Insight

Speaking up to prepare minority students

By Stephen Black
Special to The Star
01-23-2005

Many high school students maintain excellent grades, but because of a limited vocabulary and underdeveloped critical reasoning skills do poorly on standardized tests. Substandard scores means that they are either rejected by our region’s best colleges, or fail to succeed if they are accepted. To remedy this, I collaborated with area colleges, the Birmingham City School System and numerous businesses last year, to start SpeakFirst. The program was designed to enrich the academic experience of motivated students from public high schools through participation on an all-star debate team. The debate training provided by SpeakFirst develops students’ critical thinking, writing, research and public speaking skills. Tutoring, college admissions guidance, standardized test prep and summer internships are also key ingredients. Many of the reasons for starting such an initiative became clear to everyone involved only a few weeks into the school year. Temani Beck is one reason. Temani is a 14-year-old freshman attending West End High School. She is one of seven foster children being raised by a single mother. Temani is gifted and driven. A second reason is Theodore Ware. Theo is a 14-year-old freshman attending Wenonah High School. The talented basketball player travels 40 minutes each way, three days a week, so that he can be part of our debate team and prepare himself for college. It has been difficult to find drivers to help with Theo’s commute ever since one of our volunteers saw gunshots fired on Theo’s block. Temani and Theo have worked very hard on their debating skills for four months. If you would like to argue with one of them about the “importation of prescription drugs” or “the relationship between church and state,” be prepared, they are getting really good. Another reason to start SpeakFirst had to do with a story too few people know — the story of affirmative action in our nation’s higher education system. In recent years, the end of racial preferences in admissions at some major universities around the country has elicited an outcry from many liberals, raising predictions that once-diverse campuses would become nearly all-white communities of privilege and exclusivity. Taking center stage in the drama was the state of California which, in 1996, passed Proposition 209 amending its state constitution to prohibit the consideration of race in college admissions. Prior to 1996, California’s so-called affirmative action policy was warm and fuzzy, but also effortless and cost-free: “come to a football game, tour our campus, buy a T-shirt, and we will drop the bar low enough for you to get in. We get credit for valuing diversity and inclusion and you get a college education. Everyone wins, right?” Wrong. As it turns out, there is more to the story. Although college enrollment has soared during the past quarter-century, the proportion of college students completing degrees of any kind has remained flat. How could this be? Many students from low-income families receive an inadequate secondary education and simply aren’t prepared to succeed in college. In fact, low-income students are six times less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree than high-income students. Within five years of beginning college, 41 percent of students from the wealthiest quarter of the population receive a bachelor’s degree; just 6 percent from the poorest quarter do. Not surprisingly, in the first year following the removal of racial preferences from the University of California System admissions, minority enrollment dropped 50 percent. But then the UC System tried something novel. They dramatically increased their efforts to improve the academic preparation of students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in California’s K-12 schools — expanding the pool of qualified minority students prepared to succeed in college. The UC System’s initiatives include partnerships between colleges and local schools, strengthening curricula and establishing summer academic enrichment programs. All are aimed at helping disadvantaged students achieve the kind of academic record that will make them eligible for admissions and prepared to succeed. So, what happens when you couple high standards with outreach, innovation and hard work? Five years after passage of Prop 209, the percentage of minority students admitted to California colleges has rebounded to pre-1996 percentages — and most importantly — graduation rates have increased as well. Ending racial preferences forced the California system to acknowledge that true affirmative action requires an obligation to act affirmatively — affirmative action as a verb rather than a self-congratulatory soundbite. Racial preferences in higher education are a cop-out. When we become buried in our own myths about race, we put off the far harder work of ending the intellectual isolation of poor children. Focusing outreach on economically disadvantaged communities inevitably promotes racial diversity in higher education since African Americans are disproportionately concentrated in low resource areas. Academic partnerships such as SpeakFirst, in which individuals from institutions of higher education provide assistance to K-12 students, are a welcome development, but assisting only a relatively small number betrays the larger calling on our community. Outreach to our poorest-performing schools must become a stated priority of the leadership of our institutions of higher learning (both administration and faculty), reinforced by leadership from the state and support from our business community. Only by making such outreach a priority will we provide the necessary nourishment to support initiatives like SpeakFirst on a larger scale. I invite you to visit one of our debate practices and meet Temani and Theo. They will both continue to practice debate for three hours a day, three days a week for the next three years. On their own merit, they will get full scholarships to the colleges of their choice, and they will graduate with honors four years later. They believe it. I believe it. High standards, outreach, innovation and hard work will make it happen. Stephen Black is a Birmingham attorney and founder of SpeakFirst. His e-mail address is: sblack@mcglaw.com