FEATURES Hard Numbers
By Karen Rutzick krutzick@govexec.com
Government Executive July 1, 2007
Ronald Stroman was hauled before a joint Senate-House hearing in May to explain why black analysts at the Government Accountability Office were receiving lower performance ratings than their white counterparts.
How did Congress know about the discrepancy? Stroman handed over the data himself -- at least indirectly. And he's glad that he did.
Stroman is managing director of the Office of Opportunity and Inclusiveness at GAO. When Comptroller General David M. Walker hired him in 2001, he gave Stroman a mandate to promote diversity at the agency. Stroman responded with a controversial suggestion: publicize all the agency's promotions and performance ratings by race, gender, age, disability, veteran status, location and payband.
Senior GAO officials warned that this move would open the door to lawsuits and fuel unhappiness. But Walker approved the idea and Stroman began releasing the data annually on GAO's intranet. Sure enough, from 2002 to 2005, the data revealed a gap between performance appraisals of blacks and whites. It also showed that the gap widened the longer employees stayed at the agency.
"I have stood outside the Rayburn House Office Building wearing a suit and a tie during the middle of the day, trying to hail a cab, only to have that cab driver pass me by in order to pick up a white person standing less than five feet behind where I stood," Stroman told the committee. "Race, gender, ethnicity, disability, age and sexual orientation do matter."
Airing the data on the intranet was the first step to solving discrimination, according to Stroman. "What gets measured gets done," he says. "It becomes, I think, the linchpin to improving diversity."
Stroman believes GAO is the first and only federal agency to release diversity data to employees. In fact, a number of federal employee groups -- including Federally Employed Women and the African American Federal Executive Association -- went to Congress recently with a request for data. They want the Office of Personnel Management to offer more detailed information on how many minorities, women, people with disabilities and veterans each agency employs. They didn't go so far as to ask for data by promotion or performance rating.
"Current OPM reports group all minorities in grades GS-14, 15 and [the Senior Executive Service] together," William A. Brown Sr., national president and founder of AAFEA and retired senior executive at the Army Corps of Engineers, told Congress in May. "This presents a distorted view of diversity. We need an accurate baseline to measure progress or lack thereof."
Brown and his group are asking GAO to conduct a detailed study of diversity across all agencies. He wants to know, for example, whether his suspicions are true that blacks who reach the Senior Executive Service are older than others in the SES, giving them a shorter turn in power.
Brown's urgency to get the data stems from the opportunity he sees to diversify the upper ranks of government as many retire in the coming decade. Stroman wants to protect employees from the new wave of pay for performance. He says such pay systems pave the way for discrimination by giving managers more room to be subjective.
More important than giving diversity data to Congress or even to advocacy groups is sharing it with middle managers, according to a new report from The Conference Board Inc., a nonprofit business research group in New York. Written by executives from corporations such as Avon Products Inc., Hewitt Associates, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Safeco Corp., among others, the report finds that middle managers are the biggest roadblock to diversity initiatives.
Middle managers, they said, are the ones who actually handle the promotions and performance reviews that executives from on high analyze for diversity. "The middle management layer seemingly douses the spreading diversity fire, smothering it through inertia rather than outright opposition," according to the report.
To fan the fire, these executives say, give middle managers the data. The Conference Board recommends releasing diversity data four times a year.
"A common and legitimate complaint on the part of middle managers is that they don't know the score," the report noted. "They're used to getting that data on a regular basis on inventory, productivity and response times and are expected to monitor these regularly and take necessary corrective action. Diversity should be no different."
In Stroman's discussions with GAO employees, he singled out a central reason for the discrepancies in performance scores: Managers were afraid to talk to their employees of color about their performance reviews.
"When [employees of color] get their ratings back, it is a surprise to them oftentimes," Stroman says. "There is a different level of communication going on with regard to performance with staff of color than with white staff. I think that reflects the culture that we live in. Having difficult discussions at work is difficult in any setting, but when you overlay that with gender, race, sexual orientation, it becomes more difficult. That disadvantages the staff of color."
But as much as Stroman and Walker believe in their system, it has opened them up to congressional backlash.
Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia, said at the hearing that members of GAO's Blacks in Government branch came to him with concerns about the disparity between black and white analysts. The performance ratings had greater consequences for employees since a pay restructuring took place at GAO gave some employees a chance at higher pay and capped others at a lower level.
