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Massachusetts, home of the ultra-liberal Kennedy dynasty, is also home to some of the worst reverse discrimination and racial quotas in schools, colleges, and universities! |
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entire list, or pick a topic area: Massachusetts, General Ed Quota News: Affirmative action backlash tests colleges (07/30/00) [Boston Globe] "With an upcoming courtroom showdown and a presidential election raising the stakes, affirmative action at state universities across the nation has reached a turning point, as a growing number of colleges gut or abolish boosts given to minority applicants, particularly blacks and Hispanics. "For the first time since affirmative action became widespread, freshmen planning to attend the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Virginia this fall were not admitted under policies that college officials acknowledge heavily benefited some minority students with mediocre grades or test scores. "This month, Florida's 10 public universities officially stopped using preferences in admissions. Instead, they are taking all applicants ranked in the top 20 percent of state high schools - a policy that relies on schools that are largely black or Hispanic to guarantee pools of minority students. For example, for a mainly Hispanic high school with 200 seniors, the top 20 percent policy would guarantee admission to 40 students, many of whom would probably be Hispanic. "Still, preference policies have also been watered down because of legal threats such as one that rocked the University of Georgia on Monday, when a federal judge declared its affirmative action policy unconstitutional. "In language that reverberated throughout higher education, US District Judge B. Avant Edenfield overruled a 22-year-old legal precedent used by the college to defend affirmative action. The desire for campus diversity, he said, was not important enough to justify favoring minority students because of their race. ''To base racial preferences upon an amorphous, unquantifiable, and temporally unlimited goal is to engage in naked racial balancing,'' Edenfield wrote. "Although officials at many selective universities acknowledge that some minority students have weaker academic records than some white students who were rejected, they say the need for diversity justifies the school policies. "Also driving the changes were the election of governors in California, Virginia, Texas, and Florida who opposed affirmative action programs. From that political environment emerged new college trustees who saw racial preferences as discriminatory against white students, and changed the policies in spite of campus protests. Meanwhile, some voters have voiced their opposition to affirmative action, with California banning the policy in 1996 and Washington State approving a similar ban in 1998.
"The fate of affirmative action on campus, many agree, will sooner or later be in the
hands of the US Supreme Court. Partisans on both sides of the issue see the election of
the next president as critical: the appointment of new justices could sway whether race
matters when future college admissions are decided." (Boston Globe 07/30/00 by
Patrick Healy)
Mass: "Controversy and confusion could percolate in about 21 school districts this year as the constitutionality of a state law requiring schools to be racially balanced is challenged. "A successful bid this summer to end race-based student assignment in Boston and a federal court movement against any public affirmative action program is forcing the state to take a look at the 34-year-old law that orders public school districts to avoid having any school become more than 50 percent minority. "Under the statute, there is great incentive for districts to racially balance their student populations: They get funding for new school construction more quickly and they get more of it.
"... [S]ome school officials have charged districts with artificially forcing
minority percentages up to get the higher reimbursement." Boston Globe 08/29/99
page B6 by Beth Daley)
Commentary: "A student from UMass has sent Adversity.Net the following official description of UMass' special program titled "CCEBMS, Committee for the Collegiate Education of Black and other Minority Students." The UMass policy reads, in part: "CCEBMS promotes the recruitment, retention, and graduation of students of color. Its services include academic, personal, graduate school, and career counseling, free tutorials, and an intensive basic skills program called 'A Chance to Excel.'" The student submittor added this comment: "This statement seems to practically guarantee a degree for those who are not white. Free tutorials? Not for those who aren't the right skin color!" (Posted 06/30/99) - no link. Mass:
"Massachusetts has over 40,000 bilingual education students, and is one of only nine
states in the US to require bilingual education in all districts where there is a
sufficient number of students who are not proficient in English." "The
effectiveness of the state's bilingual policy was criticized in a 1996 Pioneer Institute
report ... (which) concluded 'Twenty-five years after passage of the bilingual education
law in Massachusetts, there is still no proof that (bilingual ed) works better than other
approaches such as intensive English instruction." (Mass News, posted 12/29/98) Mass:
Massachusetts' top educator, John Silber, says that Massachusetts' school racial quota
admissions are not discriminatory! Clearly Mr. Silber has not reviewed the
Constitution recently! (Associated Press, via Boston Globe 11/04/98). See
"Related Story", below.
Mass:
"Bilingual" (immigrant) students who have been in the Massachusettes education
system for three or more years cannot pass the required, standardized test on reading and
writing English! Mass. teachers have excused 58% of the state's
"bilingual" third graders from the required, standardized test. Why?
