The affirmative action debate echoing through the halls of Congress, the chambers of the Supreme Court, the ivy-covered walls of universities and state capitols across the country, also resonates in children’s classrooms.
For tens of thousands of children across the U.S., dreams of attending college depend, in part, upon the assistance they get from after-school programs designed to help inner-city students overcome the handicaps of a substandard elementary school education.
With affirmative action policies under fire and cutbacks in spending on education being debated in Washington, the people who run programs that provide such assistance are worried.
They are worried about access to future funding and they are worried that a reversal of affirmative action would make it harder than ever for children from inferior schools to make it into institutions of higher learning.
Educators are convinced that there is a direct correlation between the resources devoted to such programs and the ability of educationally disadvantaged students to enter college.
“It is a confluence of factors, partly policy and partly spending, that affect the success of these programs,” said Michael Kirst, a professor of education at Stanford University.
In 1968, when Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs began pumping money into supplementary education programs, 42.3 percent of black high school graduates went directly to college, while 55 percent of white students did-a gap of almost 13 percent.
Nine years later that gap narrowed to just 2 percent, 47.9 percent of blacks and 49.9 percent of whites, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics.
“But during the Reagan administration it reversed,” Kirst said. “The Reagan administration reduced spending and placed less emphasis in this area. You can see what that did to the figures of kids (black students) going on to college.”
By 1985, just 39.6 percent of black students went directly to college, while 57.8 percent of whites made that transition.
“If the government is less committed to building equal access to education and employment in our society, then somebody else has got to pick up the slack,” said Tom Malarkey, an official of Summer Bridge, a program that helps inner-city youths in San Francisco.
It will be programs like Malarkey’s that will have to pick up any slack left by cuts in public spending on education and any weakening of affirmative action policies.
After decades of building bridges to higher education for less advantaged children, the prospect of such setbacks is daunting. Educators fear that a reduction in the amount of government money available to support affirmative action will translate into greater competition for already scarce private funds.
“I know that our supporters are worried about how we are going to get these kids through college,” said Christopher Coons, an official of New York’s I Have A Dream Foundation, which also assists elementary school students. “We expected those federal dollars to be there to help some of these kids through college.”
The vast majority of these programs get almost all their money from private sources. Only recently with the advent of AmeriCorps-the Clinton administration’s eight-month-old national service organization-have they received significant federal funding.
While the debate about the rights and wrongs of affirmative action policies may seem far away from the largely Hispanic Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, it does echo in the lives of 12-year-old Javier Quinonez and his 8-year-old brother, Abraham.
The Quinonez brothers belong to an after-school program in the east Los Angeles neighborhood where schools are crowded and teachers are overworked.
“Unfortunately, our schools don’t provide the same kind of education that private schools do,” said Amelia Quinonez, the boys’ mother.
Throughout the school year her two sons are tutored by volunteer UCLA undergraduates in those subjects where they have specific weaknesses and where their schools have inadequate resources to help.
They are given projects that teach history, citizenship and public-speaking skills. Their mother and father have to attend classes in parenting that include suggestions on how to help their children avoid the drug and gang problems that plague their neighborhood.
If affirmative action programs are eliminated, the private academic help the Quinonez brothers receive may be in vain-their dreams of going to UCLA may prove nothing more than wishful thinking.
With elected officials throughout the country taking steps to roll back those policies, and in the wake of recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action, the opportunity of a college education might not be there for many children of the Quinonez youngsters’ generation.
California Gov. Pete Wilson, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, has been in the forefront of efforts to end affirmative action.
Earlier this month he signed an executive order ending statewide affirmative action programs over which he had authority, something that heightened concern for those trying to guide young people to college.
“Like others, he (Wilson) is being very shortsighted about this whole affirmative action issue,” said Kenny Rogers, director of the Boyle Heights Elementary Institute, the program the Quinonez brothers attend.
Rogers and others argue that Wilson and anti-affirmative action proponents should be paying more attention to programs like these and devote state and federal resources to them if they want to do away with affirmative action.
“What they forget is that these kind of programs are the ones that ultimately will make affirmative action unnecessary.”
Examples of what these programs can achieve are found in U.S. universities. Eight years ago, when Maurisa Thompson and June Hwang were elementary school students growing up in San Francisco, they shared a common problem: Both were afraid to admit they were bright.
“It was always a stigma to be smart at my school,” said Thompson, now 18 and a sophomore at Swarthmore.
For Hwang, 19 and in her second year at Yale, it had a cultural element. “Being Asian and female, I never felt I had a voice and the right to be heard,” she said.
What guided them from those schoolgirl fears to confidence and success was Malarkey’s Summer Bridge program.
