About four years ago, I learned some disturbing news about our area’s brightest and most talented young people. I began hearing stories of Birmingham high school students who maintain excellent grades, but because of a limited vocabulary and underdeveloped critical reasoning skills, they do so poorly on standardized tests that they are either rejected by our region’s best colleges, or fail to succeed if accepted.

         To help address this, I collaborated with the Birmingham City School System, area colleges and numerous area businesses to start SpeakFirst. Our program is designed to enrich the academic experience of motivated students from Birmingham's public high schools through participation on an all-star debate team. The debate training provided by SpeakFirst develops students’ critical thinking, writing, research and public speaking skills. Tutoring, college admissions guidance, standardized test prep and summer internships are also provided.

        The reasons for starting such an initiative have become clear to everyone involved as we move into our third year of operation. Temani Beck is one of those reasons. Temani is a 16-year-old junior attending Ramsay High School. She is one of seven foster children being raised by a single mother. Temani is gifted, driven and has worked very hard on her debating skills since she was a freshman. If you would like to argue with her about the importation of prescription drugs or the relationship between church and state, be prepared, she is getting really good.

        Another reason SpeakFirst was started has to do with a story too few people know - the story of affirmative action in our nation’s higher education system. In recent years, the end of racial preferences in admissions at some major universities around the country has elicited an outcry from many liberals, raising predictions that once-diverse campuses would become nearly all-white communities of privilege and exclusivity. Using trained college volunteers to conduct the screenings helps fill a gap between agencies like Sight Savers and the children who need their help, Black said.

        Taking center stage in the drama was the state of California which, in 1996, passed Proposition 209 amending their state constitution to prohibit the consideration of race in college admissions. Prior to 1996, California’s so-called affirmative action policy was warm and fuzzy, but also effortless and cost-free: “come to a football game, tour our campus, buy a t-shirt, and we will drop the bar low enough for you to get in. We get credit for valuing diversity and inclusion and you get a college education.  Everyone wins, right?” Wrong.

        As it turns out, there is more to the story. Although college enrollment has soared during the past quarter century, the proportion of college students completing degrees of any kind has remained flat.  How could this be? Many students from low-income families receive an inadequate secondary education and simply aren’t prepared to succeed in college. In fact, low-income students are six times less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree than high-income students.

        Not surprisingly, in the first year following the removal of racial preferences from the University of California System admissions, minority enrollment dropped 50%. But then the UC System tried something novel – they dramatically increased their efforts to improve the academic preparation of students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in California’s K-12 schools - expanding the pool of qualified minority students prepared to succeed in college. The UC System’s initiatives include partnerships between UC colleges and individual schools, strengthening curricula and establishing summer academic enrichment programs.

        So what happens when you couple high standards with outreach, innovation and hard work? Five years after passage of Prop 209, the percentage of minority students admitted to California colleges has rebounded to pre-1996 percentages - and most importantly - graduation rates have increased as well. Ending racial preferences forced the UC System to acknowledge that true affirmative action requires an obligation to act affirmatively – affirmative action as a verb rather than a self-congratulatory soundbite.

        Racial preferences in higher education are a cop-out. When we become buried in our own myths about race, we put off the far harder work of ending the intellectual isolation of poor children. Focusing outreach on economically disadvantaged communities inevitably promotes racial diversity in higher education since African Americans are disproportionately concentrated in low resource areas.

        Academic partnerships such as SpeakFirst, in which individuals from institutions of higher education provide assistance to K-12 students, are a welcome development, but assisting only a relatively small number betrays the larger calling on our community.  Outreach to our poorest-performing schools must become a stated priority of the leadership of our institutions of higher learning (both administration and faculty), reinforced by leadership from our city and support from our business community.  Only by making such outreach a priority, will we  provide the necessary nourishment to support initiatives like SpeakFirst on a larger scale.

        I invite you to visit one of our debate practices and meet Temani. She will continue to practice debate for three hours a day, three days a week for the next year. On her own merit, she will get a full scholarship to the college of her choice, and she will graduate with honors four years later. She believes it. I believe it.
 

© 2005 Impact Alabama