Larry Sand: The CA Left's vitriol for SCOTUS ruling unfounded, “delirious” to real issues

While the local Left bemoans the Supreme Court's rejection of affirmative action (which, due to preexisting Prop 209, only affects CA by banning race-based admissions at private schools), others—like education expert Larry Sand—are considering actual problems. For the Heartland Institute, Sand delivers the scoop on racial equality in college achievement: It hinges on cultivating high-quality K-12 schools, which requires decentralizing teachers unions' power.

In addition to being unconstitutional, affirmative action has not worked out well in the real world. Only 42% of black students nationally graduate college within six years, which is far below the 66% rate for white students.

As Jason Riley writes in City Journal, racial preferences are counterproductive. “They mismatch students with schools that recruit minorities for window dressing and then fail to graduate them in a timely manner or in the majors they initially wanted to pursue. Many bright black students who could have graduated from Xavier with a degree in engineering were instead lured to Duke, where they struggled academically, perhaps switched to a softer discipline, or simply flunked out. The upshot has been fewer black mathematicians, lawyers, and physicians than we would have had in the absence of race-based admissions.”

It’s worth noting that affirmative action was never meant to last forever. When the policy was first implemented in the 1960s, it was assumed that gaps in educational achievement between black and white Americans would eventually shrink, thereby rendering racial preferences unnecessary. Along these lines, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in 2003: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

Needless to say, the left was delirious and then some over the SCOTUS decision....

If students were actually receiving a “great education” in k-12, affirmative action or any other ploy to avoid using merit as a tool to get into college would not be necessary. And the greatest impediment to getting a great education is the teachers unions.

Said unions have been very successful at keeping incompetent teachers from being fired. Instead, inferior teachers simply move from school to school. The so-called “dance of the lemons” sees the lemons primarily dancing in inner-city schools. And importantly, the unions are front and center in trying to stop any kind of parental choice in education. But there, thankfully, the unions are beginning to lose their grip.

This article originally appeared in the Heartland Institute. Read the whole thing here.

For more on the local response to SCOTUS ruling, read Bay Area CFER board member Tony Xu’s perspective here.

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