Because they can't pass it. Bilingual education at its worst. (Boston Globe
11/1/98) Mass (Amherst):
Discredited former black UMass administrator Randolph Bromery gets NYNEX to finance
anti-white, pro-minority scholarships. Bromery has been forced out of at least two
prior colleges for his racial views. (Adversity.Net special report 12/02/99)
Mass (Amherst): "Now that the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is scaling back its race-based admissions policies, it is time to examine the toll racial preferences have taken. The first casualty was truth. Just two years ago, a UMass-Amherst spokeswoman wrote on these pages, 'UMass-Amherst does not have race-based admissions or hiring policies or segregated dormitories.' "Even now, university officials continue to tell the Globe that minimum academic standards were always met and that preferences were small, used mainly to break ties. Would that it were so. In the fall of 1997, the Board of Higher Education standards for regular admission (slightly simplified here) required a very modest high school GPA of 2.75. The actual GPAs of entering first-year students averaged 3.12 for whites, 2.99 for Asians, 2.80 for Hispanics, and 2.53 for blacks. A limited number of applicants who fell below 2.75 could be accepted as 'special admits.' "UMass-Amherst will not release the racial breakdown of ''special admits'' by the BHE definition. But under its own closely related definition, ''special admits'' comprised 49 percent of black enrollees, 42 percent of Hispanics, 22 percent of Asians, and 2 percent of whites.
"Admission policies are but the tip of the iceberg; race-based policies permeate many
other aspects of campus life. The faculty hiring set-aside program instructs departments
to 'cast around for minority or female candidates,' but then warns against revealing
the program's race-and-gender restrictions to those candidates." (Boston Globe,
03/06/99, by Robert M. Costrell) Mass (Amherst): "In the wake of successful legal and political assaults on [racial quota admissions policies] in this state and nationally, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is issuing a pre-emptive strike: It will rely less on race and ethnicity in admitting students and awarding financial aid.
"The university announced yesterday that it will begin using household income and
other non-race factors as variables in choosing students - a decision that the university
acknowledges will result in a decrease in its minority student population. 'This is
an adjustment in light of the changing legal environment,' said Joseph Marshall, assistant
vice chancellor for enrollment services. 'It is clearly a sign of the times, nationally.'
He said the move will allow the university greater flexibility and will allow it to
shield itself from criticism and, perhaps, lawsuits claiming affirmative action by race or
ethnicity is a form of 'reverse racism.' " (Boston Globe 03/20/99, by Cindy
Rodriguez) Mass (Amherst): Memo from UMass Chancellor to Campus Community: "The University of Massachusetts is moving to modify some of its admissions and financial aid practices in light of changing legal views on affirmative action nation-wide, according to an announcement by Joe Marshall, assistant vice chancellor for enrollment services. Marshall said: "UMass Amherst has a long-standing commitment to diversity but we recognize that a new climate exists. We are looking at some short-term and some long-term approaches to dealing with the changing times." " 'In the past, especially after the Bakke case in California in the late 1970s, many universities used race as a significant factor to be considered in the admissions process in order to foster a more diverse student population', Marshall said. UMass followed this practice with a goal of recruiting an incoming first-year class of qualified students who reflect the diversity of graduating seniors from Massachusetts high schools. With the recent legal interpretations in mind, Marshall said, 'Now, when we consider which applicants to admit, we will use a much broader array of permissible criteria for achieving diversity. The same will hold true for certain scholarships, which, in the past, could be awarded mainly on race and ethnic criteria. We will broaden the definition of diversity for these scholarships," according to vice chancellor Joe Marshall. (Supplied by AADAP @ www.aadap.org) Mass (Amherst):
Mass (Amherst, U Mass.): "Chancellor David Scott said Monday the school has been forced to scale back its use of racial quotas in student admissions because of a changing legal environment and a failure to retain some of its minority students. The table below illustrates the kind of racially discriminatory admissions policies that Scott said the University is eliminating:
One student reacted to news of the reduction in racial preferences by telling the Chancellor "I'm insulted you won't mobilize an effort to stop this conservative, right-wing agenda"!
Chancellor Scott made his remarks Monday in Bartlett Auditorium before a crowd of
disgruntled students who made it clear they do not want to give up racial quotas.
