Posted on 08/26/2013 7:12:52 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Los Angeles Times recently published a devastating case study in the malign effects of academic racial preferences. The University of California, Berkeley, followed the diversocrat playbook to the letter in admitting Kashawn Campbell, a South Central Los Angeles high-school senior, in 2012: It disregarded his level of academic preparation, parked him in the black dorm — the “African American Theme Program” — and provided him with a black-studies course.
The results were thoroughly predictable. After his first semester, reports the Times:
[Kashawn] had barely passed an introductory science course. In College Writing 1A, his essays — pockmarked with misplaced words and odd phrases — were so weak that he would have to take the class again.
His writing often didn’t make sense. He struggled to comprehend the readings for [College Writing] and think critically about the text.
“It took awhile for him to understand there was a problem,” [his instructor] said. “He could not believe that he needed more skills. He would revise his papers and each time he would turn his work back in having complicated it. The paper would be full of words he thought were academic, writing the way he thought a college student should write, using big words he didn’t have command of.”
His grade-point average was 1.7, putting him at risk of expulsion if he didn’t raise it by the end of the year. The one bright spot in his academic record? Why, African American Studies 5A, of course! Kashawn had received an A on an essay and a B on a midterm, the best grades of his freshman year:
Kashawn reveled in the class [a survey of black culture and race relations], in a way he hadn’t since high school. He would often be the first one to speak up in discussions, even though his points weren’t always the most sophisticated, said Gabrielle Williams, a doctoral student who helped teach the class.
He still had gaps in his knowledge of history. But, Williams said, “you could see how engaged he was, how much he loved being there.”
Did Kashawn’s good grades in African American Studies 5A mean that he had suddenly learned how to think and to write? Not at all. He was advancing little in his second go-round at expository writing: “On yet another failing essay, the instructor wrote how surprised she was at his lack of progress, especially, she noted, given the hours they’d spent going over his ‘extremely long, awkward and unclear sentences.’”
His (to him) unforeseen academic struggles took a psychological toll:
He had never felt this kind of failure, nor felt this insecure. . . . Each poor grade [was] another stinging punch bringing him closer to flunking out. None of the adults in his life knew the depth of his pain: not his professors, his counselors, any of the teachers at his old high school.
He tries to rally his spirits with heart-wrenching pathos: “‘I can do this! I can do this!’ he had written [in a diary]. ‘Let the studying begin! . . . It’s time for Kashawn’s Comeback!’”
A counselor in the campus psychologist’s office urged him to scale back his academic ambitions. “Maybe he didn’t have to be the straight-A kid he’d been in high school anymore,” the counselor advised him. This “be content with mediocrity” message is hardly a recipe for future success, but it sums up the attitude that many a struggling affirmative-action “beneficiary” has adopted to get through college.
The black-themed dorm and student center also operated exactly as one would expect, confirming their members’ belief in their own racial oppression:
“Sometimes we feel like we’re not wanted on campus,” Kashawn said, surrounded at a dinner table by several of his dorm mates, all of them nodding in agreement. “It’s usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions.”
Of course, the only reason that Kashawn and many of his fellow dorm mates are at Berkeley is because the administration “wants” them so much, regardless of their chances of success. It is unlikely, however, that African American Studies 5A discussed the academic-achievement gap in Berkeley’s admissions between black, white, and Asian students. That gap, not racism, explains why Kashawn is not a sought-after addition to study groups. (Kashawn came to Berkeley through one of the University of California’s many desperate efforts to evade California’s ban on governmental racial preferences: an admissions guarantee for students in the top decile of their high school classes, regardless of their test scores or the caliber of their school.)
Kashawn is on tenterhooks waiting to learn if his second-semester grades will allow him to continue into sophomore year. Which course gave him an A–, to pull his GPA over the top? Hint: It wasn’t College Writing.
The Times could not have written a more resounding confirmation of mismatch theory if it had tried. (The paper’s motivations for the story remain mysterious, since the Times is conventionally liberal on race matters.) Mismatch theory, most recently expounded by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, is the most powerful critique of affirmative action yet developed, demonstrating empirically that students admitted to academic environments for which they are ill prepared learn less, and are less likely to pursue rigorous majors, than had they been enrolled in schools where their peers shared their level of academic preparation.
But the Times story conveys a subtler point as well: Racial preferences are not just ill advised, they are positively sadistic. Only the preening self-regard of University of California administrators and faculty is served by such an admissions travesty. Preference practitioners are willing to set their “beneficiaries” up to fail and to subject them to possible emotional distress, simply so that the preference dispensers can look out upon their “diverse” realm and know that they are morally superior to the rest of society.
— Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and the author of Are Cops Racist?
Old School Fools aint DOWN with the program!!
BAN CURSIVE NOW!
“Sometimes we feel like we’re not wanted on campus,” Kashawn said, surrounded at a dinner table by several of his dorm mates, all of them nodding in agreement. “It’s usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions.”
Somehow I had the impression that Berkeley was overrun with white liberals who worship at the altar of diversity and inclusion. This comment leads one to believe it is full of redneck racists.
have retained the capacity for critical thought.
