The Wrong Mile

Much has been made of the Supreme Court of the United States recently voting that the practice of Affirmative Action, at least as implemented in giving students from certain non-White backgrounds an advantage in admissions, is in violation of the United States' Constitution and (allegedly) it's founding principles. There has also been a fair amount of discussion of the partisan split in the vote, with the six Conservative justices voting that the practice is unconstitutional, and the three Liberal justices dissenting. (Although Republican and Democrat may be more accurate. While, theoretically, the justices of the Supreme Court are non-partisan, Presidents and Congress know what they are doing well enough that only a staunch partisan has any real chance of being seated. One may was well call a bowl a bowl.)

The varied and sundry commentary tends to completely ignore, or only briefly touch on, the broader issue at hand. Part of the Conservative majority's reasoning appears to be that racial preferences were never intended to a long-term solution. While one could argue that the circumstances leading up to the fact that certain groups of people were systematically kept out of selective (and many non-selective) colleges and universities in living memory were literally centuries in the making, the majority reasoned that surely they could be fixed in a couple of generations. And maybe they could have, if the correct remedies were put in place. And this is the shortcoming of the earlier efforts at affirmative action; the problem they were solving was not the correct one.

There is a widespread and quite popular idea that the United States is a meritocracy. Some people will dispute, and quite strenuously, any statement to the contrary. But what is "merit?" In college admissions, merit was commonly defined a combination of grades and scores on certain standardized tests. (At least, when sports isn't involved.) While this is often taken to be measuring a combination of academic rigor and willingness to apply oneself to one's studies, a lot of what is actually being measured is the quality of one's education. And because of the way in which the United States tends to fund education, all schools are not created equally. Equal protection under the law, has, generally speaking, not been considered to mean "equal access to quality in public goods." So while an aggrieved White or Asian student can have their case go all the way to the Supreme Court, students of any racial background, or their parents, who understand that their schools are under-resourced, and therefore deliver sub-standard educations, have no nationwide legal remedy. For that matter, they often lack local ones.

Because schools are often funded by the communities or municipalities wherein they reside, wealthy places have better schools. And better schools lead to better outcomes. Those better outcomes lead to greater wealth. Which leads to the ability to access better schools. And the opportunity hoarding that Affirmative Action was designed to dent continues. It's also worth noting that American housing policy, especially as concerns home loans, had been (and in some ways, still is) implemented, in some cases, intentionally, in ways that locked certain groups out of higher-income neighborhoods, even when they had the income to buy into them.

Colleges and universities were given the task of determining which students, whose scores wouldn't make the cut, would have been good enough had they had the same access to quality in education as their wealthier and higher-status counterparts. The Supreme Court voted that this last-mile intervention was inappropriate. But it doesn't now, and hasn't in the past, given accountability to anyone for fixing the tangle of historical problems that selectively set so many students back starting from the first mile of their education journeys.