"It would appear that African-Americans at GAO have been harmed by the restructuring, and this brings into question the fairness and credibility of GAO's performance management system," Davis said at the hearing.
[To read the entire article, go to: http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?filepath=/dailyfed/0707/070307mag1.htm ]
Sunday, September 30, 2007
An anti-bias ballot battle
By Devona WalkerStaff Writer
Fri September 28, 2007
The Affirmative Action Civil Rights Council continued Thursday to provide oversight to state agencies in an effort to increase employment of minorities and women, despite the momentum of a petition campaign seeking to do away with affirmative action in Oklahoma. The California-based American Civil Rights Institute is the brains and dollars behind the Oklahoma Human Rights initiative. The group is seeking to get on the November ballot a vote to end gender and race-based preferences in the hiring of state employees, public contracts and public education.
"This is not a black and white thing,” said state Rep. Mike Shelton, D-Oklahoma City and a member of the council. "The unfortunate thing is that people are signing this, without understanding how devastating this is going to be to women. More than anyone else, this is going to set women back 50 years.”
A similar initiative — backed by the same group — was successful in Michigan during the midterm elections as well as in California and Washington.
Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona and Missouri were chosen by Ward Connerly, the founder of the American Civil Rights Institute, as the next states where he would push for the change.
"Oklahoma is one of the states that we chose, but there is local support for it,” Connerly said. "That was one of the deciding factors.”
The proposal, State Question 737, also would affect small businesses, as there are programs established to help small businesses run by minorities and women. A minimum of 138,970 signatures of state registered voters must be obtained for there to be a chance of getting it on a general election ballot.
Perceptions citedOklahoma supporters would not speak to specifics in terms of the number of signatures, but say the local effort is doing quite well.
Oklahoma state government has nearly 20,000 women employees and more than 7,000 minority employees.
Peter Schmidt, a novelist and deputy editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education, says criticism against affirmative action is mostly about perceptions.
About half of white people over the age of 18 think they have been passed over by a less-qualified black, he said.
"And that means a lot when you want to get someone to sign a petition,” Schmidt said
[To read the entire article, go to: http://newsok.com/article/3135839/1190960077 ]
Fri September 28, 2007
The Affirmative Action Civil Rights Council continued Thursday to provide oversight to state agencies in an effort to increase employment of minorities and women, despite the momentum of a petition campaign seeking to do away with affirmative action in Oklahoma. The California-based American Civil Rights Institute is the brains and dollars behind the Oklahoma Human Rights initiative. The group is seeking to get on the November ballot a vote to end gender and race-based preferences in the hiring of state employees, public contracts and public education.
"This is not a black and white thing,” said state Rep. Mike Shelton, D-Oklahoma City and a member of the council. "The unfortunate thing is that people are signing this, without understanding how devastating this is going to be to women. More than anyone else, this is going to set women back 50 years.”
A similar initiative — backed by the same group — was successful in Michigan during the midterm elections as well as in California and Washington.
Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona and Missouri were chosen by Ward Connerly, the founder of the American Civil Rights Institute, as the next states where he would push for the change.
"Oklahoma is one of the states that we chose, but there is local support for it,” Connerly said. "That was one of the deciding factors.”
The proposal, State Question 737, also would affect small businesses, as there are programs established to help small businesses run by minorities and women. A minimum of 138,970 signatures of state registered voters must be obtained for there to be a chance of getting it on a general election ballot.
Perceptions citedOklahoma supporters would not speak to specifics in terms of the number of signatures, but say the local effort is doing quite well.
Oklahoma state government has nearly 20,000 women employees and more than 7,000 minority employees.
Peter Schmidt, a novelist and deputy editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education, says criticism against affirmative action is mostly about perceptions.
About half of white people over the age of 18 think they have been passed over by a less-qualified black, he said.
"And that means a lot when you want to get someone to sign a petition,” Schmidt said
[To read the entire article, go to: http://newsok.com/article/3135839/1190960077 ]
Saturday, September 29, 2007
National Take Affirmative Action Day
National Take Affirmative Action Day
October 9, 2007 - National Phone Briefing
April 8, 2008 - Nationwide Day of Action
For years, students have been working to advance and preserve equal opportunity and affirmative action policies on their campuses and in their communities. Following the rollback of some of these policies by ballot initiative in California, Washington state, and Michigan, and by litigation in other states, student action on this issue has never been more critical! Because of this, we invite you to join thousands of campuses across the country in taking action to preserve key programs for Women and People of Color in a two-part National Take Affirmative Action Day (NTAAD) beginning with an important national phone briefing and strategy discussion on October 9th, 2007, culminating in a nationwide day of action on April 08, 2008!
