From The Branch in partnership with The 74 and MeidasTouch, Where the Schools Went is a five-part documentary series about what happened to the city’s schools after the levees broke, and how it led to the most radical education experiment in modern American history.

Listen to the trailer now.

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In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action ruling, many progressives have responded with a flurry of proposals to push colleges to find alternative methods of pursuing racial equity. Common ideas include pushes to end legacy admissions, invest in more robust recruiting, increase enrollment, and strengthen wealth-based admissions preferences. I support most of those ideas — as we discussed recently on the Lost Debate — as do many experts across the political divide. 

However, a more polarizing and destructive response has been gaining steam in liberal circles. Many prominent commentators have called for an end to standardized tests. The most prominent form of this argument comes from Ibram X. Kendi, who had been calling for universities to abandon the SAT and ACT long before the ruling. In an Atlantic piece written days after the decision, Kendi once again laid out his argument:

When admissions metrics value SAT, ACT, or other standardized-test scores, they predict not success in college or graduate school, but the wealth or income of the parents of the test takers. . . . Standardized tests mostly favor students with access to score-boosting test prep. A multibillion-dollar test-prep and tutoring industry was built on this widespread understanding. Companies that openly sell their ability to boost students’ scores are concentrated in immigrant and Asian American communities. But some Asian American ethnic groups, having lower incomes, have less access to high-priced test-prep courses. 

The problem with Kendi’s argument is that he doesn’t discuss the alternatives to standardized tests, which are often even more regressive. I wrote about this issue in a recent article:

Do you know what else correlates with family income and education? Every alternative to standardized tests. This includes GPA, extracurricular access, the quality and quantity of letters of recommendation, college admissions editing and assistance, and connections to admissions offices. At least standardized testing is transparent and consistent. A student in Harlem is taking the same test as a student in Scarsdale. And though they won’t have the same access to resources to prepare, the tests are evaluated using the same criteria. The same can’t be said of many of the alternatives, which have all of the same resource inequities, but none of the objectivity on the back end. A student can have a 4.0 GPA at their zoned public school but may face college admissions officers who don’t respect that score as much as a 4.0 GPA at an elite private school. If that Harlem student sat for the same test and did better than that kid in Scarsdale, then that student from Harlem will get the admissions officer’s attention.

Now, thanks to a new comprehensive study from Raj Chetty’s team over at Opportunity Insights, we have data to demonstrate the difference between standardized tests and other measures. Here’s what his study had to say:

[O]ur results raise questions about the equity implications of holistic evaluation policies. Highly selective public colleges that follow more standardized processes to evaluate applications exhibit smaller disparities in admissions rates by parental income than private colleges that use more holistic evaluations. While holistic evaluations permit broader evaluations of diverse candidates in principle, in practice, they appear to create incentives and scope for students from high-income families to further differentiate themselves from others (e.g., by enrolling at private high schools that provide non-academic credentialing). Similar challenges may arise in many other settings where applicants are evaluated on complex criteria, from internships to job applications to memberships in selective clubs.

According to Chetty, these so-called holistic practices are “uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success.” 

So, not only do these squishy practices harm poor students, they also select for students who are less likely to succeed in life, which is precisely the opposite of what Kendi claims. 

Kendi also argues that standardized tests are racist: 

[T]he tests themselves have racist origins. Eugenicists introduced standardized tests a century ago in the United States to prove the genetic intellectual superiority of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon men. These “experimental” tests would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” the Stanford University psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman wrote in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. Another eugenicist, the Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham, created the SAT test in 1926. SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” aptitude meaning “natural ability to do something.”

This is a textbook case of the genetic fallacy. If something originated from an invalid or illegitimate (or racist) source, then it must always be wrong. According to this logic, if Isaac Newton was racist, then gravity must be racist. Of course this is silly. But let’s pretend for the sake of argument that an idea with a racist past must always be racist. In that case, the subjective admissions policies that would become our sole criteria in Kendi’s world would also become suspect. 

During its early history, Harvard’s admissions were based purely on academic achievement. But in the 1920s, the rising number of Jewish students led to unease among the university’s leaders, prompting a shift towards a “policy of equal opportunity.” This involved adopting Columbia University’s application system, which evaluated “character” and “fitness,” and subtly included inquiries about “religious affiliation” and “mother’s maiden name.” Adopted across Ivy League universities, this change enabled Harvard to justify a nearly fifty percent reduction in Jewish students in subsequent years.

The difference between the alleged racist origins of standardized tests and the newer “holistic” admissions processes is that the universities have weakened the former in order to discriminate against students of color, most recently against Asian-Americans. And they have kept the latter, the holistic processes, to mask their discrimination. Meaning, this isn’t about the genetic origins of the practices; it’s about their modern form. Universities like Harvard had been using the subjective measures to punish a minority group until a lawsuit exposed their practices. 

At almost every turn of this debate, Kendi has it backward. The subjective measures aren’t the solution, they are the problem. They are the tools of the racists and elites. If we want to be truly anti-racist, we should preserve the tests and abandon anything that can’t be measured.

The post The Problem With Kendi appeared first on The Branch.

In a spirited essay titled “Why AI will save the world,” the famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen attempts to rouse us to a future tethered to artificial intelligence. We dissected this piece on a recent episode of Lost Debate. Our verdict: while brimming with provocative and fascinating arguments, Andreessen exaggerates his case while erecting and demolishing one straw man after another. 