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It is stunning that so many conservatives who are rational in every other way, continue to believe that government single-payer schooling can be fixed.
Gee! If we could only go back to the old K-12 system.....( Head banging against computer desk.)
I’m sick of commenting on this $h!t. Colleges are never going to change. They’re going to give free admission to low IQ minorities, fill them with this ‘racial oppression’ $h!t, give them grades they don’t deserve, and send them out to be hired by kiss-a$$ corporations or government agencies, where they will get a salary for being a minority.
Then our kids who paid their own college tuition and the tuition for the minorities are passed over for jobs because they are “White.”
After all that, we are called racist for breathing.
I’m sick of it.
More than likely, being an unfortunate result of a “mis-contraception”, his misuse of academic sounding words were totally “in-venereal”
The tragic figure in this story is not Kashawn. It’s the unknown Asian-American kid from Fremont with a straight-A average and very high test scores whose place at Berkeley was taken away by the self-righteous administrators, who admitted Kashawn instead to fill their quota.
My only issue on McDonald with this is dinging for counselor for advising that he accept doing his best. Hundreds of years of ‘Gentleman’s C’ college students have adjusted to mediocre grades, whether by limits in ability or effort.
I think the counselor knew what he or she was doing.
those “traditional” new school NAMES...that some people...saddle thier offspring with...are intended to make those kids feel SPECIAL....thereby boosting their self esteem.
Imani...Ebony...Shanice...Aaliyah...Precious..Nia...Deja [?]... Diamond..Asia
The Top 20 ‘Whitest’ and ‘Blackest’ Names
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2470131&page=1
you just HAVE to know that such choice names will help a “student” excel..
“It’s usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions.”
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So?...Suck it up! Cope! Find strategies. Be assertive.
I was a woman majoring in the hard sciences and was **often** the only woman in the class. There were rarely more than 3 woman in a auditorium class of more than 100. I later entered a male dominated profession. In a school of 600 professional students there were 12 ( Yes, TWELVE) women students!
Least of all the "favored" individual. My true but sad story. I worked for many years for one of the biggest chemical companies in the US, at one of their deep South sites. The company (affirmative action) hired a significant number of black technical employees. My group landed (and I worked directly with) probably 5-6.
One poor soul had gone up through "black" institutions his entire academic career (black high school, black universities) to the stated level of having a masters degree in chemistry. He worked directly for me. The poor soul just did NOT have either the necessary skills nor the necessary intelligence to function in the job. He barely performed at the level of a high school grad. Needless to say, he eventually departed the company, convinced the whole time that it was "the system" that was the reason.
The really sad part is that he was right...but not in the way he thought.
By comparison, some of those I worked with had come up through "all-black" but CATHOLIC parochial schools. Same demographic population, same cultural background, but NO "affirmative action" grade/performance inflation.
THOSE blacks could compete on an equal level with any other employee of the company of comparable academic background.
Affirmative action is NOT a positive!
You did (and I did). All those Pell grants and such are paid through tax funds.
Yep, a failing student would be very tough to tutor in a study group.
If you read the whole article in the LA Times, you will see they let in another black guy from the slums who was an a natural intellectual. He really cut lose in college, and aced all the difficult courses.
The black guy who didn’t do so well reminds me of a couple of white guys I met in college, who were just educated beyond their mental abilities. They wrote similar types of papers full of big words with no clear concepts behind them.
I find the choice of ‘Asia’ to be an interesting one.
But the choice of name to me is a microcosm of the conflict one may feel in trying not to reject one’s own race and yet having reason to feel ambivalent, at best, about the associated culture.
Bingo! All over the country, school districts are spending a fortune of our tax money trying to teach high school subjects to students who did not learn in elementary school to read, write, and do arithmetic. There are all sorts of specialists, technology, curriculum creativity, and excuses ... but the problems originated and need to be fixed at the 1st-3rd grade level.
The only real solution would be to have students without basic skills go into classes where they are taught, no matter what age they are. Significantly, we have such classes outside the schools-blob: they're called "adult literacy and numeracy" programs. They're taught by volunteers usually working for private organizations, and the students are there because they have decided they need the skills they don't have.
It's just the beginning of a long-term plan. Once they've been given a degree (that has value to those who earned it), they are placed in a government agency or private corporation or university that is seeking the same public praise of "celebrating diversity". But rather than being placed where meaningful work is performed, they generally are given high profile positions that actually require little by way of results.
After years of perfunctory, highly rated performance reviews, they build a resume that looks impressive enough that they can get real jobs; and then they flame out, some times with disastrous results.
Does the name Franlin Raines ring a bell? How about Barack Obama?
AMEN.
Recently the Los Angeles School District voted to give EVERY student an I-Pad.
Already they cannot write- now they don’t have to——until they have to be employed.
It is a must for the high schools to push these underachievers thru the pipeline today because if they keep getting ‘put back’, you end up with 18 year old freshmen in high schools.
This is what employers have to deal with when they are shoved out into the world of real jobs & real skills being required. I can show you kids with a high school diploma that (I would not hire to fill my horse water tanks.
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