First envisioned by the United States Student Association in 2001, NTAAD is a day for students to demand that their college and university administrators defend and strengthen the programs that ensure an equal opportunity for all students: affirmative action programs! Since then NTAAD has grown exponentially with the co-sponsorship of the NAACP Youth & College Division and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund’s Student Activist Network. It is time to stand up and defend recruitment and retention programs and ensure that all people, regardless of race and gender, have equal access to Higher Education. Please join us on October 9th , at 8pm ET, for a national phone briefing and strategy discussion and find out more of what you can do to stop the anti affirmative action agenda!Please RSVP by October 2, 2007 to Scott Lu, Student of Color Campus Diversity Project Director of the U.S. Student Association at mailto:cdp@usstudents.org/t_blank or 202.637.3924. The private dial-in number will then be circulated to those who rsvp. As long as institutional discrimination is present in institutions of higher education, National Take Affirmative Action Day will serve as a means for student of color activists to stand in solidarity and action for justice!
Start Date/Time
October 9, 2007 8:00 pm
End Date/Time
October 9, 2007 10:00 pm
Open To Press
Cost
free
Contact Email
cdp@usstudents.org
Website
http://www.civilrights.org/campaigns/student_activist/
Related Issue
Affirmative Action
http://www.civilrights.org/civil_rights_calendar/page.jsp?itemID=32161742
October 9, 2007 - National Phone Briefing
April 8, 2008 - Nationwide Day of Action
For years, students have been working to advance and preserve equal opportunity and affirmative action policies on their campuses and in their communities. Following the rollback of some of these policies by ballot initiative in California, Washington state, and Michigan, and by litigation in other states, student action on this issue has never been more critical! Because of this, we invite you to join thousands of campuses across the country in taking action to preserve key programs for Women and People of Color in a two-part National Take Affirmative Action Day (NTAAD) beginning with an important national phone briefing and strategy discussion on October 9th, 2007, culminating in a nationwide day of action on April 08, 2008!
First envisioned by the United States Student Association in 2001, NTAAD is a day for students to demand that their college and university administrators defend and strengthen the programs that ensure an equal opportunity for all students: affirmative action programs! Since then NTAAD has grown exponentially with the co-sponsorship of the NAACP Youth & College Division and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund’s Student Activist Network. It is time to stand up and defend recruitment and retention programs and ensure that all people, regardless of race and gender, have equal access to Higher Education. Please join us on October 9th , at 8pm ET, for a national phone briefing and strategy discussion and find out more of what you can do to stop the anti affirmative action agenda!Please RSVP by October 2, 2007 to Scott Lu, Student of Color Campus Diversity Project Director of the U.S. Student Association at mailto:cdp@usstudents.org/t_blank or 202.637.3924. The private dial-in number will then be circulated to those who rsvp. As long as institutional discrimination is present in institutions of higher education, National Take Affirmative Action Day will serve as a means for student of color activists to stand in solidarity and action for justice!
Start Date/Time
October 9, 2007 8:00 pm
End Date/Time
October 9, 2007 10:00 pm
Open To Press
Cost
free
Contact Email
cdp@usstudents.org
Website
http://www.civilrights.org/campaigns/student_activist/
Related Issue
Affirmative Action
http://www.civilrights.org/civil_rights_calendar/page.jsp?itemID=32161742
Friday, September 28, 2007
What Can Be Done to Diversify Executive Suites?
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Diversity in Academe
From the issue dated September 28, 2007
Although the American population is growing more diverse, and colleges are seeking to enroll students and hire faculty members from many different backgrounds, the top leadership at most higher-education institutions remains quite homogeneous. For example, a 2005 Chronicle survey of about 1,300 presidents at four-year institutions, of whom 764 responded, found that nearly 89 percent were white and almost 81 percent were male.
At The Chronicle's second annual Presidents Forum, held in Washington in June, Mickey L. Burnim, president of Bowie State University; Patricia Digh, co-founder of the Global Diversity Roundtable and the Circle Project; and Laura Skandera Trombley, president of Pitzer College, discussed the issue and what can be done to diversify colleges' executive suites. Following is an excerpt of their answers to questions from the session's moderator, Sara Hebel, a senior reporter at The Chronicle, and from members of the audience.
