Restoring Racial Preferences Will Harm Many Who Are Supposed to Be Helped

California’s 1996 constitutional amendment that prohibits public institutions from preferentially discriminating by race, sex, and ethnicity may be reversed later this year to restore explicit affirmative-action policies.

Some social-justice groups and state legislators argue that opportunities, incomes, and college admissions of people of color and women are significantly depressed by significant racial, ethnic, and gender biases. According to these groups, the road to equal opportunity for women and people of color is giving job and college admission preferences to them to offset the racism and biases that these groups face.

But claims that these preferences are needed to give people of color and women a fair shot is not supported by a substantial body of research studying the effects of race and sex-based preferential treatment. In fact, several studies indicate that protected groups may have significantly worse outcomes with these preferences than without.

The impact of Proposition 209 on minority student academic performance and graduation rates appears to be positive and substantial. Professor Gail Heriot studied student performance at UC San Diego and found immediate improvement among underrepresented groups. Immediately before the implementation of Proposition 209, only one black student in a first-year class of more than 3,000 students had a GPA of 3.5 or higher, compared to 20 percent of the white students in the first-year class. But the following year, 20 percent of black students had a 3.5 GPA or better after their first year, comparable with whites.

Moreover, 15 percent of black students and 17 percent of Native American students had GPA less than 2.0 before Prop 209, compared to 4 percent of white students. Immediately after Proposition 209’s implementation, this record changed substantially, with the black and native American rates falling to just 6 percent, nearly the same as whites.

More broadly, The University of California reported that underrepresented minority four-year graduation rates rose from about 31 percent just before Prop 209 to 55 percent by 2014.

Moreover, six-year graduation rates for underrepresented minorities has increased to about 75 percent. Admission rates also rose significantly for all underrepresented minorities except African Americans, which stayed about the same. Hispanic student enrollment rates increased from 15 percent to 23 percent, and the rate for Asian Americans increased from 28 percent to 37 percent. The UC student body is by far the most diverse in its history.

A study by four Duke economists shows that after Prop 209, minority graduation rates in California increased, reflecting in part better matching between students and colleges. Matching is the idea that a student will flourish at a college that is the right fit for the person but may have a very difficult time at a college that is not a good fit for them.

For example, suppose that under ethnic admission preferences UC Berkeley aggressively recruits a Latino student, but that the student discovers that UC Berkeley is not the right fit, and then drops out. Without Prop 209, what has happened is that this hypothetical student may have a lower chance of admission at Berkeley and ends up choosing a different college in the UC system that ultimately will be a better match or them.

As Professor Heriot, a member of the US Civil Rights Commission describes, there are many gifted minority students, but not enough to fill the nearly insatiable demands for race and ethnic diversity by colleges. With racial and ethnic preferences, colleges race against one another to see who can assemble the most racially and ethnically diverse first-year class, and the students who fall through the cracks are ultimately the ones who are hurt.

I personally have seen the enormous harm that can be done to a struggling minority student who is not at the right college. I began my teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania. While there, an African American student came to see me, explaining that she was really struggling with her schoolwork and apologizing for her failing grade in my class.

We spoke for quite a long time. She was very bright and creative but had gone to a poorly performing high school where she learned far less than her student peers at Penn. She was extremely depressed, and I helped her connect with student counseling.

She ended up leaving Penn, but we kept in touch afterwards. She enrolled in a junior college to learn what she needed, and ultimately graduated from the University of Maryland. I was delighted to see her succeed, but at the same time, it is sad to think of the many students like her who do not.

The study also found that colleges have done a much better job since passage of Prop 209 in supporting these students should they face academic or other challenges.

There is an important inconsistency regarding the argument of those desiring to restore race-based preferences. Students of Asian descent are much more represented in the UC system, compared with their population share, since Proposition 209. And in terms of gender bias, women now represent nearly 59 percent of the UC student body. This suggests that doing away with Proposition 209 is not about bias and bigotry per se. Instead, the argument is simply used to justify preferential treatment of certain groups.

What is the solution? An incredibly important issue that many California legislators refuse to discuss is the deficient performance of California K–12 education. California ranks 40th for educational quality among US states.

And this is just a relative ranking. Compared to those around the world, US outcomes are roughly in the middle of the pack of peer countries and, in some years, below average and trailing those of much poorer countries. In math achievement, even the highest-performing US states significantly trail the countries with the leading education systems.

More striking is that within California, students from low-income families typically attend the worst-performing public schools. It has been estimated that only about 5 percent of African American students are attending high-performing schools, while whites and those of Asian descent are much more likely to attend a high-performing school.

Creating a high-performing school system is a key part of the foundation toward building a society where all have the knowledge base and skills to succeed. Year after year, California school performance remains far below acceptable, despite substantial budget increases. The bulk of peer-reviewed research shows that this deficiency is significantly related to policy.

