"Why America Still Needs Affirmative Action" (John Cassidy)

"The University of Texas's admission policies have enabled it to increase diversity. '[T]his is what the policy was intended to do,' says John Cassidy, 'and that's why the Roberts Court might well strike it down.' "


"Having lived in the United States for almost thirty years, I am always amazed that Americans persist in believing that this is a land of unparalleled opportunity and social mobility."

-- John Cassidy, in a newyorker.com blogpost,
"Why America Still Needs Affirmative Action"

by Ken

It appears that affirmative action is safe for this week. But as John Cassidy makes clear at the outset of this post, he is only too well aware that by next week its likely to be dead or at least severely restricted, when the Supreme Court announces its decision in Fisher v. University of Texas. None of which alters his opinion that "America still needs affirmative action" -- though as we'll see he isn't necessarily thinking of affirmative action as we have normally understood it.

"Set aside, for a moment," Cassidy says, "the explosive issue of black or brown versus white, which underpins much of the discussion about affirmative action.

There are compelling reasons to make it easier for young people of all races from disadvantaged backgrounds to attend college. The University of Texas program at the center of this case did just that. Far from being ruled illegal, it should be embraced and promoted as a practical, merit-based model for other states to copy. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely.

As suggested in the quote above, Cassidy has a lot of trouble with the idea of the U.S. as "a land of unparalleled opportunity and social mobility.

A bit suspect to begin with, the Horatio Alger story has been transformed, over the decades, into a chronic mental block. To well-educated youngsters from affluent backgrounds who know how to work the system, and even to well-educated immigrants such as myself, this is indeed a land of great opportunity. But for all too many working-class Americans -- and a lot of them aren't members of minority groups -- U.S. society is less of a launchpad than a glue trap. With their feet stuck to the ground, they have little prospect of ascending very far.

And over the decades that he has been arguing the point with American friends and colleagues, growing numbers of studies have arrived to back him up (as in the conservative Brookings Institution report "Mobility Impairede").

"In a merit-based system," Cassidy writes, "family ties shouldn't matter very much."

But compared to people in places like Canada and Scandinavia, Americans tend to follow the earnings paths of their parents. On close inspection, the vast majority of highly successful Americans -- Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama among them -- turn out to be the progeny of highly educated professionals. For folks who start out in the cellar of U.S. society, even climbing up to the parlor level is quite a feat, and one that, these days, often demands a college education.

At the heart of the University of Texas situation is a system that, since 1997, has guaranteed admission to state-funded colleges to those who finish in the top 10 percent of their high school class,

thus providing a route to college for talented students who live in all sorts of neighborhoods. Everybody knows that schools in poor areas tend to be worse than their counterparts in rich areas, and that, in general, their students get lower test scores. Here was a way to address that reality, while, at the same time, rewarding merit, ambition, and hard work. The resulting surge in enrollments has caused some problems for colleges such as the University of Texas at Austin, but nobody doubts it has increased the geographic and social diversity of the student body.

In addition, for students who didn't finish in the top 10 percent, Texas public colleges were allowed "to consider race -- among many other factors, such as socioeconomic background, work experience, and extracurriculars." And the two aproaches together enabled the University of Texas to increase racial diversity. "[T]his is what the policy was intended to do, and that's why the Roberts Court might well strike it down."

Under the Supreme Court's 2003 Gruter v. Bollinger ruling, written by Sandra Day O'Connor, schools were already enjoined from considering race in a more than limited way. In the University of Texas case, white plaintiff Abigail Fisher is arguing that in being turned down by U.T. she was discriminated against on racial grounds in violation of the 14th Amendment's "equal protection" provision.

"If the Court rules in Fisher's favor," Cassidy writes, "it could well upend the program guaranteeing places to the top ten per cent of high school students along with proscribing the use of race as a factor in admissions to public colleges across the country."