Hebel: How much attention should institutions be paying to the issue of diversity among their top administrators? What can colleges do to hire and promote a wider range of top officials?
Trombley: Diversity has to be a goal of the board of trustees and viewed as a core value of the institution; otherwise, it will always remain on the margins. No one group should serve as an institution's symbol of diversity. It cannot be students; it cannot be staff; it cannot be faculty. Efforts to increase diversity have to involve everyone.
Trustees must support diversity initiatives, do outreach, and emphasize when they are conducting presidential searches that not only are they interested in a diverse pool of candidates, but also that the institution is ready for that diverse pool of candidates. I have been a candidate where it was clear that I was the "diversity candidate," and everyone was thrilled that their institution was so forward-thinking. But, in my view, if I was such a big surprise, that indicated that more foundational work needed to take place at that institution. Colleges can accomplish that by asking diversity experts to come in and help educate various groups on their campuses.
It is also important to have good institutional data. At Pitzer College, we know, for example, that 45 percent of the faculty members are women and 36 percent are people of color, and that 32 percent of the students are students of color. We have an institutional-research Web site that provides all that information, and that forms the basis for our discussions.
Hebel: What steps do leaders need to take to make sure that diversity is something that their campuses focus on?
Burnim: I agree that trustee leadership is critically important on campuses, that board members set a tone. To create the right climate or culture, a president must first articulate the value and the importance of having a diverse campus — of having diversity not just within the student body and the faculty ranks, but within the administration as well. Second, the president must walk the walk and make sure that the cabinet and senior leadership are diverse. What one does speaks a lot louder than what one says.
For example, at Bowie State University, we have spent a lot of time refining the strategic plan. Before we finalize that process, I want to make sure that we explicitly address the notion of diversity and what that means for our campus, and that we have some measurable objectives against which to gauge our progress. We need to put the right accountability measures and standards in place. We must also provide adequate resources, and recognize and reward behaviors that help us reach the outcomes that we want.
Hebel: Ms. Digh, you have described the lack of diversity in university leadership as a "wicked problem" for which simplistic or short-term solutions will not work.
Digh: The phrase "wicked problems and tame solutions" has come out of looking at diversity issues for about two decades and recognizing lately that I have made the mistake of proposing easy solutions to very complex problems. Racism in this country is a wicked problem. It is attached to a lot of other societal problems, so it is very difficult to say, "If I do A and B, then racism will disappear."
Americans like short-term, quick, linear solutions to issues like diversity or racism, which are long-term, complex issues that don't necessarily have solutions. Every wicked problem is unique. The lessons learned dealing with a wicked problem at one institution are not necessarily ones that can be easily transferred to others. What's more, wicked problems are often solved as well as they can be through group efforts. So you must constantly ask yourselves when you are in a strategic-planning process, for example, who else should be at this table? Are all the people in the room thinking just like me? Do we need different voices?
The easy way of trying to tame a wicked problem is to simply construct a definition of the problem that obscures its wicked nature and then apply linear methods to solve it. For example, a human-resources person called me to say, "We had some white employees put nooses on black employees' lockers. Could you come help us with this issue? We are wondering if you could conduct a two-hour workshop."
But such tame solutions, when they are imposed on wicked problems, exacerbate the situation by hiding the fact that it was wicked to begin with. If you have an issue on your campus and do a two-hour workshop on it, you might keep the trustees happy but actually make the situation worse.
Instead, we should make ourselves step back from our innate impulse to tidiness and ask, "Have I engaged fully in what the problem is? Do I understand the complexity of it?" And, like a Rubik's Cube, "if I change one thing or solve one part of it, will the other parts change?"
Hebel: How can colleges effectively set benchmarks and move forward in a concrete way?
Trombley: When we went through our strategic-planning process, we talked about what we wanted to see happen at the institution in five years and the areas where we had the greatest concern. Because Pitzer is a small college, we were able to come together and have an enormous amount of discussion — among large and small groups, in residence halls and elsewhere — and come up with common goals that we adopted as part of a strategic plan. I cannot overemphasize the importance of having a dialogue on a continuing basis; it cannot occur only during times of crisis. A lot of the best work happens when you are building relationships and channels of communication so that, if an issue does arise, you can work through it constructively.