When Scott finished speaking, it is reported that about two-thirds of the crowd filed out
of the auditorium singing "We Shall Overcome." (Based on Gazettenet.Com 04/06/99
by Steve Pfarrer) Mass (Boston): "Hundreds of parents and students rallied Feb. 10 at the 12th Baptist Church in Roxbury to send a strong message to those who rule Boston: A return to segregation under the slogan of "neighborhood schools" will not be tolerated. "The Boston School Committee, which is appointed by the mayor, has launched a process to "re-evaluate" its current plan that assigns students to schools. A task force has been appointed to conduct community meetings like one at the church to prepare for a new plan. "People in the community say they recognize this as a slick cover for the mayor's racist move to resegregate the schools. In the community news conference before the Feb. 10 task force meeting in Roxbury, African American City Councilor Chuck Turner made this clear. ... At the Feb. 10 meeting, parents from the Black and Latino communities made it clear they would not tolerate resegregation. They demanded an increase in the quality of all schools in Boston, reinstatement of Turner as chair of the City Council's education committee, discontinuation of racist standardized MCAS tests--and that parental choice in student assignment be continued and extended citywide so that students of color can get an equal, quality education at the school of their choice. "They condemned the task force process as a sham. And they told the task force and the School Superintendent Thomas Payzant that there is no basis for the community to trust in the School Committee given its continued failure to provide quality education to students of color. They said quality education for their children is a matter of survival -- and that they would "wage war" to get it and defend it. "Chuck Turner gave a concluding statement in which he acknowledged the efforts of the Boston school bus drivers' union for having helped to mobilize the hundreds of parents and students who attended. Union drivers distributed thousands of fliers to students on the school buses. Turner pointed out that while other, predominantly white, neighborhoods were calling for excluding children from quality education under the slogan "neighborhood schools," as Louise Day Hicks did, the Black community was calling for quality education in all schools and opposing limitation of choice. He spoke of the 1974 march against racism by 25,000 people in Boston to support the right of the African American community to equal quality education by whatever means it chose." Last known link: Boston, MA (public schools, Boston Latin) Mass (Boston): "A proposal by Boston schools chief Thomas Payzant to reserve half the seats in schools for neighborhood kids and open the other half to students throughout the city drew fire from education watchdogs yesterday. "The strongest criticism came from one of the architects of the city's ``controlled choice'' assignment plan, which was stripped of its racial components after the school system's long-standing [racial assignment] procedures were ruled unconstitutional. "Harvard University education professor Charles Willie slammed Payzant's plan as a return to segregated classrooms. He said Payzant's plan was ``not fair'' because it lacks measures to ensure schools are attended by children of all racial groups. ``To recommend a proximity preference without also recommending reinstatement of racial fairness guidelines that guarantee seats in all schools for all racial groups is to risk resegregating Boston public schools, since most Boston neighborhoods are racially imbalanced,'' Willie said, in a letter to the Boston School Committee. [A "proximity preference"? What the hell is that?] "Payzant's new proposal would allow as many students preference to nearby schools as possible, while leaving 50 percent of the seats available to students from across the district. The goal is to ensure a certain number of children can attend the schools near their homes, but also shield seats so students who live outside a particular school zone can still choose that site.
"As expected by Payzant, his plan to weigh school grades and entrance exam scores
equally in a race-neutral admissions process to the city's elite high schools also drew
fire." (Boston Herald 10/21/99 by Ed Hayward)
Mass (Boston): "Striking an uneasy compromise between neighborhood school advocates and those who want choice, Boston School Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant wants to reserve half of all seats in schools for neighborhood students and half for children who live in other parts of the city. [Editor’s Note: Payzant should be wary that such an assignment might be interpreted as a "proxy for racial assignments", especially if either half of his 50% policy turns out to predominantly benefit certain races.] "If the School Committee passes the proposal on Nov. 3, it will be the city's first student assignment policy in 25 years that does not use race to determine where children go to school. "Payzant, who will present the recommendations to the School Committee tonight, also will suggest that applicants to the city's three exam schools continue to be admitted on rank alone, although he wants to change the weight that grade-point averages and entrance test scores carry in determining that rank. [Editor’s Note: Again, Payzant needs to be cautious here. If his weighting of grade-point averages and entrance test scores turn out to primarily benefit certain races and genders, his actions may be interpreted by a future court as "proxies for race".]
"Parents and even longtime school advocates said yesterday that if the motion passes,
they probably won't know the impact of the recommendations until at least next year, and
probably longer. Still, last night, many said they are suspicious." (Boston
Globe page B01 10/20/99 by Beth Daley) Mass (Boston): "In a move widely seen as the end of an era, Boston school officials have decided that this coming school year will be the last in which they use race as a factor in determining where students go to school. "Facing pressure from a lawsuit by white parents and advocates of neighborhood schools, the city's school board voted 5-2 last month to adopt a race-blind admissions policy starting in September 2000. "The city has been using a "controlled choice" system of assigning students for the past decade, since shortly after a federal judge ended his supervision of a desegregation plan that had led to violent clashes over busing in the mid-1970s. "It was pretty clear that using race in student assignment was not going to withstand court scrutiny," Elizabeth Reilinger, the chairwoman of the school board, said last week. "We didn't think we had a viable case."
