If You Had to Choose Between Affirmative Action and School Choice, Which Would You Choose?
James E. Hanley
– July 17, 2023 Reading Time: 4 minutes
https://www.aier.org/article/if-you-had-...uld-you-choose/


AIER >> Daily Economy >> Policy >> Government >> Education


There are two educational programs designed to help minority students succeed. One benefits only a small number of minority students, mostly upper middle class, by shifting them from attending good universities to great universities. The other would benefit a vastly larger number of minority students by shifting them from very bad K-12 schools to good and sometimes great K-12 schools.

If you could only support one of these policies, which would you choose?

I’m talking, of course, about affirmative action and school choice. Strictly speaking, the two policies are not in conflict. One could support both without contradiction. But in practice, most people do favor only one or the other.

Affirmative action was originally viewed as a way to make up for past discrimination, and so was created with a conceptual end-point. Having a clear purpose that could be definitely achieved was important, because affirmative action required explicit racial favoritism, which violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. But the past discrimination had also involved unconstitutional racial favoritism, so a temporary suspension of racial neutrality to correct that past violation was deemed acceptable.

For example, an all-white fire department that had historically discriminated against black applicants could practice affirmative action until it had an appropriate proportion of black firemen. It could then end affirmative action and simply be race-neutral in the future because blacks and whites are equally likely to make good firemen.

Similarly, colleges and universities that had explicitly discriminated against minorities could use affirmative action to catch up to appropriate proportions of students of different races, but then should be race-neutral from then on. But an uncomfortable thing happened on the way to that bright future. As elite universities were forced by legal rulings or citizen intiatives to consider applicants on a race-neutral basis, minority enrollment fell, specifically among African Americans and Latinos. As it turned out, unlike with firefighters, not all ethnic groups equally met the stringent requirements to get into elite universities. Whatever the reason for that, some elite universities had to find ways to continue affirmative action to maintain their desired level of African American and Latino enrollment.

Non-elite schools didn’t have this problem because their standards for entry were not as stringent. The great majority of colleges in the country don’t use affirmative action, and many–including many liberal arts colleges and community colleges–are essentially open enrollment. So it’s not access to college that affirmative action provides; only access to elite schools.

Of course many African American and Latino admits to elite schools didn’t need the affirmative action bump to get in. They were excellent enough to pass those schools’ high academic bar without any race-based bonus. So only a portion of minority students at elite schools got in because of affirmative action. But obviously those students were also academically strong, or they would not have even been considered for the affirmative action bump. This means they would have gotten into some other good school, perhaps just below the elite level, where they could still have gotten a good education and had excellent career prospects.

So affirmative action has evolved into a very limited program that helps a relatively small number of already high-achieving, and probably mostly upper-middle class, minorities get into elite schools instead of near-elite schools. Maybe that’s worth fighting for. It’s not entirely implausible to argue that the elite who actually dominate our country, whatever our paeans to democracy might suggest to the contrary, should at least reflect the various types of diversity of America. But it seems rather limited in scope for a supposed effort to achieve greater social justice. -- excerpt, rest at link above --