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

Washington Monthly, March, 1998 by Robert Worth

In the meantime, a number of UC campuses are already running a number of programs for local school-children on campus. "We think we're the answer now," says Mike Aldaco, statewide director of the Math, Engineering, Science, and Achievement (MESA) program. "Essentially, the regents took away a tool for maintaining diversity, so the key for us now is working intensively with minority students at the precollege level, making sure they can clear the bar by a healthy margin." MESA arranges for buses to take children to the campus after school and on Saturday mornings, where an undergraduate or professor drills them on math and science. It's too soon to say what effects this will have in the long term, but Aldaco claims that 80 percent of the local minority kids in public schools who went through the MESA in its early years wound up in college, compared to virtually none of those who didn't.

But with over 500,000 public school students in the Bay area, there's a limit to what Berkeley -- or any UC campus, for that matter -- can do. "The university can't make up for the failure of the public school system," says Ryan Tate, a Berkeley senior who sat in on the UC Outreach Task Force, a 32-member panel charged with finding new ways to maintain student diversity without preferences. "They're trying so hard to make up for 209, but there's a real danger that they could try to do too much and spread themselves too thin."

And some education researchers are skeptical about what the current crop of programs can do for low-income students, particularly if they focus exclusively on remedial education. "Most programs for minority kids focus on weaknesses, and the kids never really become motivated to excel," says Uri Treisman, a mathematician who has taught at Berkeley and recently won a MacArthur Foundation grant for his own educational program work. "They may have the rhetoric of high intention, but no system to help achieve it. That's very dangerous."

One of the few programs that has proved consistently effective with high school children is Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID, which was founded in 1980 by a high school English teacher in San Diego named Mary Catherine Swanson. Swanson wanted to find a way to accommodate the torrent of poor, underprepared black and Hispanic students who were bussed into her school that year as part of a federal desegregation order. She knew the program would never work if minority students felt stigmatized by it, or saw it as a "nerdy" activity better suited to whites and Asians. She had to find a way to create a forum for intensive academic work that the whole school would respect.

Her solution was to bill the program as an elective offered during school hours rather than afterward, and to focus it on core subjects. The students involved would end up studying fewer subjects and knowing them much better. It was "not an affirmative action program," she says, though its prerequisites -- economic hardship, parents who didn't go to college, low (but not failing) grades -- landed her a majority of blacks and Hispanics. Four years in, the entire school showed a 35 percent gain in basic math skills, and a 46 percent gain in languages.