"Board members and Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant concluded that it was better to
switch than fight in part because of the generally dim view federal judges have taken of
race-based policies in recent years. And last fall, the district's long-running legal
battle to defend race-conscious admissions at the prestigious Boston Latin School ended in
failure when a federal appeals court struck down the policy." (Education Week,
08/04/99 edition, by Caroline Hendrie) Mass (Boston): BOSTON -- "In the most powerful symbol yet that the era of race-based busing is ending in America, the Boston School Committee voted on Wednesday night to drop race as a factor in deciding which school a child attends. The vote will effectively end in 2000 the last vestiges of the city's busing integration program, 25 years after its violent inception tarred Boston with a reputation for northern racism and school busing strife. "The committee's vote of 5 to 2 completed a neat historical circle: In 1974, it was a Federal judge who found that Boston's de facto school segregation discriminated against black children and ordered the busing. Wednesday night, the committee voted under pressure from a pending Federal lawsuit that argues that the current system discriminates against white children.
"City authorities who encouraged the vote to return to neighborhood schools said they
acted out of awareness that here and nationwide, affirmative action programs and other
school admissions systems that take race into account have lost again and again in recent
court challenges." (New York Times 07/15/99 by Carey Goldberg) Mass (Boston): "Twenty-five years to the day a federal judge ordered Boston to desegregate its public schools - leading to one of the most tumultuous and ugly chapters in the city's history - a group of parents yesterday asked a federal court to abandon the last remnants of the plan. "Saying four white students were unconstitutionally denied entrance to schools because of their race, the lawsuit asks the US District Court to throw out a decade-old policy that assigns students to schools based on choice and race. The plaintiffs want a race-neutral admissions policy in place by September. 'It is unfair for my son to be denied anything because of his race,' said Rose O'Toole, one of the five plaintiffs and a mother of a 4-year-old who she says was denied entrance to his choice of kindergarten because he was white. Boston's Children First, a pro-neighborhood school group, spearheaded the lawsuit and also is a plaintiff. "The lawsuit is filed after a three-year losing effort by Boston public schools to defend race-based admission policies at the system's top exam school [the infamous Boston Latin School case]. School officials argued that the educational value to a diverse student body is so great, a race-based policy is needed to ensure it.
"The US Supreme Court has yet to rule on race-based admissions policies in public
school cases, although several cases are in the pipeline and could eventually be chosen.
The nation's highest court already has ruled against using race in college-based
admissions and in awards for government contracts." (Boston Globe, 06/22/99, by
Beth Daley)
Mass (Boston): Adversity.Net (Horror Stories, Case 4, this site): The courts have repeatedly found the Boston Latin School guilty of reverse discrimination -- on YOUR tax dollars. Yet Boston Latin continued to deny white children entry to the school! Until the court ordered them to stop in November 1998! As of Feb. 5, 1999 Boston Latin has submitted to pressure from the NAACP and has dropped their appeal of the November decision to the Supreme Court. A victory for white school children in Boston; a defeat for white school children across the nation. (Continuously updated; most recently 06/24/99)
Mass (Boston): "The day after Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced a neighborhood school plan last week that would effectively end student busing in Boston, not one person came to a School Committee meeting to object. "A court case that could mean the dismantling of the entire student assignment system, which uses race as one of the factors in assigning students to city schools, was met with only tepid protests by a handful of minority leaders last month. "When a series of public hearings was held last year on possible changes in the student assignment policy, fewer than 10 parents attended each session.
"Busing is rapidly unraveling in Boston, but recent developments have failed to spark
the angry debates, the stormy protests, or unbridled passions that accompanied the
historic 1974 court ruling ordering Boston's schools to be integrated." (Boston
Globe, 01/19/99, by Beth Daley) Mass (Lowell, U Mass.):
"50 percent fewer will be admitted than in '98 "The number of blacks and Latinos
accepted to prestigious Lowell High School next fall has plummeted by 50 percent from fall
1998, raising serious questions about how to maintain diversity without using race in
admissions. At the same time, offers to Chinese American and white students has jumped
considerably, confirming predictions that Lowell, one of the top public schools in
California, will become increasingly white and Asian American." (San Francisco
Examiner, 03/16/99, by Julie Guthrie) (0file) Mass (Lowell, U Mass.):
"Lowell's admissions policy has been changed to create one cutoff for all
applicants, but for 20 percent of the class it takes into account other factors like
socioeconomic status and personal achievement." (New York Times 11/28/98) Lynn, MA (public schools, Lynn) Mass (Lynn): [Lynn, MA is a small town located North by North East from Boston, a few miles from the coast. Massachusetts liberal, pro-minority quota policies continue to invite lawsuits from parents of school children in this liberal state.] "Five families who filed suit against Lynn public schools' student assignment policy have been told their children can attend the schools of their choice, according to the lawyer who filed the suit. "However, attorney Chester Darling said he will not drop the lawsuit because the student assignment policy still is on the books and discriminates against students because of their race.
