| Education and Merit Resource Page |
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Race-Conscious
Remedies
Resource
Site
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| Education and Merit Resource Page |
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| Today, discussions
concerning admission into in our nation's educational institutions are
often centered on replacement of race-conscious affirmative action programs
with the strict use of "merit-based" admissions’ policies. Merit, it is
said, is the fairest, most democratic way of allocating scarce resources.
Merit appeals to our nation's individualist roots and national mythology
which holds that anyone willing to work hard for something – in this case,
admission into the school of choice – should be entitled to receive her
just reward. Affirmative action, it is said, dilutes and undermines merit
by selecting "less-meritorious" "minority" students over "more-meritorious"
(usually) "white" students. To many, affirmative action is antithetical
to everything that the civil rights movement stood and fought for: a "color-blind"
society in which everyone gained the right to be judged not on the color
of their skin, but on content of their character, which includes their
individual achievements. However, before one accepts wholesale the validity
of merit-based over race-conscious admissions’ policies, several base-line
assumptions encapsulated within merit-based policies must be analyzed.
It is our hope that the legal cases, law review and newspaper articles and web site links we have gathered may assist you in your analysis of these assumptions and allow you to develop your own informed opinion. This section of the race-conscious remedies resource site provides readers with many resources that will put education and merit in a clearer perspective. This site not only provides readers with the historical context of the education struggle for minorities, but also offers resources to alternative remedial measures to protect minorities in this day of civil rights retrenchment. This site promises to be informative and enlightening on education jurisprudence and on the issues that face minorities in this field as we approach the new millennium. |
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| Historical Cases | Most Recent Cases |
| Plessy
v. Ferguson,
163 U.S. 537 (1896) |
U.S.
v. Fordice,
505 U.S. 717 (1992) |
| Sweatt
v. Painter,
339 U.S. 629 (1950) |
Missouri
v. Jenkins,
115 S. Ct. 2038 (1995) |
| Brown
v. Board of Education,
347 U.S. 483 (1954) (I), 349 U.S. 294 (1955) (II) |
Hopwood
v. State of Texas,
78 F. 3d. 932 (5th Cir. 1996) |
| Green
v. County School Board of New Kent County,
391 U.S. 430 (1968) |
Eisenberg
v. Mongomery Public Schools,
19 F. Supp. 2d. 449 (1998) |
| Swann
v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education,
402 U.S. 1 (1971) |
Wooden
v. Board Of Regents Of The University System Of Georgia,
32 F. Supp. 2d. 1370 (1999) |
| Podberesky
v. Kirwan,
38 F.3d 147 (4th Cir. 1994), cert. denied 514 U.S. 1128 (1995) |
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| Milliken
v. Bradley,
418 U.S. 717 (1974) (I), 433 U.S. 267 (1977) (II) |
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| Regents
of the University of California v. Bakke,
438 U.S. 265 (1978) |
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| "The
Shape Of The River": California After Racial Preferences by
Martin Trow,
The Public Interest, Thursday, April 1, 1999 |
| NCAA Says It Will Fight Ruling On Test Scores Organization To Ask For Stay Of Order by Jonathan Curiel & Pamela Burdman, The San Francisco Chronicle, Wednesday, March 10, 1999 |
| How to Even the Score: Test Prep by Romesh Ratnesar, Time Magazine, April 20, 1998, Vol. 151 No. 15 |
Where's The Merit In the S.A.T? by Eugene E. Garcia, The New York Times, December 26, 1997 |
| TAKING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION APART by Nicholas Lemann, The New York Times, June 11, 1995 |
| Race
and the Schooling of Black Americans by Claude M. Steele, April
1992
More than half of black college students fail to complete their degree work - for reasons that have little to do with innate ability or environmental conditioning. The problem, a social psychologist argues, is that they are undervalued, in ways that are sometimes subtle and sometimes not. |
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| CIVIL
RIGHTS PERESTROIKA: INTERGROUP RELATIONS AFTER AFFIRMATIVE ACTION by
Linda Hamilton Krieger
86 Calif. L. Rev. 1251, California Law Review, December, 1998 |
| THE
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION DEBATE IN LEGAL EDUCATION AND THE LEGAL PROFESSION:
LESSONS FROM DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION LAW by
Laura F. Rothstein
2 J. Gender, Race & Just. 1, Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, Fall, 1998 |
| AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION IN LAW SCHOOL ADMISSIONS: AN ANALYSIS OF WHY AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
IS NO LONGER THE ANSWER . . . OR IS IT? by
Kathleen A. Graves
23 S. Ill. U. L.J. 149, Southern Illinois University Law Journal, Fall 1998 |
| LatCrit:
Latinas/os and the Law, A Joint Symposium by California Law Review and
La Raza Law Journal Policy, Politic & Praxis, DECONSTRUCTING THE DISTINCTION
BETWEEN BIAS AND MERIT by Daria Roithmayr
10 La Raza L.J. 363, La Raza Law Journal, Spring 1998 |
| CONTROVERSY,
A Roundtable: The Black-White Test Score Gap
Claude M. Steele, Stephen J. Ceci, Wendy M. Williams, Mindy Kornhaber, Jared Bernstein, Richard Rothstein, Glenn C. Loury, Christopher Jencks, and Meredith Phillips |
| "Merit
and Affirmative Action: In Which Rodrigo and I Meet by Chance at the New
Professors' Conference and I Learn of a Recent Event at His School"
by Richard Delgado
The Coming Race War? And Other Apocalyptic Tales of America after Affirmative Action and Welfare (NY: NYU Press, 1996) |
| Symposium:
Race-Based Remedy, THE FUTURE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: RECLAIMING THE INNOVATIVE
IDEAL by Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier
84 Calif. L. Rev. 953, California Law Review, July, 1996 |
| "The Merits of Merit" by Judith Lichtenberg and David Luban |
| AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: THE GENERAL DEBATE – This is Section II of "Beyond Self-Interest: APAs Toward a Community of Justice: A Policy Analysis of Affirmative Action" by Professor Gabriel Chin, Professor Sumi Cho, Professor Jerry Kang, Professor Frank Wu |
| The SAT: Questions and Answers – FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing |
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| If the SAT and other standardized
tests are not accurate predictors of academic success (they are better
predictors of family income) in college or after college, should they be
used at all in allocating educational resources? Should an unbiased test
be created to replace them? How else can educational resources be allocated
without using standardized tests?
Enter Food For Thought Instruction Page with a Link to Discussion Forum |
| In the 1980s, the ETS created
a new version of the SAT and used it on a test group. On this trial test,
Blacks scored equal to or higher than whites. Since the ETS can create
a version of the SAT on which Blacks score equal to or higher than whites,
should those changes be implemented on a permanent basis to reduce or eliminate
racial bias just as the ETS has made changes to its tests to reduce gender
bias?
Enter Food For Thought Instruction Page with a Link to Discussion Forum |
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| FairTest
– The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) is an advocacy
organization working to end the abuses, misuses and flaws of standardized
testing and ensure that evaluation of students and workers is fair, open,
and educationally sound.
We place special emphasis on eliminating the racial, class, gender, and cultural barriers to equal opportunity posed by standardized tests, and preventing their damage to the quality of education. [This site attacks the pervasive myth that test scores equal merit.] |
| Black Issues In Higher Education is the Nation's only news magazine dedicated exclusively to minority issues in higher education. |
| Back to Home Page |  |
This page was last updated on 24 May 1999