While discussing affirmative action in class recently, a fellow student said the reason we need policies that give minorities preference in admissions to the best institutions of higher learning is because of educational inequality in primary and secondary schools.
As a society, we have been content with the grossly negligent behavior of tolerating subpar educational instruction for minorities and the poor. We wait until students are 18 years old to blame lower SAT scores on racism, and then we admit individuals to programs that fit certain categories in the name of diversity.
It is time we phase out affirmative action policies with the most comprehensive overhaul of the educational infrastructure in this country since desegregation. This overhaul starts with changing how we view the profession of teaching.
Two generations ago, women were largely restricted to select professions if they worked out of the home, and chief among these was teaching. Because of the artificial barriers society placed on women, there was a large amount of talent in the teaching profession. As women have gained options besides the traditional roles of nurse and teacher, there are no longer any barriers to prevent talent from leaving this field, and it shows.
Today, students who choose education as a major are drawn from the lower end of the academic distribution in college as measured by SAT and ACT scores. Education is rated, in a recent academic study by Wake Forest, as the easiest of all college majors; the average GPA of education majors is 3.36. These metrics suggest we are drawing people to the education profession who can't cut it as engineers or scientists at the detriment mostly to disadvantaged students.
The reason the stats on those who go into teaching are so discouraging is because of how discouraged teachers are when they enter the profession.
Teachers are treated like industrial-age factory workers, and their unions demand they be treated as such. Because of the push against grading teachers, we have turned teaching into a static profession with little prestige.
I think it is critical that every facet of teachers' employment contracts be reevaluated. While it would be a huge mistake to think that teacher ability can be measured by one test such as the FCAT, a holistic evaluation method looking at administration, student and parent feedback in combination with test scores on other nationally normed tests would be a good place to start.
The tenure review period for teachers must be extended. Some teachers get tenure in three years, but it takes our professors usually seven years before they can be assured of job security.
Currently, teachers are paid based on years of experience and any higher degrees they might have. In an era of devalued degrees and for-profit colleges offering masters programs ad naseum, this is an archaic compensation structure that should be eliminated.
Worst of all, when all teachers are treated the same and there are no incentives for performance, the best teachers will choose to go to the nicest suburbs and teach the richest students. It is an implicitly higher form of payment to teach students from better backgrounds, thus making these teaching positions more competitive.
Minority students growing up in tough neighborhoods get teachers who are demoralized and who just try to survive because the teachers get no support and are paid low wages with no monetary incentives to do their best. Disadvantaged communities would benefit most of all with increased focus on pay for performance in teaching.
Affirmative action is just a way to assuage white elites' guilt at creating a system that gives minorities and the poor slim-to-none chance at success with teachers who have no reason to be vested in their students' academic progress.
Travis Hornsby is a statistics and economics senior at UF. His column appears on Mondays.
