Is Harvard Racist?

Harvard University's admissions policy is proof that some are doomed to repeat history. Can you imagine, in this day and age, an educational institution discriminating against a racial minority? Can you imagine what the outcry would be? “You mean, you’re preventing these qualified students from attending your college because of the color of their skin?!”

Well, you don’t have to imagine it. It’s happening. And at arguably the most prestigious college in America — my alma mater, Harvard.

The ethnic minority isn’t blacks or Jews, as it was in years past. The target this time is Asian Americans. And it’s just as wrong.

After millions of dollars in legal fees, millions of records examined, and hundreds of hours of depositions and testimony, Harvard’s once purposely opaque admissions policies have been laid bare. It’s not a pretty picture.

Here’s what we now know:

Harvard Admissions rates student applicants in three main ways: 1) Academic performance; 2) Extra-curricular achievements; 3) “Personal qualities.” That’s fine, as far as it goes, if the criteria were applied fairly. But they’re not.

Asian American applicants consistently score higher in the first two criteria–academics and extra-curricular activities, which can be objectively assessed–than white students, Latinos and African Americans.

So how does Harvard justify its Asian American quota? With the help of category three — “personal qualities,” which include vague and largely subjective factors like “likability,” “maturity,” “integrity,” and “effervescence.”

According to Harvard’s own internal reports, Asian American applicants are routinely and systematically marked much lower on this personality scale by Harvard admissions officers who almost never meet or interview applicants. But here’s the kicker: the personality ratings given to Asian students by admissions officers are vastly different than the personality ratings Harvard gets from its own alumni interviewers, who actually meet the applicants in person. Alumni interviewers score Asian applicants as high as whites.

In other words, Harvard artificially and fraudulently downgrades Asians on “personality” to get the results it wants. And what Harvard wants is to suppress the number of Asian Americans admitted.

Based on the data that Harvard was forced to turn over, economist Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University concluded that with the same application profile in terms of test scores, extracurricular activities and personality factors, an Asian American male applicant would only have a 25% chance of admission–versus 32% if white, 77% if Hispanic, and 95% if black.

What’s the real-life result of all this?

In 2013, Asian Americans made up 19% of the incoming freshmen class. According to Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research, if the personality factors had not been rigged, that percentage would have been 43%.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 guarantees that “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, or be denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Each year, Harvard takes hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government.

In Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policies, deciding that race could be used as a “plus factor” to achieve diversity, but never as a quota. Yet, by placing strict limits on the percentage of Asian American applicants it will admit, racial quotas are exactly what Harvard is using.

One strongly suspects this quota system isn’t limited to Harvard. In the last ten years, Asian American students have been limited to an 18-22% presence across the Ivy League. Or maybe that’s just a coincidence.

Writing for the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that the Court “expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

With less than a decade to go, the Ivy League shows no indication that it’s giving up on those racial preferences. Instead, these colleges have doubled down. Objective standards regarding admissions continue to be increasingly disfavored as the illegal goal of racial balancing is advanced. This racial balancing is justified by the left’s desire to achieve “racial diversity” — its insistence on seeing every person only through the prism of race, as if the most important thing any of us has to offer is the color of our skin.

Not long ago, that was called “racism.” It’s still called racism.

It needs to end, once and for all — for the sake of deserving Asian American students, for the sake of Harvard’s own integrity, and for the sake of the American principle that the rules must be the same for everyone.

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts said it best: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

It’s time we did just that. I’m Lee Cheng, of the Asian American Legal Foundation, for Prager University.

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North Carolina Democrats want to change school grading scale so 40 percent is passing

Yes, all of the bill’s sponsors are Democrats. I checked for you.

And look, if this had been in place when I took high school French, I might have done all right in spite of the fact that my teacher was a fast-talking Chinese woman. Then again, I probably still would have gacked it. Who can understand a language in which the verbs have genders?

But this is not really about learning. This is about covering up the failures of public schools, and you won’t be surprised to know that both racial politics and Common Core are factors in this effort:

The factors that go into the A-F school scores include weighted calculations of students achievement and school growth. One is student grade-level proficiency, the other is growth.

Critics of this scoring system say the rankings only look at the achievement levels and that it unfairly judges and stigmatizes schools with a high number of minority students or students living in poverty.

Keep in mind that the most recent school grade report put around 22 percent of North Carolina’s 2,537 schools at a D or F, and that less than half of all students in grades 3 through 8 were scored as grade-level proficient in state tests in reading and math.

Parents can look up their child’s school and consider what House Bill 145 will do to that score. For example, a middle school scoring 70 and has a C would be ranked a B.

