As the debate over affirmative action in colleges continues, the fundamental questions remain the same: Does affirmative action help deserving minority students succeed in school and in life, or is it a poisoned chalice that stigmatizes those who receive it for their entire careers?
Perhaps the strongest case to be made in favor of affirmative action in the past decade was William G. Bowen’s and Derek Bok’s “The Shape of the River,” a 1998 book that used a large data base of college admissions to offer a strong case that affirmative action was a good idea that ought to be continued. Mr. Bowen has continued to mine his data base for books showing that colleges spend too much money on sports. Now, in collaboration with his Mellon Foundation colleagues Martin A. Kurzweil and Eugene M. Tobin, he has returned to the affirmative action debates with Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (University of Virginia, $27.95, 285 pages).
Mr. Bowen and his team have several goals with this book. They write to defend the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, which ruled that affirmative action on campuses was constitutional for a limited period of time. They also argue that vastly more effort ought to be given to ensure that college admission committees pick a suitable number of minorities.
The authors run mathematical models to show that students from low income families who have good SAT scores are as likely to succeed as students with comparable scores from better-off households. They also argue that students given preferences for their athletic abilities do far worse in school than do students given any other sort of preference (including family legacies).
The Bowen team’s analysis might be persuasive, except that the authors devote one of their chapters to vilifying opponents of affirmative action, such as analysts for the Center for Equal Opportunity and the Center for Individual Rights. But the authors fail to address the ideas of affirmative action critics, but simply adopt a haughty “how dare they” tone. Also unpersuasive are heartfelt testimonials by beneficiaries of affirmative action; surely the authors are seasoned enough social scientists to know that anecdotal evidence, however passionate, does not show whether a social policy does or does not work.
Mr. Bowen and his colleagues do offer some good ideas. One interesting one is to allow state universities more freedom to set tuition in return for a reduction in government subsidies. But overall,”Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education” is hardly likely to change anyone’s mind about whether or not affirmative action is worth pursuing.
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Analysts of urban education tend to focus their energies on a few big cities. Look at the shelves of a big research library and you’re likely to find lots of volumes on New York, Los Angeles and Chicago schools and little good information on other cities. Thus Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego, edited by Frederick M. Hess (Harvard Education School, $29.95, 341 pages), is a highly unusual book.
San Diego’s superintendent, Alan Bersin, stayed in office for seven years. (He recently became California’s secretary of education.) Mr. Bersin invited Mr. Hess, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, to send a research team to analyze the successes and failures of San Diego school reform.
Mr. Bersin and his staff attempted bold changes in all sorts of school policies. But as New York Daily News education writer Joe Williams notes in a thoughtful overview, allies of the city’s teacher union controlled two of the five seats on the city’s school board, ensuring ferocious battles on any issue relating to hiring, firing, and paying teachers. However, Mr. Bersin and his top assistant, Anthony Alvarado, were able to replace 81 percent of the city’s principals. They also substantially reformed the way new teachers were hired, allowing applicants to send in resumes electronically rather than using old-fashioned paper methods.
Many of the papers in “Urban School Reform” will only be of interest for other education researchers, but the book was a good idea that should be used as a model for studying other large school systems.
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Every college teacher nearing career’s end wonders if he or she was a success or failure and if they lived up to the examples set by the great teachers they had in graduate school. Many of these teachers write books about their experiences; a typical example is The Art of Teaching, by Jay Parini (Oxford, $17.95, 160 pages).
Mr. Parini, who teaches English at Middlebury College, offers a great deal of advice in his book. Most of it is uninteresting. For example, he is obsessed with the clothes his colleagues wear and what their taste in outfits secretly says. But while teaching is a daily performance, it’s what teachers say, not what they wear, that matters. And like too many professors, Mr. Parini loves to infuse his lectures with leftist politics — and is shocked when students dare to disagree with him, such as by arguing that the Iraq War was necessary.
“The Art of Teaching” may help a graduate student ace a job interview at the Modern Language Association annual convention. But the only lesson Mr. Parini will provide most readers is that even a little book can be a waste of time.
Martin Morse Wooster is the author of “Angry Classrooms, Vacant Minds.”
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