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Originally Posted by Seaver
Ok, then "level" the playing field without using race.
Here in Texas there's the 10% rule. If you graduate from a public highschool in the top 10% of your class, you're automatically accepted to any public college in the state. This helps those from both rural and inner city, it's blind to race, and blind to economics.
About your leveling the playing field because of discrimination, while it exists, as I pointed out I dont believe it would do anything but compound the issue. Racism wont go away if you reinforce it.
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How is this program "blind to economics"?
Do you agree that wealthier families can afford to transport their children to impoverished districts where competition might present less of a problem to students who were better prepared purely as a function of better access to materials and more qualified teachers rather than intelligence?
Let me put it another way: If I wanted a surefire way to guarantee my child's admission to a college under such a system, I would either wait until my child's senior year before enrolling him or her in the most impoverished school I could find or I would start from day one and educate my child with private tutors.
If my child had access to his or her own vehicle or a private driver, what would prevent such lateral movement? While the poorest (and blackest) students are bused to a battleground, drug and gang infested environment, without textbooks, computers, or even chairs in many cases, my child could come home for lunch and quickly move in and out of such an environment at will.
A number of factors, well documented in sociological and criminological literature, related to the color of my child's skin color and class level along with teacher assumptions and expectations, would garner my child better grades (labeling theory), a counselor who paid attention to his or her progress toward college (tracking), and a slot in a public college (self-fulfilling prophecy).
Everything I described is structural.
Those inner-city students wouldn't stand a chance.
for a light read, check out
The Saints and the Roughnecks by Bill Chambliss.
I wonder if it's on-line.
I hope some people read this: http://alpha.fdu.edu/~peabody/Lexico...oughnecks.html