Education system fails black pupils

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by Gerald Cox

Monday, October 8, 2007 00:00

Proponents of our university's much-debated holistic admissions policy have received sobering news. According to the U.S. Department of Education, Wisconsin's 4th and 8th grade black students are performing poorly when compared to their white peers. In fact, according to the study — the National Assessment of Education Progress — Wisconsin's black students have the dishonor of being on the wrong end of a reading gap that is the largest in the nation.

With 13.8 percent of Wisconsin's population being made up of minorities and the total minority population at the University of Wisconsin at 12 percent of the university's student population, UW fails to present a student body that is as diverse as the state for which it boasts flagship status. Further, the minority population of Wisconsin high school graduates as a percentage is higher than that of the population of the state as a whole. At 14.9 percent of the Wisconsin high school graduate population, Wisconsin minorities are being underrepresented at our flagship university by almost 3 percentage points.

The answer to this paucity on the university's end seems to be the oft-ridiculed notion of holistic admissions. The most salient — though hardly the sole — targets of this policy are minority students. Holistic admission is about one thing: increasing the number of minority students enrolled at UW-Madison.

So why the disconnect between our state's minority population and UW's? We may have found an unsettling answer. The National Assessment of Education Progress reveals a startling reality for holistic admissions apologists. The demographic that holistic admissions seems to target most in Wisconsin, black students, are evincing a tendency to underperform when compared with their white peers. As the largest portion of Wisconsin minority students, black students are in a position to shape the percentage of minority students attending this university.

So why do we chide the university for not increasing its diversity when black students in Wisconsin's schools are struggling to keep up with their peers? Could it be that this university is bending over backward to admit students of color, yet it somehow cannot find enough qualified students of color to admit?

I do not question the qualifications of any black student who has chosen to matriculate here, as so many critics of holistic admissions do. But I cannot help but ask how in the face of such effective and laudable programs as the PEOPLE Program, POSSE and the Chancellor’s Scholarship Program, the masses still lament the paucity of minorities. Why does the tenor of such lamentation seem to indicate that the university itself is to blame?

The administration claims that the furor over the admissions policy is much ado about nothing, as it has been in practice for some 15 years. However, if that is the case, why is there not a commensurate number of minority students as there are minority high school graduates? Provided the university's insistence is true, and holistic admissions has indeed been in practice for a decade and a half, the fruits of its labor have been and remain inadequate.

Often, the university itself is the immediate recipient of blame. However, I would proffer the suggestion that the problem may lie elsewhere.

The problem of Wisconsin's lack of diversity vis-à-vis its black students will not be solved by an effort on the part of the university to admit students of color who were outperformed by their white and presumably more advantaged peers. The problem will be solved once black students start performing at a level commensurate with their white counterparts.

Perhaps it is not a lack of effort on the part of the university, but a problem in how Wisconsin's black students are learning — or in particular, where they are learning.

The conditions of schools that boast a disproportionate number of black students are often characterized as inadequate. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that districts with high minority enrollments have $1,000 less to spend on students than the "whitest districts in the state." Further, those schools with high minority populations tend to have teachers with less experience. There's work to be done in Wisconsin public schools if we expect to see the sort of diversity at UW as exhibited in our high school population.

The reality is that more money and better teachers mean little to a black student if his or her parents do not instill a desire for knowledge and create a context for academic success in the home. To quote Wendell Harris, the education committee chairman of the Milwaukee chapter of the NAACP, "We can't keep making excuses for parents." Rich school district or not, a child is only as good as the support his or her parents provide.

The number of black students admitted to our university will not substantially increase until black communities and families are unified in a determination to increase it themselves.

Gerald Cox (gcox@badgerherald.com) is a senior majoring in economics.