"The lawsuit, filed two weeks ago, seeks to force the city to stop using race when
assigning students to schools. Eventually, the plaintiffs want the state to throw out a
34-year-old desegregation law that allows schools to use race in assigning students to
school." (Boston Globe 09/10/99 page B6 by Beth Daley) Mass (Norton): Wheaton College is a small, liberal arts college located in Norton, Massachusetts about 30 miles or so south of Boston. They have employed many dubious "racial preferences" methods in their hiring of minority faculty. Were it not for race-based criteria, the odds that this college could hire so many black faculty in one year have been estimated at 1 in 1,000. Yet this tiny college "succeeded" in doing just that, and they are justifiably being criticized for using racial criteria in their hiring decisions. The original Chronicle of Higher Education headline reads as follows: "What Does It Mean When a College Hires 5 Black Scholars?" According to the Chronicle: "Wheaton says it shows determination and luck; critics wonder if race played too large a role. "In the highly competitive race to hire black faculty members, a small liberal-arts college in Massachusetts is out front this year. Despite having little money and a weak track record in minority hiring until now, Wheaton College has managed to sign up more black professors this spring than Harvard University. "Five of the 10 tenure-track professors who are set to join Wheaton this fall are black, compared with just two out of the two dozen new faces coming to Harvard so far. "How did Wheaton pull it off? That's a subject about which people at the college are proud but defensive. "Wheaton's president, Dale Rogers Marshall, is a social scientist with an expertise in race as it relates to urban politics. One of her priorities, she says, is making her faculty more closely resemble the face of the nation. "Our backgrounds shape our ideas," she says. "If everybody is an upper-class white male from Harvard, a whole bunch of ideas aren't going to emerge".... "Critics at Wheaton believe the college may have gone too far, creating special circumstances that helped academic departments lure black candidates. The sociology department offered a black woman a tenure-track job without conducting a national search, for example. And the English department invited only one candidate to a campus interview for its job in creative writing -- the African-American woman who eventually was hired. By comparison, two other departments that hired white candidates -- history, and physics and astronomy -- each interviewed four job prospects on the campus.... The Chronicle quotes Gerald Zuriff, a professor of psychology, as follows: "They've stuck in 'being a minority' as part of the criteria for being the best." Professor Zuriff was the most outspoken opponent of Wheaton's race-based hiring process this year. The Wheaton College economics department is illustrative of the race-based faculty hiring craze. According to the Chronicle, "Three African-American men were among the 15 people the department interviewed in January. And it ended up hiring two of them, even though it had originally had room for only one." The Chronicle report continues: "John A. Miller, who chairs the economics department, stayed up until 3 a.m. one morning working on a memorandum to persuade administrators to hire two economists instead of one. "I said, 'Here's an opportunity to get two wonderful people, both African-Americans,'" Mr. Miller recalls. Both the provost and the president of Wheaton College bought Miller's racial-quota rationale. Somewhat gratuitously, Mr. Miller described the fact that it worked out to hire both minority faculty "a miracle." Indeed. "But there was nothing supernatural about what happened, says Mr. Zuriff, the psychology professor who is among those who have questioned this year's hires. Departments hired so many African-American candidates, he says, because that was their chief goal. "Is it fair to other candidates when it really is not an open search?" he asks. "If you hired a white person through the old-boy network and didn't advertise, can you imagine what would happen?"
"Mr. Zuriff says that if all candidates were considered equally, the odds of the
English department hiring three African-Americans in a single year are 1 in 1,000. (He's
counting the two tenure-track hires and the graduate student from Brown.) In a letter he
wrote to the editor of the student newspaper, The Wheaton Wire, Mr. Zuriff asked:
"Does Professor Krebs [the chairwoman] expect us to believe that the hiring process
was truly unbiased?" (Chronicle of Higher Education, 06/09/00, by Robin
Wilson) Also visit Wheaton College's web site at http://www.wheatonma.edu/
END of Massachusetts - Racial Quotas in Education |
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