Should that happen, it may make sense for supporters of affirmative action to focus more heavily on broader concerns about social mobility. You don't have to live in the United States for long to realize that racial discrimination and racial segregation are still the daily reality facing all too many Americans; and, to combat them, I'm all for using traditional arguments wherever possible. But where the forces of conservatism have the upper hand, such as in the Supreme Court, it's also worth making the case for policies designed to improve the life prospects of all Americans, regardless of race, and to prevent U.S. society from turning into a rigid class system of the sort once associated with Latin America and “old” Europe.

Given the high degree of correlation between socioeconomic status and race, minorities of all types would be among the main beneficiaries of policies aimed at increasing social mobility, but that, to some extent, would be beside the point. The motivating force wouldn't be righting the wrongs of slavery, or constructing an impregnable Democratic majority in the electorate. It would be a desire to make real the vision of a society in which rewards are based on effort and talent, rather than family connections. And that, surely, should be something that even some conservatives could sign onto.

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Inequality Grows In Sweden-- And So Do Social Tensions... And The Potential For A Backlash

Sunday evening, almost at the same moment I published a "How Safe Is Sweden?" post on my travel blog, Robert Reich tweeted a Wall Street Journal story about how growing economic inequality is fueling the social tensions between white Swedes and immigrants and the children of immigrants born in Sweden. The Journal, unlike European publication has pointed right to racism as a root cause of the 6 days of violent rioting and arson.

One young man rioting near Husby last week told The Wall Street Journal: "If I had a job I wouldn't be here." The man, who declined to give his name during a late-night interview, said he would have been in bed had there been something on his agenda for the next day.

"We have a large group of [young people] without both jobs and education and in addition they lack money and their own places to live," said Arne Johansson, a community activist. They "lack faith in their futures and feel they are being harassed by police, and they feel this might be their chance at striking back."

Those growing up in Sweden in the 1990s and 2000s have watched the nation struggle to maintain economic parity across the population.

In a report this month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based think tank, Sweden's growth in inequality between 1985 and the late 2000s was the largest among all OECD countries, increasing by one-third.

According to OECD figures from 2008, the most recent available, the average income of the top 10% of income earners was 513,000 Swedish kronor (about $77,000), or more than six times as high as that of the bottom 10%, who had an average income of 81,000 kronor. This was up from a ratio of around 5 to 1 in the early 2000s and a ratio of around 4 to 1 during much of the 1990s.

Sweden has a reputation for equality that has suffered this week after 6 nights of rioting has exposed a fault-line between a well-off majority and a minority, often young people with immigrant backgrounds, who cannot find work, lack education and feel marginalized. Sweden also has a reputation as a very safe destination-- although that has also suffered in the past couple of years. This week, the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm has warned American citizens to stay away from areas where there is rioting-- areas that are growing in size from ghettoized Stockholm suburbs, like Husby, Hagsätra, Ragsved and Skogas, to Uppsala, Södertälje, Linköping and Örebro. What happened?

The gap between rich and poor in Sweden is growing faster than in any other major nation and some people in the affected areas "say the riots are a response to discrimination and relatively high unemployment."

Sweden, once a by-word for equality, has seen a widening gap between rich and poor, our correspondent says.

Others argue that the unrest is a simple matter of criminality, where parents failed to exert enough influence on their offspring, he adds.

Gulan Avci, a Swedish MP of Kurdish origin who represents the Stockholm suburb of Bredang, said the rioting was down to a mixture of criminality and disillusioned young people in areas of high unemployment and poor school results.

She told BBC radio that the country's integration policies had not been successful.

"But you can never ever accept violence as a way to show your disappointment with society. These teenagers don't understand they're destroying for themselves their own future, for other people that live in these areas."

"In the short run, the acute thing is to ensure that these neighbourhoods get back to normal everyday life," Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag told the Reuters news agency. "In the long run we need to create positive spirals in these neighbourhoods."

Police, who have arrested 30 rioters, estimate that around 300 have participated in the immigrant suburbs of Stockholm. There are been 200 cars set on fire-- as well as schools, police stations and restaurants. About a dozen police officers have been injured.

