"Currently only about one in three African-Americans who goes to an American law school passes the bar on the first attempt and a majority never become lawyers at all," says UCLA law professor Richard Sander.
In an article published in the Stanford Law Review, Sander and his research team concluded several thousand would-be black lawyers either dropped out of law school or failed to pass the bar because of affirmative action. Known as the ‘mismatch’ effect, Sander claims students who are unprepared and whose academic credentials are below the median are admitted to law schools they are unqualified to attend. If those same students instead were to go to less elite or competitive schools, more would graduate, pass the bar and become lawyers.
All that has been seen across the board in higher education. If you had enough data, I suspect you would see that the differences in preparation and performance of Asian American students, Jewish students, Irish students, and African American students, and Hispanic students are no greater than those between different neighborhoods of origin among many homogeneously White student bodies. Students who come from out of town may be much better prepared academically than students from in town. The differences have everything to do with educational cultural.
But you can't get the key data, because affirmative action virtually forces institutions of higher learning to lie about what they are doing. Gale Heriot, a law professor and member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, wants the California State Bar to turn over its data to Professor Sander. No chance.
Recently, a California bar committee voted 5-3 to turn down Sander’s request to use bar data collected over the last three decades on student test scores, law school admissions, academic performance and bar passage rates. The data, considered a gold standard by affirmative action researchers, is considered key to determine if racial preferences work.
"There is no answer but to give him the information," says black civil rights attorney Leo Terrell. "What is the state bar afraid of? We need to know."
The California Bar has its excuses.
"The release (bar exam) applicants sign does not allow us to release the information to third parties," Whitnie Henderson told FOX News. "Looking at all the information we just decided it was not something that fit within the committee’s purview."
The
real reason they aren't releasing the data, of course, is that they
know it would confirm Professor Sander's thesis, and they just can't
handle that truth.
The universities cling to affirmative action as an article of faith.
They are immune, if not allergic, to any counter evidence. This is
exactly the opposite of what science is all about. Affirmative action
hurts the people it is intended to help. It corrupts the institutions
that practice it.
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