Hebel: How do you foster discussions when people hold different views about diversifying the top ranks of the institution?
Burnim: It is not hard to engage in a discussion on campuses. We are intellectual communities, so whether it is a forum, a convocation at the beginning of an academic term, or commencement, I take the opportunity to teach a lesson or raise a question or issue. That continuing dialogue can take place throughout the campus and the academic year.
[To read the entire article, go to: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i05/05b04801.htm?=attw ]
Diversity in Academe
From the issue dated September 28, 2007
Although the American population is growing more diverse, and colleges are seeking to enroll students and hire faculty members from many different backgrounds, the top leadership at most higher-education institutions remains quite homogeneous. For example, a 2005 Chronicle survey of about 1,300 presidents at four-year institutions, of whom 764 responded, found that nearly 89 percent were white and almost 81 percent were male.
At The Chronicle's second annual Presidents Forum, held in Washington in June, Mickey L. Burnim, president of Bowie State University; Patricia Digh, co-founder of the Global Diversity Roundtable and the Circle Project; and Laura Skandera Trombley, president of Pitzer College, discussed the issue and what can be done to diversify colleges' executive suites. Following is an excerpt of their answers to questions from the session's moderator, Sara Hebel, a senior reporter at The Chronicle, and from members of the audience.
Hebel: How much attention should institutions be paying to the issue of diversity among their top administrators? What can colleges do to hire and promote a wider range of top officials?
Trombley: Diversity has to be a goal of the board of trustees and viewed as a core value of the institution; otherwise, it will always remain on the margins. No one group should serve as an institution's symbol of diversity. It cannot be students; it cannot be staff; it cannot be faculty. Efforts to increase diversity have to involve everyone.
Trustees must support diversity initiatives, do outreach, and emphasize when they are conducting presidential searches that not only are they interested in a diverse pool of candidates, but also that the institution is ready for that diverse pool of candidates. I have been a candidate where it was clear that I was the "diversity candidate," and everyone was thrilled that their institution was so forward-thinking. But, in my view, if I was such a big surprise, that indicated that more foundational work needed to take place at that institution. Colleges can accomplish that by asking diversity experts to come in and help educate various groups on their campuses.
It is also important to have good institutional data. At Pitzer College, we know, for example, that 45 percent of the faculty members are women and 36 percent are people of color, and that 32 percent of the students are students of color. We have an institutional-research Web site that provides all that information, and that forms the basis for our discussions.
Hebel: What steps do leaders need to take to make sure that diversity is something that their campuses focus on?
Burnim: I agree that trustee leadership is critically important on campuses, that board members set a tone. To create the right climate or culture, a president must first articulate the value and the importance of having a diverse campus — of having diversity not just within the student body and the faculty ranks, but within the administration as well. Second, the president must walk the walk and make sure that the cabinet and senior leadership are diverse. What one does speaks a lot louder than what one says.
For example, at Bowie State University, we have spent a lot of time refining the strategic plan. Before we finalize that process, I want to make sure that we explicitly address the notion of diversity and what that means for our campus, and that we have some measurable objectives against which to gauge our progress. We need to put the right accountability measures and standards in place. We must also provide adequate resources, and recognize and reward behaviors that help us reach the outcomes that we want.
Hebel: Ms. Digh, you have described the lack of diversity in university leadership as a "wicked problem" for which simplistic or short-term solutions will not work.
Digh: The phrase "wicked problems and tame solutions" has come out of looking at diversity issues for about two decades and recognizing lately that I have made the mistake of proposing easy solutions to very complex problems. Racism in this country is a wicked problem. It is attached to a lot of other societal problems, so it is very difficult to say, "If I do A and B, then racism will disappear."
Americans like short-term, quick, linear solutions to issues like diversity or racism, which are long-term, complex issues that don't necessarily have solutions. Every wicked problem is unique. The lessons learned dealing with a wicked problem at one institution are not necessarily ones that can be easily transferred to others. What's more, wicked problems are often solved as well as they can be through group efforts. So you must constantly ask yourselves when you are in a strategic-planning process, for example, who else should be at this table? Are all the people in the room thinking just like me? Do we need different voices?
The easy way of trying to tame a wicked problem is to simply construct a definition of the problem that obscures its wicked nature and then apply linear methods to solve it. For example, a human-resources person called me to say, "We had some white employees put nooses on black employees' lockers. Could you come help us with this issue? We are wondering if you could conduct a two-hour workshop."
