Contents
1. Sternberg (2005) Arguments
2. Statistics: The Reality of Discrimination (Braun 1995)
3. Meaghan Goes to College (Ewers 2004)
4. What if there were no Affirmative Action? (Hoover 2005)
5. References
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1. Sternberg (2005):
How [competently] can a leader lead if he or she has only limited acquaintance with the diverse group of people he or she is supposed to lead? Much of what we learn in college is a result of the people with whom we mix.
Affirmative action is one way to achieve this goal. It is based on a three-fold premise.
- First, affirmative action is intended to compensate for past injustices by making opportunities available to people in designated groups that were not available to people like them in the past.
- Second, it recognizes the fact that past injustices can creep into the present–that even if a system allows members of all groups equal access in theory, it may not adequately achieve this goal in practice.
- Third, because it attacks the problem directly, affirmative action can create diversity in an entering college class that, at times, has seemed difficult to achieve in any other way.
[People] succeed by developing and deploying various blends of creative, analytical, and practical skills and attitudes. Creative skills and attitudes are needed to formulate ideas, analytical skills and attitudes to determine which of these are good ideas. Practical skills and attitudes are then needed to implement successfully these good ideas and to convince others of their value. It is not enough just to be able to remember and analyze ideas. One needs to be able to come up with good ideas in the first place (creative ability), and then to implement them successfully (practical intelligence).
This framework suggests that conventional tests of abilities are not fully adequate… They are inadequate in design because they so heavily emphasize analytical (as well as memory-based) abilities to the exclusion of creative and practical abilities. And they are less than adequate in implementation because too often they are used in a way that assumes that abilities are fixed instead of malleable–that a score represents what a person is capable of doing overall, rather than providing a rough estimate of what a person actually does at a given time and place.
Socioeconomic status (SES) can markedly affect the abilities we have when we enter school and that develop during our school years. Indeed, researchers like Turkheimer have shown that the heritability of abilities depends in large part upon socioeconomic status, with greater heritability occurring at higher levels of SES and greater levels of “environmentality” at lower levels. Children who grow up at higher SES levels have the luxury of developing their analytical skills, in part because these are the abilities most challenged by their affluent parents and their schools.
Children growing up in more challenging environments must develop higher levels of creative and practical skills, because they need such skills to survive–to get to school safely, to stay safe throughout the school day, to avoid the temptations of illicit activities, to study under challenging conditions, and so forth. In some environments, they must be practical or they do not survive. Studies on Brazilian street children by Terezinha Nuñes and others show, for example, that these children risk death if they cannot form a successful street business.
The upshot is that affluent children enter the school and college sweepstakes with an enormous advantage conveyed by the match between the abilities socialized by their environment and the abilities required for success in traditional ability testing and instruction. Schools emphasize analytical and memory-based skills and these are precisely the abilities at which children of the middle and upper middle class tend to excel.
Of course, there are exceptions. But on the whole, the system is geared to favor these children. This is not the result of a diabolical plot. Rather, at the beginning of the 20th century, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon were asked to construct an ability test that would predict school achievement. They did-and did so successfully. Their test measured skills very similar to those taught in school, and indeed, most current ability tests can be viewed as high-level achievement tests designed to challenge somewhat lower levels of competencies and expertise.
Because these very skills are needed for success in traditional ability testing, school-based instruction, and traditional assessments of student achievement, a closed system is created. Those who do well in the system do well in all its aspects; those who do not, do well in none of its aspects. Consequently, a test of abilities can appear to be valid, because it is valid within the closed system of which it is a part. The SAT does predict college achievement and does so roughly equally for different groups. So from the standpoint of the system in which it is embedded, it is doing what it is supposed to do.
2. Statistics: The Reality of Discrimination (Braun 1995)
while white men are approximately one-third of the population, they comprise 80 percent of the Congress, hold four-fifths of tenured positions at colleges and universities, constitute 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies’ senior managers and 99.9 percent of athletic team owners, and have been 100 percent of US presidents. In addition, an examination of historical unemployment tables debunks the myth that jobs are going to black men at the expense of white males. The fact is that unemployment rates for white males have remained relatively steady, while unemployment rates for back males have increased.
3. Meaghan Goes to College (Ewers 2004)
“Meaghan didn’t let applying to college drive her crazy… A 2004 graduate of an all-girls private school in Northern California, she spent her high school years surrounded by the college-obsessed. Private counselors and top-dollar tutors were as common as cellphones and credit cards.
… Meaghan … took the SAT just once, even though her score was a mere–gasp–1360. She had a few Advanced Placement courses as a junior, but her GPA, a 3.3, was in the middle of the pack.
… The summer before her senior year, the pressure began to build: She tried and tried but couldn’t get her essays to sound quite right, so her parents hired a consultant to help edit them–at $60 an hour. Then she signed up for four AP classes as a senior, including physics and biology, figuring it would give her a boost. “
Meaghan … applied to a total of 12 schools. Each application cost over $100. She was accepted to two of these. She is now in school. is it fair that she was accepted on the basis of ‘merit’, while someone else wasn’t, based on the fact that s/he did not have equal advantages?
4. What if there were no Affirmative Action? (Hoover 2005)
Disregarding race in college admissions would cause sharp drops in the number of black and Hispanic students at elite institutions, according to a new study by two researchers at Princeton University.
The study, described in an article published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, also found that eliminating affirmative action would significantly raise the number of Asian-American students, while having little effect on white students.
If affirmative action were eliminated, the acceptance rates for black applicants would fall to 12.2 percent from 33.7 percent, while the acceptance rates for Hispanic applicants would drop to 12.9 percent from 26.8 percent, according to the study.
Asian-American students would fill nearly 80 percent of the spaces not taken by black and Hispanic students, the researchers found, while the acceptance rate for white students would increase by less than 1 percent.
The researchers who conducted the study–Thomas J. Espenshade, a professor of sociology, and Chang Y. Chung, a statistical programmer at Princeton’s Office of Population Research–looked at the race, sex, SAT scores, and legacy status, among other characteristics, of more than 124,000 applicants to elite colleges.
5. References
- Braun, C. (1995). Affirmative action and the glass ceiling. Black Scholar, 25(3), 7. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
- Ewers, J., & Haigh, A. (2004). GETTING INTO COLLEGE. (Cover story). U.S. News & World Report, 137(6), 68-76. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
- Hoover, E. (2005). What Would Ending Affirmative Action Do?. Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(41), A28. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
- Sternberg, R. J. (2005). Accomplishing the Goals of Affirmative Action — WITH or WITHOUT Affirmative Action. Change, 37(1), 6-13. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Posted on February 14, 2011
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