Affirmative action was past its prime. Here’s how to help Black students succeed | Opinion

The late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who founded the “Disruptive Innovation” model, talked often of the need for businesses to refrain from being distracted by objectives that do not help them achieve their long-term goals. The thinking was to never allow ephemeral plans to distract from the ultimate objective. “Don’t implement a strategy,” he once said, “you do not intend to pursue.”

Last week, the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, sounding the death knell for what had become an unnecessary distraction from our goals and hopefully paving the way for us to focus on a long-term objective that demands our immediate attention: Many minority students — specifically Black and Hispanic youths — are now ill-prepared for postsecondary education.

Shortly after the court’s decision was announced, charter school founder Ian Rowe noted in a Tweet that in 2015, 18% of fourth-grade Black kids read at or above proficient defined by the National Assessment for Educational Progress; in 2019, only 15% of that same cohort — now in 8th grade — read at or above proficient levels. It’s believed that today, less than 20% of this cohort of black high school seniors is reading at proficient levels.

“The biggest issue that the group faces is not the lack of affirmative action to get into college,” wrote Rowe, cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies. “It’s being ill-prepared before even getting there. That is the truth we have to confront.”

Part of the defense for affirmative action has been that it was not only useful for ensuring that Black students could, as Yale law professor Stephen. L. Carter recently wrote, “show what they can do,” but that, as former first lady Michelle Obama recently shared, it also “helped offer new ladders of opportunity for those who, throughout our history, have too often been denied a chance to show how fast they can climb.”

Their words echo the most strident arguments for affirmative action: that access to elite colleges provides Black and Hispanic students with a smoother path to higher incomes and greater lifetime earnings. Therefore, advocates of the program argued, it was worth giving certain minorities a chance at an advantage they might not otherwise enjoy.

However, if real progress and increasing ladders of success is the goal, elite institutions are far from most ideal places to look. Already, more than 70% of the Black and Hispanic kids who attend Harvard come from the top 25% wealthiest Black and Hispanic households. Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the two schools at the heart of the court case, have roughly 15 times as many wealthy as poor students on campus.

The results are in, and they point to a goal missed. Over the last 35 years, Black and Hispanic students’ enrollment at top schools has cumulatively decreased, with the share of Black freshmen at elite schools virtually unchanged since 1980.

Sentiment aside, the facts are that more than five decades of affirmative action has done little to close the academic achievement gap, and in that same span, the white-Black income gap has doubled. As Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s research has shown, the ZIP code a kid comes from — before college — is one of the greatest predictors of access to opportunities and better outcomes.

Instead of commiserating over the likelihood that fewer Black kids will be admitted to Ivy League schools in the future, I suggest placing a priority on the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. They graduate 20% of Black students in the U.S., and those graduates on average, earn higher salaries than Blacks from many other universities.

With affirmative action now banned, it’s time to focus on the years preceding college, including the elementary, middle and high school years. We’ve spent nearly six decades implementing a strategy that, while worth pursuing at the outset, has outlived its usefulness. Expanding opportunities for all kids, regardless of their race, must be the goal moving forward.

Ronell Smith is a business strategy consultant who serves on the Southlake City Council.

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