But such tame solutions, when they are imposed on wicked problems, exacerbate the situation by hiding the fact that it was wicked to begin with. If you have an issue on your campus and do a two-hour workshop on it, you might keep the trustees happy but actually make the situation worse.
Instead, we should make ourselves step back from our innate impulse to tidiness and ask, "Have I engaged fully in what the problem is? Do I understand the complexity of it?" And, like a Rubik's Cube, "if I change one thing or solve one part of it, will the other parts change?"
Hebel: How can colleges effectively set benchmarks and move forward in a concrete way?
Trombley: When we went through our strategic-planning process, we talked about what we wanted to see happen at the institution in five years and the areas where we had the greatest concern. Because Pitzer is a small college, we were able to come together and have an enormous amount of discussion — among large and small groups, in residence halls and elsewhere — and come up with common goals that we adopted as part of a strategic plan. I cannot overemphasize the importance of having a dialogue on a continuing basis; it cannot occur only during times of crisis. A lot of the best work happens when you are building relationships and channels of communication so that, if an issue does arise, you can work through it constructively.
Hebel: How do you foster discussions when people hold different views about diversifying the top ranks of the institution?
Burnim: It is not hard to engage in a discussion on campuses. We are intellectual communities, so whether it is a forum, a convocation at the beginning of an academic term, or commencement, I take the opportunity to teach a lesson or raise a question or issue. That continuing dialogue can take place throughout the campus and the academic year.
[To read the entire article, go to: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i05/05b04801.htm?=attw ]
The New Affirmative Action
The New York Times
September 30, 2007
Application
By DAVID LEONHARDT
In another time, it wouldn’t have been too hard to guess where Frances Harris would have ended up going to college. She has managed to do very well in very difficult circumstances, and she is African-American. Her high school, in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, was shut down as an irremediable failure the spring before her freshman year, then reopened months later as a charter school. Midway through high school, her father developed heart problems and became an irritable fixture around the home. She also discovered that he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy who, when her mother took Harris to see him, simply said his name was George and waited for her to leave. In Harris’s senior year, her mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for bankruptcy.
Harris somehow stayed focused on teenage life. She earned an A-minus average and she distinguished herself as a debater. Her basketball teammates sometimes teased her for using big words, but they also elected her co-captain. As she led me on a tour of her school and her neighborhood one day this summer, she introduced me around with an assured ease that most adults can’t manage, even if her sentences are peppered with “like,” “you know” and “Oh, my God.” Her bedroom in the bungalow she shares with her parents is a masterpiece of teenage energy, the walls covered with her prom-queen tiara, her purple-and-white basketball jersey (No. 3) and photos of her friends. “The hardest part of high school,” she says, “was to be smart and cool at the same time.” She decided her dream college was the University of California, Los Angeles.
Ten or 20 years ago, Frances Harris almost certainly would have been admitted. Her excellent grades might not have even been necessary, because Berkeley and U.C.L.A. — the jewels in the U.C. system — accepted almost all of the African-Americans who met the basic application requirements. To an admissions officer, Harris would have seemed like gold: diversity and achievement, wrapped up in a single kid.
But in the early 1990s, the elite campuses began to pull back from their aggressive affirmative-action policies, and in 1996, California voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, also known as Proposition 209. After that, race could no longer be a factor in government hiring or public-university admissions. The number of black students at both Berkeley and U.C.L.A. plummeted, and at U.C.L.A. the declines continued throughout the next decade. The reasons weren’t entirely clear, but they seemed to include some combination of the admissions office taking Proposition 209 to heart and black students falling further behind in the academic arms race. (Harris, for instance, scored a 22 on the ACT test — slightly above the national average and well below the U.C.L.A. average.) The changes on U.C.L.A.’s campus were hard to miss. In 1997, the freshman class included 221 black students; last fall it had only 100. In the region with easily the largest black population west of the Mississippi River, the top public university had a freshman class in which barely 1 in 50 students was black.