This body of research concludes that implementing common-sense reforms to the rules governing tenure and promotion, to pay criteria, and to the high costs of firing a poorly performing teacher would substantially raise student performance. These reforms have become so obviously needed that they are constantly advanced within policy circles, but they ultimately are suppressed by teacher unions, which in turn have a very close political relationship with many California lawmakers.

California state senator Ling Ling Chang (R-Diamond Bar) recently remarked, “Our academic admission process should be fair and even for all who apply. Having institutions of higher learning pick winners and losers based on nothing more than race is an abhorrent practice and something that should not be allowed ever in this country.”

Senator Chang’s statement should be heeded. The evidence indicates that implementing racial and gender preferences may significantly harm the very groups targeted to benefit from this policy. There are common-sense education reforms that will do so much more than race-based preferential policies.

But these education reforms are blocked by the legislators who ironically claim to be the strongest representatives of these targeted groups. Meanwhile, another generation of students from poor households will receive a deficient K–12 education and will face adulthood with far fewer opportunities than they could—and should—have.

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Better than Common Core: Florida’s New K-12 Standards Raise the Bar, Says New Report

The Independent Institute has published a briefing that vindicates Florida’s K-12 curriculum-content standards. A team of education policy experts demonstrates that Florida’s standards have particular strengths relative to their predecessor Common Core in areas such as knowledge acquisition and guidance for teachers. The guidelines actually offer a new gold standard that other states may well choose to emulate.

In the Spring of 2020, the Florida Department of Education announced its new state standards called “B.E.S.T.”, for Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking. B.E.S.T. is a replacement for the Obama-era Common Core Standards in English and mathematics. The change came after Governor Ron DeSantis, who had vowed to “eliminate the Common Core from Florida schools,” issued a 2019 executive order to create new curriculum-content standards.

Such a switch was controversial, with academics and parents expressing concerns. A critical report published by the Fordham Institute even warned that the B.E.S.T standards “aren’t ready for prime time.”

The Independent Institute’s positive review was written by Ze’ev Wurman, former senior policy adviser with the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education; Dr. David Steiner, Executive Director, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy; with Dr. Ashley Berner, Deputy Director, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy; and Dr. James Milgram, emeritus professor of mathematics at Stanford University and one of the 23 members of the Common Core Validation Committee. Steiner is former commissioner of education for the State of New York and former dean of the school of education of Hunter College in New York City.

In their review of the English standards, Dr. David Steiner and Dr. Ashley Berner offer their recommendations for further improvement to the standards, while concluding, “In its essential elements, the B.E.S.T standards are the strongest standard in ELA currently in use in the United States” and “can stand as a new model for the country.” They note that many of the criticisms of the B.E.S.T Standards are simply mistaken about what is contained in the standards and discount their coherence.

In his review of the B.E.S.T. math standards, Dr. James Milgram praises them for their clarity and walks through several examples of effective mathematics questions.

SOURCE 







Australia: Inside medicine’s culture of racism, bullying and harassment

I have no doubt that the instances described below did happen.  What I doubt is that they are common.  The medical profession encounters many of the hard edges of human society so is less idealistic.  As a result they can be cynical and reserved in their approach to others.

I see something of that when I meet a medical practitioner who is new to me.  When they hear that I am a retired university lecturer, their attitude to me visibly warms.  I become one of them rather than someone who has to be approached with caution. And I do generally get on well with doctors.

So I can see that doctors have been hardened by experience and that might make them unsympathetic or abrupt on occasions.  But does that do much harm?  One would think that Asian students might be treated unkindly and I believe that they are on occasions.  But the large numbers of Asian doctors I encounter one way or another tells me that they are pretty good at surviving any such travails.  The large number of female doctors tells a similar story

And the assumption that receivers of donor sperm usually prefer Caucasians as the donors is not ignorant. It is simply wrong. The fact is that Caucasian types are overwhelmingly preferred by recipients.  England gets a high proportion of its donated sperm from Denmark, where blue eyes and blond hair are common.  The Viking invasion is not over!

So the claim that medicine has a culture of racism, bullying and harassment surely has  something to it but not much


Being told indirectly that, unless you’re a white man, no one is going to want your sperm is not something you forget.

But medical students say racist slurs, social exclusion, gender discrimination and inappropriate jibes from their superiors are a common experience and it highlights the need for urgent changes in the industry.

Sam, a fifth-year medical student who is a person of colour, says bullying is “endemic” in medicine, especially if you are not white.

He has been subject to a number of slurs, including one incident a few weeks ago involving a midwife in the IVF ward of a Sydney hospital.

The student was in the room when a group of nurses were discussing a female patient who had requested an Asian sperm donor. “(The midwife) said, ‘I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to use caucasian sperm’,” Sam explained.

And Sam’s not alone. Many of his peers have also endured deeply unpleasant experiences.

Another fifth-year student, Tim*, said he benefited from being a white man in the medical industry and wanted to do more to help his international colleagues.

