On Thursday of this week, K-12 educators will commemorate the 58th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision recognizing that separate schools for black and white are inherently unequal.  Even after de jure segregation was officially dismantled, K-12 educators acknowledged that de-facto racial, ethnic, and economic segregation of schools is harmful to student outcomes.  Low-income students stuck in high-poverty elementary schools, for example, are two years behind low-income students who have the opportunity to attend more-affluent schools.

At the elementary and secondary level, educators devised a number of strategies to address economic and racial isolation, including programs to allow low-income students to transfer out of high-poverty schools into higher performing middle-class schools, and “magnet” programs to attract middle-class students into higher…

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On Sunday, the Washington Post declared that Massachusetts Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had the “Worst Week in Washington.” News came to light that Warren, a Harvard Law professor, touted her Native American heritage (she is reportedly one-32nd Cherokee) in legal directories from 1986 to 1995, and that Harvard Law School claimed her status added to faculty diversity. Conservatives charged she had gamed the system to use affirmative action to advance her career.

Warren denied the charge—and there is no evidence that she in fact benefited from a racial preference in hiring—but her weak responses only dug the hole deeper, Chris Cillizza of the Post noted. Her case highlights four weaknesses in affirmative-action policies—and also suggests a way out.

First, Warren’s explanation for why she listed herself as a Native American—which denied any…

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The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) recently released a significant commission report that begins to articulate a positive path for change for two-year colleges.  Reclaiming the American Dream: Community Colleges and the Nation’s Future, was issued by a high-level 38-member panel, and had the backing of major players in higher education: the Gates and Kresge foundations and the ACT and Educational Testing Service.

The report, which was featured in a story by David Wessel in the Wall Street Journal, does three important things in my view:

First, the report frankly acknowledges the shortcomings of community colleges in stark language.  “What we find today are student success rates that are unacceptably low, employment preparation that is inadequately connected to job market needs, and disconnects in transitions between high schools, community colleges, and…

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There is a lot of buzz around New Republic journalist Timothy Noah’s new book, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, which persuasively documents the nation’s burgeoning economic divide. While we appropriately pride ourselves for becoming a more egalitarian society with respect to African-Americans, women, and gays, Noah writes, our incomes have grown stunningly unequal. If in the 1960s and 70s, the United States became an “angrier place,” today, our enormous economic inequalities have helped make America “a meaner place.”

In the early part of the 20th century, when politicians were worried about growing concentrations of income and wealth among families like the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Carnegies, the richest 1% took in 18% of the national income, Noah notes. That figure dropped to 9% in 1970, when unions remained an …

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When the U.S. Supreme Court hears a challenge to the racial affirmative-action program at the University of Texas at Austin this fall, one of the big issues will be whether Texas’s two “race-neutral” alternative programs provided sufficient racial and ethnic diversity to make the use of race unnecessary—and therefore illegal. Did programs to provide affirmative action based on socioeconomic status, and to automatically admit students in the top-10 percent of every high school class, create an adequate level of racial and ethnic diversity by themselves?

Last week, the Chronicle reported on an interesting new study by two Princeton University sociologists, Angel L. Harris and Marta Tienda, on the impact of the Texas top-10-percent law on Hispanic students. The report, which was published in Race and Social Problems, analyzes Hispanic admissions to Texas’s two most selective in…

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Santa Monica Community College created a furor when it recently proposed charging higher prices for certain popular classes as a way of addressing overcrowding. The proposal, which was reported on the front page of the New York Times and on National Public Radio, raised complaints because community colleges are supposed to be affordable open-access institutions that promote equal educational opportunity. The plan would have added new sections of oversubscribed courses at quadruple the regular per-credit price.

After sustained criticism and student protests (in which some were doused by police with pepper spray) Santa Monica trustees quickly ditched the plan. But this small victory for equity masks enormous inequalities that remain. The reason why Santa Monica was driven to its differential pricing scheme, after all, is that community colleges are desperately overcrowded and…

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For years, critics have complained that the U.S. News & World Report college rankings measure “inputs,” such as median student SAT scores, rather than “outputs,” in the form of how much students have actually learned after four years. From an equity standpoint, the U.S. News rankings are also troubling because they create a perverse incentive for colleges to take the very highest-scoring students who may have had everything given to them, rather than students with somewhat lower scores who have overcome obstacles in life.

If we instead evaluated colleges based on actual outputs, might that create healthy incentives to focus on how much learning goes on in a school? And if the measures could gauge value added, might that create an incentive to admit low-income students whose full potential is not reflected in entering scores but could shine with the right supports?

Last week…

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With the nation focused on the U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of President Obama’s  health-care legislation this spring, many in higher education are talking about another blockbuster case: the challenge to a racial affirmative-action program at the University of Texas, to be considered this fall. Some of the early commentary, however, is creating misconceptions about what is at stake in the Fisher v. Texas litigation.  Here are three recent myths that have surfaced.

Affirmative action in higher education is about white women.

Many suggest that while the media focus on race, white women are in fact the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action.  Over at the Chronicle‘s Brainstorm blog, for example, Michele Goodwin argues that it is ironic that white women such as Jennifer Gratz, Barbara Grutter, and now Amanda Fisher have “lead the charge against affirmative action,…

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The Virginia state legislature has been making headlines for discussing whether women should have to undergo a trans-vaginal ultrasound before having an abortion, but the same legislative body is receiving kudos, from the liberal New Republic, for seeking to abolish tenure for teachers in public schools.

In backing the proposal, the editors of The New Republic drew a distinction between higher education, where they think tenure is appropriate, and K-12 education, where they want tenure “abolished.” Universities are “our country’s ideas factories,” they write. “And so it makes a certain amount of sense that we would want university professors—the people our society relies on to explore ideas, including unpopular ones—to enjoy protections from ideological or intellectual retribution. But this rationale doesn’t apply at the K-12 level.”

The editorial goes on to say…

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Bayard Rustin, the brilliant civil-rights strategist who organized the 1963 March on Washington and had a profound impact on Martin Luther King Jr., would have turned 100 tomorrow. In commemoration of the centennial of his birth, a new book, I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life In Letters, (edited by Michael G. Long) has just been published. It is a volume that is rich in Rustin’s wisdom and highly relevant to today’s debates over issues from gay rights to affirmative action.

During the civil-rights movement, Rustin was forced to play a behind-the-scenes role, in part because he had been a Communist in his youth, and in part because he was openly gay during an era of profound homophobia. But in his supporting role, Rustin had an enormous influence on the civil-rights movement, serving, Vernon Jordan said, as “our intellectual bank, our Brookings Institution.” Rustin…

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