A U.C.L.A. graduate named Peter Taylor, a 49-year-old managing director at Lehman Brothers in Los Angeles, remembers picking up The Los Angeles Times outside his house on a Saturday morning in June of last year and reading that piece of news. Taylor, who is black, is a third-generation native of the city and one of U.C.L.A.’s most active alumni. Within days of reading about the latest decline in the number of black students, he began a campaign to reverse it. At a reception to honor U.C.L.A.’s new acting chancellor, a law professor named Norm Abrams, he greeted Abrams with a big smile and said, “Well, Norm, you’re stepping right into it, and you’ve got to deal with it.” Abrams soon named Taylor to lead a task force of students, faculty, alumni and outsiders from places like the Urban League and the First A.M.E. Church. It spent the next year trying to get more black students to apply, more black applicants to be admitted and more black admits to enroll. In essence, Taylor’s group was trying to figure out how to bring a student like Frances Harris to U.C.L.A. without breaking the law — or at least without getting caught. What they have achieved may well show us the future of affirmative action.
Peter Taylor’s office on the 25th floor of the MGM Building in Century City looks out over the Fox movie lot and a golf course; in the distance downtown Los Angeles rises. Taylor has lived in an artsy neighborhood of Los Angeles called Silver Lake since he was a child. In the aftermath of the Watts riots, his father, then a school administrator and one of the few black men to hold such a job, became the principal of Locke High School in South-Central Los Angeles. Taylor himself went on from U.C.L.A. to earn a master’s degree in public policy and work for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign before joining Lehman Brothers. When we were talking in his office, he apologetically interrupted our conversation and spent 10 minutes on the phone trying to persuade the person on the other end not to make any changes in a coming bond offering. There was, he kept saying, no point in doing something that might upset the market. But Taylor’s cautious, corporate style can be deceiving. He doesn’t mind a good fight. “Prop. 209 has made things more challenging,” he said. “It has created a new paradigm. But there are still things that can be done.” I asked him whether those things might include civil disobedience, and Taylor surprised me by replying: “Exactly when you cross over into civil disobedience is not always clear. And I probably come down on the side of pushing the outer limits. I’m much more of the attitude of, ‘So what if someone sues?’ If you lose, you at least define the line a little more clearly. You say, ‘Mea culpa,’ and you don’t do it anymore.”
The heart of California’s higher-education problem, according to Taylor, is that Proposition 209 created a patently impossible situation. The law says that universities can’t consider race, even though race has an enormous effect on the lives of applicants. California’s best high schools offer so many A.P. and honors classes — which confer bonus points on a student’s G.P.A. — that the average G.P.A. of white and Asian freshmen at U.C.L.A. is now 4.2. At many of the largely black high schools around Los Angeles, it is sometimes impossible to do much better than a 4.0, because of the relative lack of A.P. classes. Black students at better high schools have a much easier time, but it’s not as if they are keeping up with their peers. Even if U.C.L.A. tried to get around Proposition 209 by giving a big leg up to low-income applicants, it wouldn’t increase its black population very much. At every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the academic record of black students is worse than that of other groups. As Taylor says: “There is a great deal of pressure to look for a proxy for race. There is no proxy for race.”
He and many other defenders of affirmative action consider this to be a self-evident fact, but there has also been a good deal of social science to support the view that the specific problems surrounding race — including discrimination — endure.
[To read the entire article, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30affirmative-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all]
September 30, 2007
Application
By DAVID LEONHARDT
In another time, it wouldn’t have been too hard to guess where Frances Harris would have ended up going to college. She has managed to do very well in very difficult circumstances, and she is African-American. Her high school, in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, was shut down as an irremediable failure the spring before her freshman year, then reopened months later as a charter school. Midway through high school, her father developed heart problems and became an irritable fixture around the home. She also discovered that he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy who, when her mother took Harris to see him, simply said his name was George and waited for her to leave. In Harris’s senior year, her mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for bankruptcy.
Harris somehow stayed focused on teenage life. She earned an A-minus average and she distinguished herself as a debater. Her basketball teammates sometimes teased her for using big words, but they also elected her co-captain. As she led me on a tour of her school and her neighborhood one day this summer, she introduced me around with an assured ease that most adults can’t manage, even if her sentences are peppered with “like,” “you know” and “Oh, my God.” Her bedroom in the bungalow she shares with her parents is a masterpiece of teenage energy, the walls covered with her prom-queen tiara, her purple-and-white basketball jersey (No. 3) and photos of her friends. “The hardest part of high school,” she says, “was to be smart and cool at the same time.” She decided her dream college was the University of California, Los Angeles.
Ten or 20 years ago, Frances Harris almost certainly would have been admitted. Her excellent grades might not have even been necessary, because Berkeley and U.C.L.A. — the jewels in the U.C. system — accepted almost all of the African-Americans who met the basic application requirements. To an admissions officer, Harris would have seemed like gold: diversity and achievement, wrapped up in a single kid.