“It’s difficult to report because a lot of this stuff toes the line. It’s not like someone has slapped you across the face; it’s usually much less obvious,” Tim said.

One example he gave involved a teacher who was very particular about students arriving to class on time, and wouldn’t let them in if they were late.

“One day I arrived a few minutes late and he said, ‘Don’t worry, come in and sit down.’ But a student from an Indian background arrived straight after me and he wouldn’t let him in,” Tim explained.

“Then I noticed it was a repetitive thing. He’d let the caucasian students in but not the international students. It’s just not good enough.”

From belittling, to sexist comments and favouring male colleagues, sexism in medicine has also been allowed to flourish.

One female medical students told NCA NewsWire she was placed in a male-dominated team that made jokes about women being in surgery.

“They would say, ‘Why are you here? You need a family-friendly career,’” the student said.

“I couldn’t report it because I was the only female student in there and it would have been obvious that it was me.”

A second female student said while her experiences had been good, everyone assumed she was a nurse, not a doctor.

“Most of my teachers always refer to doctors being a ‘he’ and nurses being a ‘she’,” the student explained.

Sam supported those comments saying when he entered a theatre no one asked any questions, but when females do they were queried.

All four students described being ignored or hounded in front of patients or fellow staff.

When Tim spent time as part of a neurosurgery team, he should have done ward rounds and accompanied seniors into surgery. Instead, he was ignored.

“When they found out I was a student and not doctor, they wouldn’t even acknowledge me or say hello. This continued the entire time,” he said.

“For the majority of that term, it wasn’t what they were saying; it was them not saying anything.”

And when they were speaking, they often spent it belittling the Sydney student.

He said things escalated when he noticed a patient wasn’t responding to questions and failed to open her eyes, or move her hands.

“I thought, ‘this could be life-threatening’ so I said to the doctor, ‘Shouldn’t we do something? She doesn’t look good.’ But in front of everyone, they would be really dismissive and start asking things like, ‘What do you think is wrong with her? What should you do?’” he said.

“That patient was quite ill and no one was doing something about it.”

While not all doctors gave students a rough time, many have experienced verbal abuse, social exclusion, racial discrimination, gender stereotyping and general rudeness, usually from surgeons and physicians.

A report, published by BMC Medical Education and driven by fifth year UNSW Medicine student Laura Colenbrander, found in the past year alone Bankstown-Lidcombe, St George, Royal Prince Alfred, Westmead and Tamworth hospitals had all made headlines regarding mistreatment of junior doctors.

The hierarchical structure of medicine fuelled the “endemic culture” of bullying and harassment, often perpetrated by senior staff, Ms Colenbrander’s study found.

All four students said the hierarchy created barriers to reporting mistreatment, as they feared they would be labelled a troublemaker.

Students were also concerned it would affect career progression or that reporting avenues did not guarantee confidentiality or an outcome.

“Senior doctors were overwhelmingly considered unapproachable because they were ‘self-important’, sexist, uninterested, too busy, or participants feared verbal abuse,” the report states.

Australian Medical Students Association president Daniel Zou said the reporting processes for bullying and harassment remained unclear to many medical students.

“There should be confidential, easily accessible, clearly communicated and consistent reporting pathways available for all medical students,” he told NCA NewsWire.

“In many hospitals and medical schools, there are no guaranteed confidential reporting processes or anonymous reporting processes. For those hospitals and medical schools that do, they are oftentimes confusing pathways, inaccessible and ineffectual.”

Tim argued the industry had a responsibility to teach students about what bullying and harassment was.

“There are a lot of things we didn’t realise were serious,” he said. “And a lot of medical students won’t report it because we know nothing will happen. It’s not a big enough issue to bring up with top-level hospital management.”

Of the four study participants in Ms Colenbrander’s research who had reported an incident or knew someone who had, none had experienced desired outcomes.

This included sexist behaviour from surgeons on which the clinical school had insufficient authority to act.

This harassment extends beyond students. In 2015, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) confirmed more than 50 per cent of doctors and trainees (not including medical students) had been bullied or harassed, with verbal harassment among consultants most commonly cited.

Ms Colenbrander said the issue of bullying and harassment “spoke to her” because she knew many students who had experienced this in a hospital setting. “It just seemed widespread,” Ms Colenbrander told NCA NewsWire.

“Personally my experiences have been really positive. I’ve had great teachers and experiences but I’ve also definitely experienced the underbelly of medicine.”

According to a survey released by the Medical Board of Australia, one in three trainee doctors in Australia have experienced or witnessed bullying, harassment or discrimination in the past 12 months.

However, only a third have done anything about it, with 57 per cent believing they would suffer negative consequences if they reported the inappropriate behaviour.

And mistreatment of medical students will no doubt have long-term consequences on the nation’s future doctors.

“It has an epidemic bullying culture. Medicine isn’t immune from the stuff that happens in other professions. It’s still very rife and still there,” Sam said. “These are the people that look after you, so why can’t they look after their own.”

SOURCE