Equal Education Still A Dream For Some Equal Education Still A Dream For Some
March 3, 2000
USA Today
DeWayne Wickham
Thousands of demonstrators are expected to converge today in Tallahassee to protest Gov. Jeb Bush's proposal to replace Florida's affirmative action program with a race-neutral plan that he says will produce similar results. The demonstrators' timing is bad - and so, too, is their aim. Their rally takes place on Super Tuesday, the busiest day on the presidential primary calendar. As a result, the protest march through the streets of Tallahassee will get about as much attention as a naked man in a nudist camp. Faulty strategy compounds their timing error. Instead of trying to shoot down that portion of Bush's proposal that revamps the way disadvantaged minorities gain entry into the state's higher-education institutions, the activists should set their sights on Florida's dismal record of educating black and Hispanic kids in its elementary and secondary schools.
College-level affirmative action is a quick fix for the state's failure to meet its constitutional commitment ''to make adequate provision'' for ''a high-quality education'' for all schoolchildren. Like many other states whose constitutions offer similar guarantees, Florida has failed to make good on this promise. Rather than march on the legislature, the demonstrators should storm the courts to sue Florida for the failure of many schools to educate black and Hispanic students. Four years ago, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that Hartford's public schools were violating the state's constitutional guarantee of equal educational opportunity. It ordered state officials to give priority to remedying these problems. More than one reason for a lawsuit.
That same year, a group of Florida parents and school board members brought a similar lawsuit. They argued unsuccessfully in state court that top Florida officials hadn't provided a ''uniform system of free public schools.'' ''This kind of litigation is tough to do,'' said Connie Rice, a California-based civil rights attorney, ''but winning is not the only reason for bringing such cases.'' Lawsuits such as these ''can shine a spotlight on the savage inequality that many minority students are made to suffer.'' Rice should know. She's a member of a legal coalition that intends to sue California for its failure to provide students there with ''an equal opportunity to learn.''
Like Rice's group, Florida activists should lean as much on their state constitution's equal protection clause as its guarantee for a high-quality education. Implicit in the equal protection clause, they should argue, is the right of all students to have access to public education that provides an equal opportunity to go to college. On this count, Florida clearly has failed its black and Hispanic schoolchildren. While 66% of white fourth-graders in Florida were reading at the basic level or higher in 1998, 68% of black students and 53% of Hispanic youngsters - many of whom attend racially segregated schools - were reading below the basic level, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Assessment of Education Progress.
The federal report also found that 34% of black and 26% of Hispanic eighth-graders scored below the basic level in writing, while only 15% of white students failed to meet the basic writing standard that year. These dismal Florida numbers are buttressed by a new national study by the Applied Research Center, which concluded that ''public schools consistently fail to provide the same quality education for students of color as for white students.'' Searching for new ways It is the failure of Florida's schools to educate black and Hispanic students adequately that is the state's Achilles' heel - not the governor's plan to do away with affirmative action.
Don't misunderstand me. Affirmative action is a rational and reasonable response to past and current discrimination that denies people of color full access to the mainstream of opportunity in this country. But where there is neither political will nor popular support to sustain such programs, advocates of such remedies must find new ways to bring about the same results. As voters in California and Washington have shown, states are especially vulnerable to attack on affirmative action plans, which are better defended in cities such as Atlanta, where both the mayor and a majority of residents support such programs.
Protest marches are unlikely to alter Bush's plan, or change the thinking of the majority of Floridians whom polls show favor a proposed ballot initiative that would outlaw - not simply retool - all of the state's affirmative action programs. This daunting reality demands solutions to Florida's race problem that hold out the hope of far-reaching change - not a plan the state's voters are almost certain to strike down.
AAD Homepage | Florida and Affirmative Action