The Elimination of Affirmative Action: California's Degraded Educational System

Abstract

I am the Dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley, the top-ranked education school in the nation. Since receiving my doctoral degree from the University of Kansas in 1972, I have served as a Professor of Psychology and/or Education at five public universities, including three in the University of California system. I have also served as Senior Officer and Director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs in the United States Department of Education. I have written extensively on educational policy issues, in particular on multilingualism, multiculturalism, and diversity in education, and on the education of Latinos in the United States. My curriculum vita is attached as Exhibit A.' I have prepared this report on an expedited basis at the request of Scheff & Washington, PC, which represents students who intervened as defendants in Grutter v. Bollinger, 2 a case challenging the affirmative action admissions policies at the University of Michigan Law School. I have not testified as an expert in the last four years and am not being paid for my services in this case. The elimination of affirmative action admissions policies in the University of California system has severely intensified problems of inequality in access to post-secondary and professional education in this state. The number of black, Latino, and Native American students enrolled in the system has dropped, and the system as a whole has begun to segregate into elite campuses with more white and Asian students and less elite campuses with more black and Latina/o students. This circumstance is educationally unacceptable for all: for those of us who teach and who train teachers, for white and Asian students, and for minority students and their communities. It has proven impossible to compensate for the elimination of affirmative action through other means, though attempts to do so have been made. The impact has been particularly destructive in the most competitive graduate and professional schools in the University of California system including my own program and the law schools on the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses. For decades, the growing emphasis on standardized test scores in postsecondary admissions has compounded the distortions imposed on K-12 education by race-related social and educational inequities. The elimination of affirmative action has made the overemphasis on tests into an even more pernicious guarantee of unequal opportunity for minority students, and especially those students whose primary language is not English. My colleagues and I have called for the elimination