In Part I of this series, I made the simple point that school choice should be a civil rights issue.
This is because government schools do a scandalously bad job of educating children from poor communities and choice would give families the ability to escape that failing system.
And the people I cited in that column also made very good points about better K-12 schooling being the right way of preparing more minority children to successfully advance to the next level, especially if they want to attend elite colleges.
Which is a good reason to now look at a series of essays in the New York Times on “How to Fix College Admissions Now.”
Professor Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard, easily has the best piece. Here’s some of what he proposed.
…selective schools are planning to respond to its widely anticipated decision to end affirmative action…in part, by watering down their admissions standards, through policies like reducing or eliminating the role of standardized tests. …But this is precisely backward. Instead of making the admissions process shallow, elite colleges should deepen the applicant pool. The simplest, most direct way to do that is for these schools to found and fund schools that educate disadvantaged students. …They could fix the problem if they truly wanted to. Elite colleges could operate a network of, say, 100 feeder middle and high schools — academies that are open to promising students who otherwise lack access to a high-quality secondary education, in cities where such children are common because of high poverty rates and underperforming public schools. …he cost would be about $4 billion — about 2 percent of the League’s total endowments. This cost could be offset by fundraising specifically for the academies. One could even add three years of middle school without getting close to the $10 billion mark, if we believe intervention must start sooner.
Professor Fryer is correct on many levels.
- He’s right that better K-12 schooling is the smart way of getting more minority kids ready for college.
- He’s right that government schools obviously are incapable of doing the job.
- And he’s right that private schools are capable of producing much better results.
But what’s especially enjoyable about his column is that he’s asking elite colleges to put up or shut up. If they really care about better schooling and more diversity, they can take a small slice of their endowments to make it happen.
Given the rampant hypocrisy on the left, I won’t be holding my breath waiting for this to happen.
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Image credit: Ingfbruno | CC BY-SA 3.0.
