New data show just how successful affirmative action programs have been at elite colleges and universities. Too bad those data might not have much relevance for the current debate over preferences in higher education.
Peter Schrag
Peter Schrag, a longtime education writer and editor, is the co-author of When Europe Was a Prison Camp: Father and Son Memoirs, 1940-41 (Indiana University Press, 2015) and author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future, and California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment. He is a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee.
Posted inEducation in America
Affirmative Actions’ California Afterlife
The debate about affirmative action at the University of California isn’t over yet.
Posted inFeatures
The Burden of Western History
There have been revisionist histories of America and the American West at least since the middle of the sixteenth century, when the priest-historian Bartolomé de las Casas accused his fellow Spaniards of the mass murder, essentially the genocide, of millions of Native Americans. In 1879, even as Manifest Destiny and the dream of the open […]
Posted inFeatures
Smells Like School Spirit
“No other people,” wrote Henry Steele Commager, themost widely read American historian of the generation following World War II,”ever demanded so much of schools and of education as have the American. Noneother was ever so well served by its schools and its educators.” A lot of us,bombarded by the educational controversies and the ongoing schools-are-failingrhetoric […]
Posted inEducation in America
“F” Is for Fizzle: The Faltering School Privatization Movement
Entrepreneurs promised they could rescue public schools and turn a profit too. Reality intruded.
Posted inEducation in America
New Page, Old Lesson
A few years ago educational standards and national testing seemed on their way. But the push for standards has set off predictable reactions from different quarters. Ironically, testing now may be downgraded in importance.
Posted inEducation in America
End of the Second Chance?
Where the get-tough movement in education gets it wrong.
Posted inEducation in America
The Voucher Seduction
Vouchers have new political power derived from their potent appeal to minorities and the poor. Liberals and defenders of public education had better take notice.
Posted inFeatures
Too Good to Be True
Who’d have ever thought that Texas, famous for finding all sorts of silly things to boast about, would suddenly find cause to brag about its educational achievements? Not a little, but a whole lot. And who’d have thought that what some people have come to call the Texas Miracle would be regarded with great respect, […]