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

Washington Monthly, March, 1998 by Robert Worth

But on Saturday mornings a bright yellow school bus stops in front of the front doors at MLK and picks up about a dozen students to drive them over the Bay Bridge to Berkeley. They step off the bus into an immaculate world of plazas and fountains, and walk into the Bechtel Engineering Building. There they are met by two or three cheerful Berkeley undergraduates who will tutor them in math and science and assure them that they too, if they work hard enough, can go to college.

"It is not an exaggeration to say the process of selection of who will go to college begins in the first grade," declared University of California Chancellor Robert Berdahl at a press conference in January. "With each passing year, students denied equal access to challenging classes and ultimately to college-prep courses see their chances of college admission decline." The remedy, Berdahl added, lay in a redoubled outreach effort for poor and "underrepresented" students at schools like MLK, all the way from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Ironically, this sudden hunger for equal opportunity grew directly from what most California liberal saw as a disaster: the UC regents' 1995 decision to ban the use of race and gender in hiring and admissions. The deans at Berkeley had spent the previous decade crafting a multiculturalist paradise by cutting the percentage of white undergrads in half and swelling the size of the Asian, Latino, and black presences on campus. Almost half of every freshman class was judged on race and ethnicity as well as merit -- a process they defended in the name of diversity rather than past injustices. Now their treasured rainbow was about to wash away, or so it seemed, unless they could find a solution before the new rules kicked in for the entering class of 1998.

Their answer has been to unleash an army of tutors -- both faculty and undergraduates -- on local public schools. "What were really doing is opening up a whole new range of interactions between campuses and schools," says Karl Pister, a UC emeritus professor who is overseeing the new plan. "You often hear people talk about the educational continuum, but there really hasn't been one. Now we're trying to give some substance to that myth."

You can smell the hype, but beneath it is a real ferment of ideas about reaching out to low-income students. UC San Diego is actually building a charter school right on campus, designed to boost under-performing children from poor families into the UC system. The school staff will include undergraduate tutors who will get "public service" credit for their teaching. "This is not about lowering the gates," says Cecil Lytle, the UCSD provost who introduced the idea. "Affirmative action has not elevated the academic achievement of minority youngsters, and that's what we'd like to do with this program." Lytle wants other campuses, at UC and around the country, to follow suit. "Every major city has four or five major universities right in the hood," he says. "They're already providing expertise for agriculture, law, medicine. Why not use them to improve the schools?"