The statistics are sad, but at least they are real. They show us what we have to do, which is work on the quality of our high schools, and work on the kids to both get them ready for college, and get them to want it.
Affirmative action doesn't really solve the problem, it masks the problem. Get rid of affirmative action, and you can't ignore the problem any more, you have to admit it and deal with it.
Practically everybody capable of handling college is already getting in right now [together with quite a bunch of those not capable of handling it].
The lower-achieving students are far behind before they get to high school. Dr. John Ogbu (may he rest in peace) did a great study of how black students are allowed, or even encouraged, to fall behind white students as early as 3rd grade.
You're right. Los Angeles (and even more, California generally) has a relatively low population of African-Americans, who appear overwhelmingly confined to a few neighborhoods. I've read elsewhere about how terribly Los Angeles public schools perform; posters on this forum usually misattribute this miserable performance exclusively to the illegal immigrant problem.
The civil rights movement marked a policy shift in the Democratic partisan approach toward blacks. The Great Society and War on Poverty simply confined the "free" blacks to public-housing projects. Liberal politicians fund and run these projects by subsidizing failure and punishing success. Getting a legitimate low-skill/low-wage job doesn't yield the reward of earned wealth but the punishment of a denial of social services. This punishment generally places the African-Americans in an effective tax bracket near or even exceeding 100%.
Welfare recipients desiring to better their situation face a stark choice: continue to receive free food, housing, and other benefits without working; or work a full-time job that earns them less money than the value of those entitlements while losing such entitlements. Although the latter path ultimately might lead to prosperity, the welfare system imposes an almost prohibitive immediate burden, often with little certainty for the future. The working path also poses great risks to those grown dependent on government, especially for housing. Any available apartments (especially in a liberal city with a government-imposed housing shortage) for low-wage earners are surely few, perhaps distant, and very expensive. And the thought of saving money--from whatever source derived--for such a venture? Don't even think about it. Welfare punishes savings.
Beyond entrapping adults with impossible economic penalties to escape, the welfare system insidiously punishes the children born into it. The welfare system punishes economically almost any behavior that might lead to success and reward in the outside world.
Professional welfare recipients are not stupid: even they engage in behavior that yields economic reward while avoiding behavior that yields economic punishment. The system particularly punishes fatherhood and encourages extramarital intercourse, prostitution, and broken families. Because of the imposed economic impediments to gainful legal employment, a lack of family obligations, and plentiful idle time, men and boys eschew the Boy Scouts to join criminal gangs that go virtually unprosecuted. These gangs engage in illicit criminal activity, particularly the drug trade, from which they might grow rich without attracting the notice of welfare distributors.
Under the Democrat-sponsored welfare regime, therefore, black children endure veritable segregation into "project" ghettos, a profound lack of fathers or other viable male role models outside the criminal underworld, and severe life-long economic inducements to engage in failing behavior. Against these odds, schools already face an uphill battle to educate young African-Americans. But many schools in black neighborhoods, although awash in the liberal panacea (tax money), lack competent teachers. In an environment where caring, competent teachers may represent the only positive role models or ostensibly college-educated people that children encounter, teachers play a particularly critical role in the formation of young people. Children arrive particularly unprepared for school, and only teachers can address their inadequacies and guide them toward literacy without any parental involvement or inducement. All too often, teachers prove unable to take up this challenge.
The public-school problem grows even more acute in the upper grades, where violent gangs distract teachers' attention from the most easily educated of their charges. The incompetence of elementary teachers compounds their problems, putting teachers in the nearly impossible position of instructing almost or even completely illiterate and generally to violently uncooperative teenagers in the finer points of Shakespeare. These multiple-generation professional welfare recipients view schools as places to get pregnant (and hence get more welfare) or deal/use drugs (to get illegitimate cash). In their world, failing school carries more rewards and fewer punishments than passing or graduating.
Even if students manage to graduate from high school with enough of an education to pass the SAT, read, write, and do simple mathematics, they still live in a world where social pressure and economic incentives strongly disfavor legitimate employment (except at professional-athlete salaries) or further education. If you manage to save enough money to pay tuition (or even get a scholarship or student loans) to go to college, then you (and perhaps even your family) lose all sorts of welfare benefits.
"Affirmative action doesn't really solve the problem, it masks the problem. Get rid of affirmative action, and you can't ignore the problem any more, you have to admit it and deal with it."
- You are right. I must admit that every time that I now see a television show which features a black guest who has been billed as a PHD or other university educated "expert" in the subject under discussion, the thought comes to my mind - "I wonder if he/she is one of those affirmative action graduates and, if so, do they really know what they're talking about?"
It's a sad legacy of affirmative action that I now have these thoughts and shows the long range implications of a such a short sighted quick fix solution.