There's some sense of backlash against the country's generous asylum and immigration policies brewing on the right, of course, although it's not as intolerant as what you would expect in the U.S. "These people, they should integrate in this society and just try a little bit more to be like Swedish citizens," is a typical response. Sweden, which has a population of only 9.5 million has 1.8 million first and second generation immigrants. They took in 100,000 Iraqis after the U.S. invaded that country, accepted 40,000 Somalis and took in more Syrians this year and last than any other European country per capita (over 11,000)

What set the riots off-- the trigger rather than the cause-- was when police killed a 69 year old unruly Portuguese man. Teens, who sometimes tend to resent police authority, weren't ameliorated when cops started calling them "monkeys" and "negroes." And soon enough the rioting took on a dynamic of its own. Many of these immigrants have no Swedish friends and only come into contact with Swedes who are policemen or social workers. A real ghetto attitude has been evolving in the last few years-- especially after tax cuts for the wealthy and middle class kicked in at the expense of social programs for the poor.

The only State Department warnings for American tourists issued in May were for habitually dangerous countries: Iran, Mauritania, Cote d'Ivoire, Eritrea, Central African Republic and Libya. "Travel Warnings, the State Department website explains, "are issued when long-term, protracted conditions that make a country dangerous or unstable lead the State Department to recommend that Americans avoid or consider the risk of travel to that country." So Sweden doesn't have a full-blown warning yet, just an alert from areas where there is rioting. Always good to stay away from them any way. Sweden is generally considered one of the safest countries in the world for travelers. Still, the British Foreign Service warns tourists to take out comprehensive travel and medical insurance, watch out for terrorism and stay away from immgrant-heavy Stockholm suburbs, Husby, Hagsätra, Rågsved, Skogås.

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The stock-market "boom" may not be a bubble, but that doesn't mean it's good news for most of us

"Today, there's a growing divide between the fortunes of corporate America and those of the majority of Americans. . . . The stock-market boom is real, but most Americans have been left on the outside looking in."

-- James Surowiecki, in his latest New Yorker
"Financial Page," "Boom or Bubble?"

by Ken

So what do you think, is this great stock-market boom really another in our recent series of stock-market bubbles?

I confess I haven't given the matter much thought. I'm not even sure I was aware that there is a stock-market boom. I've had, um, stuff on my mind. A stock-market boom doesn't figure heavily in my stuff. A stock-market bubble, however, might force itself on my attention, judging by that recent history of market bubbles, which somehow came crashing down on those of us who thought we were pretty remote from either tech or housing hysteria.

Not surprisingly, The New Yorker's financial columnist, James Surowiecki, has been paying attention.

With the stock market setting new highs on a nearly daily basis, even as the real economy just slogs along, there seems to be one question on everyone's mind: are we in the middle of yet another market bubble? For a growing chorus of money managers and market analysts, the answer is yes: the market is a house of cards, held up by easy money and investor delusion, and we are rushing all too blithely toward an inevitable crash. Given that we've recently lived through two huge asset bubbles, it's easy to see why they're worried. But in this case the delusion is theirs.

The bubble believers make their case with a blizzard of charts and historical analogies, all illustrating the same point: the future will look much like the past, and that means we're headed for trouble. Smithers & Company, a London market-research firm, says that, according to a number of market indicators, stocks are, by historical standards, forty to fifty per cent overvalued. The bears admit that corporate profits are high, which makes the market's price-to-earnings ratio look quite normal, but they insist that this isn't sustainable. They think that earnings will return to historical norms, and that, when they do, stock prices will be hit hard. Today, after-tax corporate profits are more than ten per cent of G.D.P., while their historical average is closer to six per cent. That's a vast gap, and it's why bears believe that the market is, in the words of the high-profile money manager John Hussman, "overvalued, overbought, overbullish."

As you may have guessed, Surowiecki isn't in the "bubble camp." He allows that "It's certainly unusual for corporate profits to soar during a slow recovery."

But the argument for a stock-market bubble is flawed: when it comes to the role that corporations play in the U.S. economy, the present looks very different from the past, which means that historical comparisons to the nineteen-fifties, let alone the thirties, tell us little. The four most dangerous words in investing may be "This time, it's different." But this time it is different.

