Diversity Thursday

it's a good fight

In the campaign to move the ball forward to a non-discriminatory education system based on merit and not a sectarian spoils system based self-identified and often highly inaccurate racial and ethnic classifications, we have to accept there will be successes and failures.

There can be localized success at the local and corporate levels, but the big wins and losses can be found at the Executive and Legislative branches of government, but the real impactful wins will have to come through the judicial.

As we covered last September, a great victory was had in the fall with the 6-3 decision that dealt a heavy - but not fatal - blow to racial discrimination in admissions.

As expected, with all the rent seekers, grievance mongers, and race-essentialists out there, especially in the ideological terrarium that is DC, a lot of push back took place. Combined with the unprecedented pressures on Supreme Court justices at their own homes, we should not be surprised that SCOTUS as a body is being cautious to advance too far.

They can’t stop the tide of justice, but they are trying to slow things down. You can see that in the recent action in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board as outlined in a great article in City Journal;

In February, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, a case that concerned a change in admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in Alexandria, Virginia. After the new policy took effect, the share of Asian students admitted to TJ, one of the nation’s top public high schools, dropped by nearly 20 percentage points from the previous year. The share of white, black, and Hispanic students, by contrast, increased. As it turns out, this had been the goal of education officials in Fairfax County all along. At an October 2020 meeting, TJ’s own principal revealed that she wanted a “student body that more closely aligns with the representation in Fairfax County Public Schools.”

Justice Samuel Alito described the majority’s refusal to hear the case as “hard to understand.” In 2007’s Parents Involved v. Seattle School District, the Supreme Court held that a school district’s interest in racial balancing could not justify the district’s use of race in selecting students for admission to public high schools. In 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the court struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Neither decision, however, addressed admissions policies that—like TJ’s—are race-neutral on their face but race-conscious in aim and effect. Thus, “TJ offers a roadmap,” Alito warned, “for other selective schools to skirt the Equal Protection Clause.”

As the nation is littered with administrators that cannot help but try to force racially discriminatory actions to “make the metrics work,” - like the ocean behind the tide - more cases are coming;

The Supreme Court has a second chance to remind education officials that “eliminating discrimination means eliminating all of it,” as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Students for Fair Admissions. Last month, the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence—a group of parents and students who support merit-based admissions and improving K–6 education—asked the justices to examine the 2021–22 admissions policy for Boston’s three selective public high schools. This policy, while facially race-neutral, diminished the share of white students (from 33 percent to 24 percent) and Asian students (from 21 percent to 16 percent) at Boston Latin School (BLS), Boston Latin Academy (BLA), and John O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science (O’Bryant). As in Fairfax County, the Boston School Committee adopted the new admissions policy because it believed Asians (and whites) were “overrepresented.”

For years, admission to BLS, BLA, and O’Bryant was based on a student’s grades in English language arts and math, along with the student’s score on a standardized test similar in nature to the SAT/ACT. Education officials in Boston would combine each applicant’s grades and test results into a “composite score” and offer admission to those with the highest scores.

But in the winter of 2020, the school committee—troubled by the fact that black and Latino students made up 75 percent of students at Boston Public Schools but only 40 percent of the student bodies at the three exam schools—voted to overhaul the admissions process. The new policy, intended for the 2021–22 school year, eliminated the entrance exam (admissions are now based solely on GPA) and replaced the citywide competition with a zip code quota. Applicants with the highest GPAs receive 20 percent of the offers at each school, while the remaining 80 percent of offers are dispersed among the city’s zip codes, depending on the number of school-age children who live there. Competition for these seats takes place exclusively within each zip code.

After the new policy took effect, it became much more difficult for white and Asian students to win a seat at BLS, BLA, or O’Bryant. In zip codes where the population was at least 55 percent white and Asian, the average GPA (on a 12-point scale) of admittees ranged from 10.32 to 11.56. However, in neighborhoods where the population was at least 55 percent black and Latino, the average GPA of admittees ranged from 9.51 to 10.67.

In changing the selective schools’ admissions policies, education officials in Boston appeared to be strongly motivated by racialism. Samuel Acevedo, a co-chair of BPS’ Opportunity and Achievement Gap Task Force, described the new policy’s purpose as “rectifying historic racial inequities afflicting exam school admissions for generations.” Meanwhile, school committee chair Michael Loconto was forced to resign after being caught on a hot mic ridiculing the names of Chinese-American parents who had come to a school board meeting to speak out against the new policy.

