AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EVEN WORSE FOR BLACK EDUCATION THAN ANYONE IMAGINED

It is obvious that AA harms the standards of black education. Lowering standards is how it works. But it now seems that it reduces the NUMBER of black graduates too

A new and provocative study on affirmative action, which will appear in the Stanford Law Review this month, is attracting such attention that there is a special click-through on the publication's website to field questions about it. The conclusions of the study, that racial preferences at law schools produce fewer rather than more black lawyers, is already generating controversy that is sure to only increase. The study, "A Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," argues, using statistical analysis, that although total elimination of racial preferences would cause a 14 percent reduction in the number of blacks accepted to law school, there would be an 8 percent increase in the number of blacks actually becoming lawyers. The reason for this, according to the analysis in the 100-plus page study, is because of the improvement in grades, graduation rates, and rates in passing bar examinations that would result from color-blind admissions policies.

The author of the study, Richard Sander, is a law professor at UCLA who is also trained as an economist. It is interesting to also note that, according to press profiles, Sander is a long-time liberal and advocate of race-conscious public policy. His apparent motive in doing the study was to provide rigorous analysis that would examine if indeed racial preferences produce the net benefit to blacks that are the alleged justification of these policies. In a recent Los Angeles Times column, Sander makes it a point to avoid being placed in any ideological camp. His stance, inferred from the column, is that racial preferences are justifiable if they indeed lead to the goal of a color-blind society. On the question of law-school preferences, he suggests eliminating, or cutting them back, because his data indicate that they hurt blacks and not because he opposes them in principle. Nevertheless, the conclusion of Sander's study, that racial preferences in law schools result in a net reduction of new black lawyers, is an eye opener........

While academics go on about the validity of Sander's analysis, blacks should make the safest and most prudent bet and assume that it is accurate. We should focus our attention on the real problem, which is that our kids are not getting the education at the K-12 levels to prepare them for the challenges of university life. The data that demonstrates this is beyond question.

The most important opportunity we have for revitalizing K-12 education is to provide alternatives to the public school system through school choice. Polls show equal support for this reform among blacks and whites. The task now is getting tangible plans in place to provide schooling alternatives for every black (and white) child.

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RELIGIOUS COLLEGES THRIVING

It's not news in academia, although it may come as a surprise to the rest of us: America's 700-plus religiously affiliated colleges and universities are enjoying an unprecedented surge of growth and a revival of interest. New institutions have opened their doors in recent years, including the evangelical Patrick Henry College in Virginia; Ave Maria, a conservative Catholic law school in Michigan; and the Buddhist-run Soka University in California. Long-established schools such as the Mormon flagship, Brigham Young University, have launched satellite campuses.

And enrollments are soaring. As Naomi Schaefer Riley reports in "God on the Quad" (St. Martin's, 274 pages, $24.95), the number of students attending the 100 schools of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities--an organization of four-year liberal-arts schools dedicated to promoting the Christian faith--rose 60% between 1990 and 2002. In those same years the attendance at nonreligious public and private schools stayed essentially flat. The number of applications to the University of Notre Dame, the nation's premier Catholic college, has risen steadily over the past decade, with a 23% jump last year alone.

But numbers don't tell the whole story. Many religious schools, traditionally regarded as second-tier or worse, have improved the quality of their students and of their academic offerings, sometimes dramatically. The evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois and the Reformed-affiliated Calvin College in Michigan now rank among the nation's leading liberal-arts institutions. Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Waco, Texas, has embarked on an ambitious program to boost itself into the nation's first rank by hiring 220 new full-time faculty members. The percentage of Ave Maria's law graduates who passed the Michigan bar examination last year was higher than that of the University of Michigan's graduates. Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva University is on U.S. News & World Report's list of the nation's top 50 research universities, while Wheaton ranks 11th in percentage of graduates who go on to receive Ph.D.s.

Surely Ms. Riley, a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal's "Houses of Worship" column, has picked an exciting topic, and her book attempts to explore what life is like at religious colleges and why so many young people these days scramble to attend them. To this end, she visited 20 strongly confessional campuses across the country, mostly Protestant, and a group of small, relatively new conservative Catholic campuses, such as Thomas Aquinas in California and Magdalen in New Hampshire. Also on her itinerary were Notre Dame, Soka and two Jewish schools. She devoted most of her interviews to the students themselves, although she also visited classrooms, where professors, unlike most of their secular-school counterparts, actually encourage the discussion of religious matters.

Ms. Riley's aim, as she explains, was to focus primarily not on how the schools maintain their religious identity, if they do, but on how they foster a student culture that rejects the intellectual and moral relativism of most college campuses. The students at these schools, instead of experimenting with sex and drugs, generally oppose sex outside marriage and choose to marry early and start a family.

"Most dress modestly and don't drink, use drugs, or smoke," writes Ms. Riley. "They study hard, leaving little time for sitting in or walking out. Most vote, and a good number join the army. They are also becoming lawyers, doctors, politicians, college professors, businessmen, psychologists, accountants, and philanthropists in the cultural and political centers of the country." Ms. Riley calls the 1.3 million graduates of such schools a "missionary generation" that aims to change today's spiritually empty culture....

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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