But in the early 1990s, the elite campuses began to pull back from their aggressive affirmative-action policies, and in 1996, California voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, also known as Proposition 209. After that, race could no longer be a factor in government hiring or public-university admissions. The number of black students at both Berkeley and U.C.L.A. plummeted, and at U.C.L.A. the declines continued throughout the next decade. The reasons weren’t entirely clear, but they seemed to include some combination of the admissions office taking Proposition 209 to heart and black students falling further behind in the academic arms race. (Harris, for instance, scored a 22 on the ACT test — slightly above the national average and well below the U.C.L.A. average.) The changes on U.C.L.A.’s campus were hard to miss. In 1997, the freshman class included 221 black students; last fall it had only 100. In the region with easily the largest black population west of the Mississippi River, the top public university had a freshman class in which barely 1 in 50 students was black.
A U.C.L.A. graduate named Peter Taylor, a 49-year-old managing director at Lehman Brothers in Los Angeles, remembers picking up The Los Angeles Times outside his house on a Saturday morning in June of last year and reading that piece of news. Taylor, who is black, is a third-generation native of the city and one of U.C.L.A.’s most active alumni. Within days of reading about the latest decline in the number of black students, he began a campaign to reverse it. At a reception to honor U.C.L.A.’s new acting chancellor, a law professor named Norm Abrams, he greeted Abrams with a big smile and said, “Well, Norm, you’re stepping right into it, and you’ve got to deal with it.” Abrams soon named Taylor to lead a task force of students, faculty, alumni and outsiders from places like the Urban League and the First A.M.E. Church. It spent the next year trying to get more black students to apply, more black applicants to be admitted and more black admits to enroll. In essence, Taylor’s group was trying to figure out how to bring a student like Frances Harris to U.C.L.A. without breaking the law — or at least without getting caught. What they have achieved may well show us the future of affirmative action.
Peter Taylor’s office on the 25th floor of the MGM Building in Century City looks out over the Fox movie lot and a golf course; in the distance downtown Los Angeles rises. Taylor has lived in an artsy neighborhood of Los Angeles called Silver Lake since he was a child. In the aftermath of the Watts riots, his father, then a school administrator and one of the few black men to hold such a job, became the principal of Locke High School in South-Central Los Angeles. Taylor himself went on from U.C.L.A. to earn a master’s degree in public policy and work for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign before joining Lehman Brothers. When we were talking in his office, he apologetically interrupted our conversation and spent 10 minutes on the phone trying to persuade the person on the other end not to make any changes in a coming bond offering. There was, he kept saying, no point in doing something that might upset the market. But Taylor’s cautious, corporate style can be deceiving. He doesn’t mind a good fight. “Prop. 209 has made things more challenging,” he said. “It has created a new paradigm. But there are still things that can be done.” I asked him whether those things might include civil disobedience, and Taylor surprised me by replying: “Exactly when you cross over into civil disobedience is not always clear. And I probably come down on the side of pushing the outer limits. I’m much more of the attitude of, ‘So what if someone sues?’ If you lose, you at least define the line a little more clearly. You say, ‘Mea culpa,’ and you don’t do it anymore.”
The heart of California’s higher-education problem, according to Taylor, is that Proposition 209 created a patently impossible situation. The law says that universities can’t consider race, even though race has an enormous effect on the lives of applicants. California’s best high schools offer so many A.P. and honors classes — which confer bonus points on a student’s G.P.A. — that the average G.P.A. of white and Asian freshmen at U.C.L.A. is now 4.2. At many of the largely black high schools around Los Angeles, it is sometimes impossible to do much better than a 4.0, because of the relative lack of A.P. classes. Black students at better high schools have a much easier time, but it’s not as if they are keeping up with their peers. Even if U.C.L.A. tried to get around Proposition 209 by giving a big leg up to low-income applicants, it wouldn’t increase its black population very much. At every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the academic record of black students is worse than that of other groups. As Taylor says: “There is a great deal of pressure to look for a proxy for race. There is no proxy for race.”
He and many other defenders of affirmative action consider this to be a self-evident fact, but there has also been a good deal of social science to support the view that the specific problems surrounding race — including discrimination — endure.
[To read the entire article, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30affirmative-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all]
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