Great Article : The real way to Desegregate schools

Brown vs the board of ed. may have ended official race segregation, but as anyone who has lived in both a urban area and the suburbs knows, America's schools are still mostly segregated. Basically it goes Black-poor-inner city-underachieving vs White-wealthy-suburbs-average achieving. Educators have repeatedly tried to fix the last part (achievement) by mixing the first part (race). Whenever race is used discrimination occurs however (even if for good ends), and thanks to the recent decision by the supreme court, this is now illegal. A much better way to attack problem is this proposal, which uses financial status to discriminate. This is a fantastic idea, and as the article claims, it may even fix the race problem as a side effect. Note to Public school teachers, there is something new called capitalism, please look it up... 2 page report due Friday.

On a side note, I can think of two reasons why economic based affirmative action is a better idea than race based AA. First is because to succeed at just about anything requires money, and poor people don't have it, no matter what race they are (obviously). No matter what the NAACP thinks, it is not easy for a poor white person to get very far in life or go to a good school. This leads us to the second problem with race AA: rich minorities. My work in college admissions has given me experiences with minorities who have every advantage growing up, but are also entitled to more because they are underrepresented. While I have nothing against the parents of my peers who needed help during the civil rights era to get a good education, I don't believe for a second that any of my private school friends or people in this neighborhood need any special help to get into private colleges. Long story short, using race allows well-off minorities to take advantage of the system, usually at the expense of the poor minorities whose places they take. Today at work, I talked to a African American girl on the phone who was unhappy that the available apartments in Center City weren't "up to her standards". I was not amused because of the fact that I just had to move out of CC because I could not afford it (this girl also dismissed East Falls after I suggested it.) This girl had applied to a disadvantaged minority program at Drexel (DPMS) , clearly hoping to play the race card in admissions (the program requests but doesn't enforce the "poor" requirement and people frequently try to take advantage) Karma won this battle though, as our wealthy "disadvantaged" applicant got rejected from the minority program because her application missed the deadline. Can't wait to see how she likes being treated like everyone else...