RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/state-percent-plans-college-admissions-race-affirmative-action

In her 2024 State of the State address, Governor Kathy Hochul announced the “Top 10% Promise.” The policy guarantees New York high school seniors ranked in the top 10 percent of their class direct admission to the State University of New York system.

The initiative, introduced in response to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on affirmative action in college admissions, is hardly novel. Since 1996, several states have adopted similar “percent plans”—policies that grant automatic admission to public universities based on class rank rather than test scores—in response to bans on racial preferences. But as I show in a new Manhattan Institute issue brief, these plans often fall short, both in advancing racial diversity and in boosting academic outcomes for the students they aim to help.

Consider Texas, which pioneered the “percent plan” model. In 1992, a white woman named Cheryl Hopwood was denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law. At the time, the school based admissions primarily on the “Texas Index,” a composite score combining undergraduate GPA and LSAT results. That year, black and Hispanic applicants needed a TI of at least 189 for admission, while white and “non-preferred minority” applicants needed a minimum score of 199. Hopwood, who earned a TI of 199, sued the law school for racial discrimination.

The United States District Court for the Western District of Texas heard the case and sided with the law school. But Hopwood appealed, and in 1996, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s decision. “The law school presented no compelling justification, under the Fourteenth Amendment or Supreme Court precedent, that allows it to continue to elevate some races over others,” it held. At the time, the Fifth Circuit’s ruling was binding, and it invalidated the use of affirmative action in Texas’s public universities.

Texas Democrats feared that, without racial preferences, the number of black and Hispanic students enrolled in the state university system would plummet. So, led by state representative Irma Rangel, they proposed a supposedly race-neutral alternative to affirmative action: the “Top 10% Plan.” Rangel’s plan guaranteed all Texas seniors ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school class direct admission to the state university of their choice, regardless of race or ethnicity. For this reason, Democratic lawmakers understood the policy to be an alternative to affirmative action.

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As someone who has been writing about education issues for years, I have noticed that disinformation, misinformation, and all-around twaddle are now more ubiquitous than ever. I will cover three areas here.

Massive teacher layoffs

Various online articles report that “massive teacher layoffs” —notably in California— are “devastating, chaotic, and detrimental” to student learning conditions.” While some layoffs include other employees, including librarians and nurses, most cuts are to teachers.

Most of the hysterics don’t acknowledge that many districts are over-staffed due in part to the expiring $190 billion federal Covid relief funds. Also, a major contributor to the need for fewer teachers in California is that while there were 6.3 million students in 2006-2007, now just 5.8 million are enrolled, and the state projects that number to fall to 5.3 million by 2031.

Looking at the bigger picture, researcher Chad Aldeman reports that in the 2023-24 school year, public schools nationwide added 121,000 employees, hitting a record high, even though enrollment dropped by 110,000. He discloses that about one-third of these districts added teachers while serving fewer students. For instance, Philadelphia lost nearly 16,000 students but employed 200 more teachers, dropping its student-to-teacher ratio from about 17:1 to under 15:1.

Aldeman writes that about a quarter of all districts followed the path of California’s Capistrano Unified School District, which lowered its teaching force over time but not as fast as it lost students. Capistrano suffered a “22% decline in student enrollment but reduced its teaching staff by just 7%.”

It’s worth noting that in most of the country, where teacher union contracts are in play, layoffs are made based on seniority, not teacher quality. Hence, students suffer not because of fewer teachers but rather fewer good ones.