Beyond racial preferences: a handful of programs are showing that there is life after affirmative action

Washington Monthly, March, 1998 by Robert Worth

Maybe so, but the school board isn't counting on it. Boston Latin headmaster Michael Contompasis is putting his hopes into what he calls "academic boot camps" held during the summer between 5th and 6th grade, with another week of preparation at the start of the school year, just before the kids take the entrance exam for Boston's three magnet schools. The program runs three hours a day, four days a week through the month of July and part of August. Like USMAPS, it attacks the fundamentals -- English and math -- and is openly geared towards improving scores.

"We're working under the assumption that all set-asides will be removed," says Mike Danziger, who runs a nonprofit that is working with Boston Latin on a supplementary boot camp that will start running at another local school this summer. "But we're not an affirmative action program; we're open to all kids who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity."

For many of these kids the most important step is just finding someone -- anyone -- who can point them in the right direction. "There are lots of smart kids in the public schools who just don't have any idea they could go to college" says Joel Vargas, the son of poor Mexican and Chinese immigrants and now a doctoral student at Harvard. Vargas was get his As at his local public school when a teacher told him about Summerbridge, a nonprofit that seeks out children from low-income families, puts them through tough after-school programs, and guides them through the bewildering process of applying to competitive schools. hi the end, Vargas got a scholarship to a private school, but even afterward, "I needed to be pushed -- there were some real gaps in my education. It was a slap in the face to see how far behind I was and how unfair the system was."

For kids who don't have the good luck to get a scholarship to a private school, as Vargas did, the system is even less fair. "To get an education, our kids have to go to one of the exam schools," says Boston School Committee Chairman Liz Reilinger. With only three exam schools and a student population of over 63,000, the odds for success are pretty bad. "What makes this unique is that you have a different responsibility at this level," says Contompasis. "Students at the University of Texas law school [where another landmark preference program was struck down] are going to get in someplace. The question for us is, how are we going to get kids into the pipeline to go to college at all? There is it a level playing field."

Not by a long shot. Boston Latin's students go on to the nations best universities, while half of the city's public school kids would currently fail the states new minimum graduation requirements. Eighty percent of those kids are minorities, and 85 percent of them are poor enough to quality for the free lunch program. Clearly, there's a need for programs that would do more than shoehorn a few bright kids into an exam school.

The End of the Rainbow Coalition

Most of the students at San Francisco's Martin Luther King Middle School live in Hunter's Point, a neighborhood that is dirt-poor, crime-ridden, and literally toxic: The air reeks with deadly fumes from an old Navy yard dumping-site Many of them come from what headmaster James Taylor calls "very impacted backgrounds, like what you would see on a TV special about crime in America." So many of their parents are addicts or abusive or just plain absent, that lately Taylor has begun arranging for some of them to live at the homes of staff members, where they will at least be safe and able to do their homework.