposed to affirmative action and also believing that everyone should be treated the same regardless of race?
The article is otherwise pretty good.
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Here’s an interesting panel discussion on “What’s Next for Affirmative Action?” put on by the New York Times and moderated by its Supreme Court correspondent, Adam Liptak. The panelists are Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, Georgetown University law school professor Sheryll Cashin, and Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation. Cashin and Kahlenberg want to end racial preferences in university admissions; Bollinger, a longtime advocate of them, of course does not.
What’s most interesting is that Bollinger makes it quite clear that the principal reason he favors racial preferences is because of America’s history of racial discrimination — notwithstanding the fact that this justification has been rejected by the Supreme Court and has not been available as a legal matter for decades. (See, for example, what he says at around 13:30–15:30, 23:30, and 32:00.)
Interesting that he admits it, though not surprising that he thinks it: For a long time, it has been clear that this — and not the phony-baloney “diversity” rationale — is what really motivates schools. And how “compelling” can the diversity rationale be to the courts if it’s not the real reason for these policies?
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Peter Thiel’s new book is getting some buzz, so I thought I’d post a link to an excellent earlier piece he co-wrote, calling for an end to racial preferences in admission to Stanford.
And speaking of new books, here’s a link to the teleforum/podcast I moderated last week that discusses Professor Sheryll Cashin’s now book Place Not Race. Professor Cashin is very much a woman of the Left, but she has concluded that the time has come to get rid of racial preferences in university admissions.
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Here are two other items of interest to Center for Equal Opportunity supporters.
First, I was quoted last week in this article about the proposed End Racial Profiling Act. As I explained at greater length in my testimony before the Senate against this bill a couple of years ago, I’m opposed to (true) racial profiling in the traditional law-enforcement context (I explain why I might make an exception for terrorism), but this bill is a bad way to approach the issue.
Second, last week CEO sent out several emails to various “minority job fairs,” pointing out the legal and policy problems with such racially exclusive events. For example, we flagged for them “Appendix D” of this testimony I delivered a few years ago to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Similar efforts by CEO in the past have resulted in opportunities being opened up so that they are available to all without regard to race or ethnicity.
