The Blue Blog

This article from the Boston.com Education News covers a story that is local in its content but national in the implications and topic that has been causing debate for some time- affirmative action.  The reason the article was written was to point out that the amount of minority students at Boston Latin, an elite public exam school, has actually risen as a percentage of the total enrollment since an affirmative action admissions policy was removed.  Since the last academic year, the number of black and Hispanic students at Boston Latin has rose from eighteen percent to about twenty-five percent of the student population, with the admissions being based solely on the test scores and similar criteria.  This rise in minority students, however, comes eight years after a court ruled that they could not consider race in admissions eight years ago- since then, the school has been criticized for plunging minority enrollment.  Officials credit the rise in admissions to an outreach program to underrepresented students.

So, why am I tackling the issue of affirmative action now, in this context?  With all of the debate and disagreement related to the issue, I feel that it is about time that I explored the topic in greater depth and begin to form my own opinions, since at this point I don’t know whether or not I think affirmative action is a positive or a negative practice.  When I read information such as that in this article, I am prompted to think that maybe, even if admission of minorities to elite public schools or even public universities drops after affirmative action admissions are dropped, the amount of minority students will eventually rise again.  The problem is, would all institutions start outreach programs to minority students as this school did?  After all, it took several years for the percentage of minority students to rise at Boston Latin, and that was only after five years of such an outreach program.

A parent of a Boston Law student was quoted in the article as saying that “Going to Boston Latin historically is a real ticket to opportunity for working-class students in the city.”  If social mobility is the goal of the school, then those with the most social mobility will probably already have an advantage to attending Boston Latin because they are already in the best schools.  I do believe that white students are more likely to be privileged than minority students, and I think the reason that affirmative action was created in the first place was to offset this advantage that arises from the history of the society we live in.  So, if it is already easier for white students to get into better schools because they have had more opportunities and gone to better schools, then to me it seems that affirmative action is nothing but a band-aid for the problem of racial inequality.  If minority students are given fewer opportunities in the first place, put into worse public schools and denied access to the resources available at better schools, then this should be the target of correction.  Of course, undoing the effects of several hundred years of inequality is no easy task, and it’s a topic that I think it would take up too much space to discuss here.  What I do think is that, if we really want to see a change, we are going to have to start changing things before students start trying to get into elite public schools or a university.  Putting a quota on how many minority students need to come into a school may be our best tool for battling racial inequality at the present time, but it should not be the only one- the source of the problem needs to be addressed.