Your April 25 editorial “The Proposition 209 trade-off” continues to perpetuate the oversimplification of “substandard schooling, economic hardship and poor upbringing” as the major factors in the competitive disadvantage of black and Hispanic high school graduates with white and Asian high school graduates when applying to UCLA and the University of California at Berkeley.
Perhaps you should consult the Oct. 2, 1997, Op-Ed column by Steve Chapman, which pointed out that on the college entrance exam test (Scholastic Assessment Test), black students from the highest income category score about the same, on average, as the poorest whites. They also do worse on the math portion of the test than Asian students from the lowest income brackets.
The clear implication of these facts was pointed out by Ward Connerly, a University of California regent who was quoted in The New York Times last July 27 as stating:
“You hear that black kids need a preference because there is no one encouraging them to go to college. Well, these upper-income kids have parents who are doctors, lawyers, professors, so you can’t conclude the problem is at home. I don’t rule out the impact of K-12 education, but I think it’s exaggerated. These Asian kids are going to the same schools as the Latinos and blacks and outperforming them. It’s time we got a handle on why middle-class black kids from the suburbs are losing out to low-income Asians from the inner city.”
It’s also time that your editorial board gets a handle on the complexity of the issue.
