New policy hides public school failure

Horowitz is the director of the West Los Angeles Center for the
Study of Popular Culture and the editor in chief of
frontpagemag.com.

By David Horowitz

Like every reform proposal since Proposition 209, the new
University of California admission policies are the product of
political blackmail, designed to circumvent the law. They are
anti-Latino, anti-black and anti-poor. They will inevitably
diminish even further the value of an education in the UC system,
and thus are an attack on the citizens of California.

Under the comprehensive review policy, academic performance will
be only one of three requirements for admission, which will now
also include the absurdly subjective “life challenges”
requirement. This is something that only God could judge with any
justice, but which the UC Board of Regents has entrusted to
ordinary bureaucrats, giving them 10 minutes per applicant to make
a decision.

This hanky-panky is justified by a political fairy dust called
“institutional racism,” which allegedly denies equal
access to a handful of minority groups, in a state where literally
hundreds of different languages are spoken.

In fact, under the 1957 Master Plan for Higher Education, the UC
was already an open system. The law guaranteed every California
resident with a high school diploma the right to a place in the
state’s higher education system. This included a multi-tiered
system of community, junior and state colleges that provided open
and fair access to all its levels.

What was not guaranteed was an immediate place at the top
without having earned it. Prior to the affirmative action movement,
educators were guided by the quaint idea that education should be
meritocratic, and that its rewards should not be distributed on the
basis of racial prejudice or any other subjective bias.

Affirmative action aimed at destroying this system, justifying
itself by unsubstantiated charges of university bigotry. But the
efforts of Regent Ward Connerly and scholars like Stephen and
Abigail Thernstrom have shown beyond reasonable doubt that racial
disparities in UC admissions have nothing to do with what is
preposterously called “institutional racism” (in plain
English, racism without actual racists). They are the result of the
failure of Latino and black applicants to meet existing academic
standards. The reasons for this failure lie in the bankruptcy of
the public schools, which the Democratic Party and the political
left have controlled for half a century.

Recently, the Los Angeles School District announced that it
would not be ending “social promotion,” because that
would mean holding back 350,000 children who were failing in its
schools ““ half the entire school population. (Los Angeles
Times, Jan. 20, 2000).

This is a social atrocity. Two-thirds of these children are
Latino; all of them are poor. Under the policy of social promotion,
the school district lies to them and moves them along to cover up
the system’s failure. These lies are perpetuated by UC
affirmative action policies and grade inflation, which are also
designed to conceal failure.

No one ever achieved greater results by lowering the bar. The
new UC policy is not designed to promote minority achievement but
to get more minorities into the UC system without improving the
public schools.

Benefiting from this system that robs poor, black and Latino
children of their educational birthright, are adults ““
Democratic politicians, teacher union socialists and education
bureaucrats ““ who are leeching off an institutional budget
that is greater than the gross national products of most nations in
the United Nations.

If the UC entrance requirements were strictly academic, the
public would be forced to focus on the racist failure of the public
schools rather than on fantasies of denial like
“institutional racism” at the university level, which
nobody can identify and therefore nobody can remedy.

The new policy is driven by the illusion that the deficiencies
of the public schools can be corrected at the college level.
Research by the Thernstroms has shown that the result of racially
rigged entrance requirements is that black and Latino students in
the UC system perform at the bottom of their classes and drop out
in record percentages.

These gaps will be perpetuated under the new policy. They create
the perception among minorities and majorities alike that blacks
and Latinos are intellectually inferior, thus stoking the very
fires of racism that reformers pretend to be trying to
eliminate.

They also create academic failure where none was necessary. If
underachievers were matched with colleges for which they were
actually qualified, they would do well, graduate in the same
percentages as other groups and go on to equally successful
careers. But the left sees advantage in perpetuating failure: the
more human misery they can create for others, the better they feel
about themselves.