Different how?

* Taxes. One reason to believe in today's corporate profits is that corporations now are paying so much less in taxes. "In 1951, corporations had to pay almost half of reported profits in taxes. In 1965, they had to pay more than thirty per cent. Today, they pay only around twenty per cent."

* Globalization. Another reason to believe: So much more of the corporate bottom line today comes from foreign earnings, which 'account for almost a third of corporate earnings," almost three times the case in 2000. "The global economy, even with its current woes, is projected to grow more briskly than the U.S. economy over the next decade, so corporations will continue to benefit."

* "Labor's share of the economy has fallen steeply." Unions have no power, and apart from some skilled workers, neither do workers. There may not be new profits to be racked up by squeezing the stuffing out of whipped-to-the-mat workers, "but keeping profits where they are doesn't look all that difficult."

Which brings us to what for me is the money quote, and we take it in whole.

It's still possible that investor hysteria could eventually inflate stock prices, or that investor panic could send them crashing, but there is no profit bubble and, for now, no stock-market bubble, either.

For investors, that's obviously good news: there's nothing wrong with profits, and the rebound of the stock market has helped restore many Americans' battered finances. Still, it's unsettling that companies and investors are doing so well while the economy as a whole is stuck in the mud. Throughout the postwar era, high corporate profits were coupled with rising wages and strong economic growth. Today, there's a growing divide between the fortunes of corporate America and those of the majority of Americans. You might hope that people could make back as investors some of what they're not getting as workers, but in fact only about half of Americans have any money in the stock market, and most of those who do have only small sums. What's more, the crash of 2008 scared many ordinary investors out of the market, so they haven't benefitted from the recent profit boom at all. "There's a lot of residual shell shock at work, and that's made investors still pretty gun-shy," [Doug] Ramsey [chief investment officer for Leuthold Weeden Capital Management] said. The stock-market boom is real, but most Americans have been left on the outside looking in.

Once upon a time we heard some political chatter about "The Two Americas." Thank goodness we stopped hearing about that! The compact coterie of Americans Who Matter just don't want to hear about the rest of us, because, after all, by definition we don't matter.

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Well, Of Course Rich Kids Are Smarter Than Poor Kids

My pal Roland teaches in an inner city elementary school in one of the toughest neighborhoods in L.A. Everyday he comes home exhausted and frustrated and drained. "Maybelline was suspended again," he seems to tell me more often than I ask him if he wants to eat at Ink or M.A.K.E. Maybelline is 8. I remember when he first told me about her at the beginning of the semester. He said he thought she might be a genius, definietly the smartest child in his class. He seemed excited to play a role in helping her reach her potential. Now he's relieved when she doesn't terrorize his other students, steal their lunches and pencils or just beat them up. Maybelline's probably not going to Harvard or Stanford (where Sean Reardon teaches education and sociology). More likely she's going to end up at the Central California Women's Facility outside Chowchilla. Essentially, she has no parents; no idea who her father was and her mom's a junkie, in and out-- mostly in-- jails and prisons. Maybelline lives with her unemployed grandfather.

Did you read Reardon's OpEd in the NY Times over the weekend, No Rich Child Left Behind? He didn't mean the kind of rich Maybelline is. She doesn't have to study for her tests-- she never does-- but she aces them anyway. What a shame that society will squander that kind of richness! "Here’s a fact that may not surprise you," offers Reardon: "the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion." And the differences are growing-- gigantically.

One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

...In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?

We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.

Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.

...It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students-- there certainly are-- but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.


If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.



My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and-- in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs-- access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.

But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.

High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources-- their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school-- on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more-- more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time”-- in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.

The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.

It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem-- a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class-- is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.

We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.

So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.

But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.

This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.

It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.

The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills-- how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate-- essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.

Nothing really there for Maybelline-- nor for most of her classmates. Not any more than the air traffic controller fix helped them or their families or communities.

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