George Rebane

[I recorded this as my regular KVMR FM89.5 commentary for broadcast on 19 March 2010.  President Obama appears to be ready to re-establish equal outcomes as the proxy for equal opportunity, a proxy which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2001.]

The equal opportunity debate is now at least forty-five years old.  The problem has always been how you measure equal opportunity.  The progressives came upon the solution years ago – it was simply equal outcome.  If a population contained 20% Hispanics and 80% of some other class, then after going through an equal opportunity program, you’d better have the success rate be at least 20% Hispanics and 80% others for the results to have delivered equal opportunity.

Conservatives had big problems with this definition.  They argued that you have to account for the predisposition of the racial and ethnic classes in order to explain any disparities in the results.  They said that all we could and should do was to ensure that everyone had an equal chance going through the process. The outcomes would always be determined by many factors that take a lot of things into account, including what each participant brought to the starting line.  Skewing the race to force the outcome to conform to class proportions would mess up the whole process and mess up society to boot.

But across the land, equal opportunity came to mean equal outcome.  Nevertheless, the debate raged on in and out of court, and was finally brought to a conclusion in 2001.  Then the Supreme Court ruled in Alexander v. Sandoval that the Civil Rights Act prohibits only disparate treatment and not disparate impact.  In short, equal outcome lost and equal opportunity meant that you couldn’t rig the race in favor of one class or another.  This ruling has held for about nine years.

This year in the public schools, Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is planning on going back to equal outcomes.  In enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, Secretary Duncan intends to correct ‘ten years of neglect’ – code for the Bush administration – by turning loose the department’s Office of Civil Rights to return us to the Clinton years when statistical disparity was equated with discrimination.  We knew this as the quota system.

So now if the school reports that a disproportionate fraction of Hispanics or blacks were suspended, then the school is guilty until proven innocent of discriminating on the basis of skin color, and will be called to correct the situation.  Similarly, if an AP class does not have the proper pro rata proportions of whites and blacks attending, then the school again is on the hook to make the case for the attendance, or change its policy in how the course is accessed and conducted to deliver equal outcomes.

The results of this new inquisition will, of course, hurt all the students.  But it will penalize the minorities the most, as was shown during the equal outcome years of the 70s and 80s.  Then the whites and Asians either transferred to other schools or simply moved out of the district to escape classroom chaos.  That left behind the quagmire we today call public education.

I called Mr Marty Mathiesen, principal of Nevada Union, to get his views.  This was news to him since the school district had yet to advise him of the initiative.  He said that Nevada Union complies with Title VI by filing the appropriate reports on who got suspended and who got into AP classes based on cause and merit, with no class membership call outs.  This is an early warning for parents who may want to dig deeper or contact their electeds. 

I am George Rebane, and I expand these and other themes in my Union column, and on georgerebane.com.  The opinions here are mine and not necessarily shared by KVMR.