Private universities across the country are scrambling to respond to the ruling by Republican-appointed members of the Supreme Court that race cannot be used in making college admission decisions.
Some are describing the Republican court majority as conservative or ultra-conservative in making its ruling on Affirmative Action.
Reversing nearly 50 years of precedent, policies and procedures instituted by private institutions to diversity the racial compositions of their schools is anything but conservative.
But it is now the law of the land. So what now?
The first target of those seeking to promote diversity and fairness in the admission process is rightly preferences for legacy applicants whose parents or grandparents attended the school.
There is no evidence that legacy students are better qualified and those admitted under the preference are overwhelmingly white. Lawsuits have already been filed against the practice at Harvard University.
Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and president of Harvard, also called for colleges taking a hard look at admissions preferences for those who excel in “aristocrat sports” and “resist being impressed by those who have benefited from high-priced coaching through the admissions process.”
Summers also recommended the elimination of early decision and early admission options to make the process fairer for applicants from less sophisticated and less-advantaged families.
These suggestions would certainly be jarring to North Shore parents and students, who have greatly benefited from these practices. But they would make the system fairer.
The University of California Davis has come up with another approach to ensure diversity in its student body by increasing black enrollment – a socioeconomic scale.
The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education. Admission decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews.
This system answers one of Affirmative Action’s flaws – giving minority children of wealthy parents, particularly with Ivy League degrees, who attend prep school an advantage over poor kids from disadvantaged backgrounds with access only to substandard public schools.
Additional changes should also address another Affirmative Action flaw – the disadvantaging of Asian-American students – of whom there are many on the North Shore.
All of these proposals are intended to correct for what Justice Sonia Sotomayer called in her dissent “an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
But efforts to level the playing field in college admissions are actually downstream from where the problems for blacks and Latinos actually begin – in public schools.
In Nassau County and across the country, public schools are called the first step in leveling the playing field for children of all races. But, in fact, they do the exact opposite.
Thanks to a public school system primarily financed by property taxes, districts that are predominantly white or Asian spend far more per student than districts that are predominantly black or Latino.
This state-sanctioned system puts black and Latino students at a disadvantage from the get-go.
On the North Shore, spending per pupil is high but ranges dramatically from $47,627 in the North Shore School District to $27,00 in Herricks.
Next year, East Williston will spend $42,627 per pupil, Great Neck $40,000, Roslyn $39,344, Mineola $38,140, Manhasset $35,334 and Port Washington $34,571.
None of these districts’ black population is more than Roslyn’s 3.4%.
Hempstead School Disrtrict, which is predominantly black, spends $22,600 per pupil.
The high spending per pupil on the North Shore is intended to provide the best education and best support for getting children into the best colleges. Which leads to better-paying jobs once they graduate.
This advantage is the reason many people have moved to the North Shore.
Many North Shore parents will increase that advantage by providing their children with after-school tutoring, courses to improve scores on national tests and even writing application letters.
For a parent, doing everything they can to help their child be well prepared for college and to get into the best colleges is natural.
But these advantages tilt the playing in the favor of children living in affluent districts, which tend to be predominantly white and Asian, especially on Long Island,
Long Island is one of the most segregated suburbs in America where, as of 2019, half of the black population lived in just 11 of the island’s 291 communities and 90 percent lived in just 62 of them, according to 2017 census estimates.
This is not by accident.
The segregation seen on Long Island is the direct result of where roadways were built, the setting of boundaries for the 124 school districts, housing prices, and racial steering and blockbusting.
They are also the work of the federal government, which until the 1960s used redlining to deny blacks mortgages, and the private sector.
William Levitt, who is widely credited with being the father of modern suburbia beginning in Nassau County, barred the sale of homes to blacks and prohibited the resale of properties to blacks through restrictive covenants.
These policies go a long way in explaining the enormous gap in family wealth between blacks and whites in this country.
Nor did discrimination against blacks on Long Island end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act in the 1960s, which barred discrimination.
A 2019 investigation by Newsday found that some real estate agents routinely steered prospective buyers to areas based on race.
Summers said he believes “much of the strength of our university system derives from its pluralism, with fierce competition among institutions large and small, public and private, sectarian and non-sectarian, specialized and liberal-arts oriented, research or teaching focused.”
And even the Supreme Court in its affirmative action ruling exempted the military academies “in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”
Elected officials at every level in New York should now address how to make the public education system fairer to black and brown students before they apply for college.
One way would be to further decrease or, even better, eliminate the large disparity in spending per pupil between school districts through further changes to state aid formulas. This means more money for less affluent districts and the same or less money for more affluent districts.
The state tax cap should also be modified to exempt districts that fall below a certain level of spending per pupil. This would make it easier for districts seeking to close the spending gap per student through tax increases.
Towns and villages should also make zoning changes to permit more affordable housing. This would allow more students from less affluent families to attend high-spending schools.
This would also help address an 800,000 housing unit shortfall in New York that hurts businesses seeking employees, married couples from buying their first homes and empty nesters from downsizing. It would also enable Nassau to become less segregated.
The state should offer both carrots to encourage the development of affordable housing and sticks to penalize those who refuse to do their part. Perhaps by giving less state aid to municipalities.
President Lyndon Johnson said in a 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
Yes, it is now nearly 60 years since Johnson spoke those words and much has improved. But much hasn’t.
Blacks spent more than 250 years as slaves, barred from learning to read or write. They faced another 100 years as second-class citizens under Jim Crow. And blacks have faced systemic discrimination that continues to this day.
It is time for public schools in New York to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