As mentioned above, the Supreme Court justices are human too, and one of the most dangerous norm-breaking of the Biden Administration & its DOJ allowing the aggressive intimidation campaign against Supreme Court justices. It seems to be working;

It’s unclear whether the high court will hear the appeal, especially given that it denied Coalition for TJ certiorari not long ago. Some of the justices might be concerned that taking up another case on racial preferences so soon after Students for Fair Admissions will lead to unrest. Yet, this concern does not outweigh the significance of the case itself. In ruling against the Boston parents, the First Circuit turned decades of U.S. Equal Protection law on its head. Indeed, it held that, though the 2021–22 admissions policy for Boston’s selective schools led to a decline in whites and Asians, these groups were not disparately impacted because they were still overrepresented relative to their shares of the overall student population in Boston Public Schools. The Fourth Circuit advanced the same argument in its April 2023 ruling against Coalition for TJ. (The Fourth Circuit held that, because Asians still made up a majority of TJ students, the school’s new admissions policy did not discriminate against them.)

That can be distressing, but the phase of the tide is clear.

As we noted last year, the victory in the fall had a carve out that allowed the service academies to still discriminate on the basis of race, but … in fits and starts … there is a case that is slowly making its way. Again, SCOTUS is trying to keep things from moving too fast;

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in the latest affirmative action legal battle, this time centered on the United States Military Academy’s continued use of race-conscious admissions.

The case, Students for Fair Admissions v. U.S. Military Academy at West Point, is currently being heard by a federal appellate court. The plaintiff, SFFA—the same organization that won landmark victories last year against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—appealed for an emergency injunction from the court to stop West Point from considering race in admissions while the lower court’s proceedings continue.

In an unsigned note with no apparent dissents, the justices of the high court said they were passing on the case because its “record before this Court is underdeveloped, and this order should not be construed as expressing any view on the merits of the constitutional question.”

For the impatient like me, you can find some nice victories here and there.

Of all places, look at what MIT just did.

For a long time, they like many education institutions were open in their racialist policies. For instance, in 2016;

Race is one of many factors we consider. It is never a controlling factor, so it is never the only thing that we consider, but it is one part of the whole. Our process is an individual, holistic admissions process, which means we look at every student in their entirety.

In the last few years as a critical mass of people who no longer tolerated this mid-20th Century concept of race in the 21st Century, efforts were made to explain, or hide what they were doing…but you can’t hide something this pernicious for long. It can’t survive the light of day.

After the SCOTUS decision in the fall, they admitted rather openly that they were previously discriminatory against people based on race in admissions. They were struggling with the concept of merit, but they were accepting the fact we were at the end of the first quarter of the 21st Century.

Another part of the Cultural-Marxism infused racialist ideology we are fighting, is the compelled speech, ideological filtering tool known as “Diversity Statements.”

Along with the full spectrum of critical studies socio-political programs at our service academies, as we covered a little over a year ago, Diversity Statements are in use at our service academies. The leftist cadre in the administration and faculty were a little late in the game copying the worst leftist trends in academia they fanboi around, but the SCOTUS shield will ironically ensure that racial discrimination in admissions might have the US military as its last holdout.

Sad, really, The US military to its great credit led the nation in the 20th Century implementing integration and equal treatment for all. It is sad that we find ourselves in the 21st Century seeing the US military as the last redoubt of retrograde racialist policies. Diversity Statements may linger there longer until new leadership comes in with the top-cover to end this disgraceful policy.

However, MIT has seen the elephant on Diversity Statements;

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology said on Monday that it would no longer require candidates applying for faculty positions to write diversity statements, which have been denounced by conservatives and free-speech advocates as forcing a kind of ideological conformity.

In their statements, generally a page-long, candidates were required to explain how they would enhance the university’s commitment to diversity.

Such statements have become enshrined in faculty hiring at many elite public and private universities, as well as in corporate life. Academics have defended them as necessary in judging whether a faculty member can reach out to an increasingly diverse student body.

In announcing the change, M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, said diversity statements constituted a form of compelled speech that do not work.

Good for MIT.

There will be setback, and there will be advances. It can be hard to tell looking directly at it … but if you take it from the vertical and lay it towards the horizonal, you can eventually see the signal build.

Keep pushing, everyone who can. More light. More fresh air. More discovery.

In our little experiment in a self-governing polyglot republic, we have to eliminate any kind of system of spoils that provided benefits or takes away opportunity based on immutable characteristics, especially the sectarian accelerators related to race, sex, and ethnicity.

It’s a good fight.