This action in this bill is similar to past changes in student proficiency scores.

Originally, North Carolina students were ranked on a 1-4 scale. That was changed to a 5-point scale, and the level a student was considered grade-level proficient was designated as being 3 and up.

The idea to shift the student proficiency levels to a wider scale came a year after the implementation of Common Core following poor test scores.

This is all about the public education establishment not wanting to be held accountable for poor performance, which is why the sponsors of the bill are all Democrats – likely beholden to the teachers’ union, which will be looking to protect school funding so they don’t lose the means to demand massive raises and benefits.

North Carolina clearly has a system by which schools are ranked according to student performance. Too many students getting D and F grades means the school is rated as failing, and that usually carries some sort of consequence related to funding.

The Democrats’ solution? Change the definition of success so students who are learning less are labeled as learning more. Dumb it down, if you will.

By the way, why are Democrats such anti-black racists? They’re the ones who think the grade scale is unfair to schools with lots of minorities. Why do Democrats think minorities can’t get good grades? Why do they think they have to dumb down the grade scale for minorities’ benefit?

If a Republican or some private-sector CEO said you have to make things easier for black people, they’d be tarred as racists and drummed out of their jobs and polite society. But when Democrats base policy on that very belief, no one pays attention.

If you can’t get 60 percent of a subject right, you haven’t learned it and you don’t deserve to pass. And no one is doing you a favor when they pass you on to the next level when you haven’t learned the current one. These politicians are dooming a bunch of kids to lifetimes of failure so their constituents in the education establishment won’t have to explain their own failures.

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School Board Voted Against Armed Security Before Shooting, Now They’re Reversing Course

Reality has a way of bringing people around. Just a month after a school board in Baltimore voted against allowing armed officers in area schools, they’ve changed their minds after seeing firsthand what happens when determined criminals strike.

At first, all ten members of the board resisted the idea of “good guys with guns” in the Maryland schools. They unanimously turned down a measure that would have supported armed police officers — not teachers or private security — to help safeguard schools.

Then tragedy struck. “Neil Davis, a 25-year-old family member of a student, came into (Frederick Douglass High School) on Feb. 8 and shot special education assistant Michael Marks, according to police. The 56-year-old longtime staffer was seriously injured but survived,” The Baltimore Sun reported.

Two weeks after that shooting, the board members have a very different perspective. They’re now backing legislation that would permit trained police officers to be armed in local schools.

“(T)he city’s school board reversed its position on whether school police should be allowed to carry weapons, voting 8-2 in support of legislation that would amend state law to authorize officers to patrol schools with guns,” The Sun explained.

That show of support could help a school security bill proposed by state delegate Cheryl Glenn, a Democrat, pass in the state capitol.

“It would be nice if we lived in a world where we didn’t need guns at all, but that’s not the reality for us in Baltimore City,” Glenn told the Baltimore newspaper.

“This decision will give the bill a lot of the support the delegation needs to see,” she added. “This is all about public safety.”

But while the recent shooting and the reversal by the school board has certainly boosted the bill’s chances of passing, there’s still opposition.

“It’s not a given what will happen in Annapolis,” school board chair Cheryl Casciani said, “and after it happens we will have some real decisions to make about how we’re going to do this.”

Interestingly, sworn police officers are already permitted to carry their firearms on school grounds outside of school hours, but must surrender their guns when they’re arguably needed the most: during classes when the hallways are filled with young students.

“Under current law, the city’s roughly 100 school police officers are allowed to carry their guns while patrolling the exterior of school buildings before and after school hours, but they are required to store their weapons in a secure location during the day,” explained The Sun.

“Baltimore is the only jurisdiction in Maryland with a sworn school police force. In surrounding districts, local police or sheriff’s departments patrol schools and are allowed to carry their weapons,” that outlet continued.

The large Maryland city is 100 percent controlled by Democrats, without a single Republican on its council. Baltimore has the second-worst murder rate in the entire United States.

One of the voices who is most frustrated with bureaucrats preventing officers from doing their jobs is a cop himself.

“I wonder how that 10-0 vote feels now?” Sgt. Clyde Boatwright asked. Boatwright serves as president of the school police union.

Meanwhile, Michael Marks, the educator who actually took a bullet during the school shooting a month ago, has added his voice to the side supporting armed police.

It’s frustrating that America’s schools have become locations of violence, but ignoring reality does not make it go away. Criminals don’t respect laws, and when one of them walks into a place of learning with a gun, the best defense for the students are trained, prepared officers who are ready to protect them.

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