There was a passage from the piece that we didn’t have a chance to discuss on the show, one that merits special attention: 

This is not to say that inequality is not an issue in our society. It is, it’s just not being driven by technology, it’s being driven by the reverse, by the sectors of the economy that are the most resistant to new technology, that have the most government intervention to prevent the adoption of new technology like AI – specifically housing, education, and health care. The actual risk of AI and inequality is not that AI will cause more inequality but rather that we will not allow AI to be used to reduce inequality.

Andreessen cites a piece from the American Enterprise Institute from a year ago that breaks out different sectors of our economy by inflation:

This chart has made the rounds on the internet, with the most common interpretation that the more regulated and government-dependent an industry, the more it’s prone to inflation. This dynamic certainly seems at play in higher education, something I wrote about a year ago concerning student debt:

Government created this crisis; government should solve it. “Government has been acting like a predatory lender,” argued Slate’s Jordan Weissman on a recent episode of the Plain English podcast. “They give out loans indiscriminately, they don’t check credit scores, and they don’t even ask questions about the kinds of schools you’re going to.” Borrowers from for-profit colleges hold on average 40% more debt and are twice as likely to default. The government has made it as easy as possible for these for-profits to prey on vulnerable customers and has done next to nothing to control costs or discriminate on the basis of quality of program or major. This dynamic is also at play in non-profit and public colleges as well, where, as Dominic Pino and many others have argued, the government restricted supply (making it hard to start a university) while manufacturing demand. To make matters worse, the government also makes it extremely difficult to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy. 

According to Andreessen, there’s something deeper going on. He argues that government involvement is negatively correlated with technological adoption:

The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now. Whereas the sectors in blue are less regulated, technology whips through them, pushing down prices and raising quality every year.

As someone who spent years battling with my local school district over Byzantine technology procurement policies (among other sins, they forced me to use clunky Pearson data and assessment tools, even as a charter), I am somewhat sympathetic to what Andreessen argues. Traditional public schools are often handcuffed by bureaucracy — or downright resistant to new technology (as evidenced by New York City’s ban on the use of AI). 

Yet even at the K-12 level, where the technological blockages are real, many teachers and schools ignore their districts and use whatever software tools they find helpful — something made possible due to the proliferation of student laptops. 

However, Andreessen’s argument becomes less persuasive regarding higher education, which is the sector that dominates the “red” portion of the graph he cites. Is the problem with college a technological one? Is innovation at the post-secondary level indeed “virtually forbidden”?

Elite colleges for years have been putting their content on the internet for free. I even interviewed someone recently who reconstructed an entire MIT degree at home using online materials. With few exceptions, you can find high-quality lectures, assessments, and other adaptive learning materials on any subject. You can even find expert coaching and tutoring if you are willing to pay a bit. As Andreessen himself points out, AI will only make those tools more effective. 

As Scott Galloway and others have pointed out, the problem with universities is largely in their credentialing power and elite networking. The technology is already there to scale Harvard’s instruction to millions, but the university is incentivized to keep its degrees scarce. A kid in Bangladesh can learn about philosophy from Michael Sandel, but she won’t be able to brush shoulders with the world’s elite or earn a degree that an employer would recognize. We don’t need new software or machine learning to solve that. In fact, the government (through the coercive power of the purse) may be the only entity that can force elite programs to serve more students. Sure, the government can and should weaken certain licensing rules, but that would do next to nothing to solve for the scarcity of degrees in certain elite professions that don’t require licenses. 

In this sense, as it relates to post-secondary education, the solution may be the opposite of what Andreessen proposes. We may actually need more robust government intervention.  

The post On AI and Inequality appeared first on The Branch.

When my 13-year-old daughter declared, out of the blue, that she no longer wanted to go to school, my wife and I were uniquely prepared. Having been a middle school teacher and principal for years, I’d talked kids through all sorts of frustrations with school. I had an arsenal of arguments, from the economic to the existential, to convince her to endure another year. Calmly, we asked her to say more.

“I’m just tired of sitting in class all day,” she said.

We nudged: Had something happened with her friends? Was there a teacher or particular class she didn’t like?

She assured us that her social life was fine, or, at least, as fine as it can be for anyone in 7th grade. Her teachers were kind and understanding, the classwork was interesting enough, and her grades were excellent. She loved a lot about her school. 

But she was tired. Tired of switching subjects every 45 minutes. Tired of not getting to pursue her own interests. Tired of spending so much time listening and watching. Tired, in other words, of all the practices and protocols inherent to school—what we educators know as the “grammar of schooling.” 

I took a breath. I knew this terrain, and had talked students through it before. But in this particular circumstance, I had a problem: I was tired of school myself.

After two decades, I had tired of exercising my beloved craft—teaching—within the particular structures of school. So tired, in fact, that I had recently quit working in schools altogether.

Like my daughter, I was genuinely conflicted. My career was full of remarkable moments of inspiration and connection, meaningful challenge, heart-warming appreciation from families and children, and plenty of fun. What other job pays you to read great books with children, or join in an epic match of playground soccer?

But the silver lining had a cloud: I felt constantly stuck, conflicted between what I knew to be best practices for teaching (i.e. creating space and time, letting kids lead the learning, building connections to other subjects and the “real world”) and the way school was designed (i.e. the frantic switching of classes, the centrality of the teacher and curriculum, the siloed architecture of classrooms and schools). Many days, it felt like driving with the brakes on.

The pandemic finally did me in. Though it was obvious we needed to be imagining new structures, new ways—even if temporary—to support children from afar, we educators found ourselves scrambling to invent the virtual version of the same old grammar of school. From glitchy Zoom lectures to absurd systems for tracking attendance and proctoring tests, it was beyond futile. It was heartbreaking. 

When the pandemic had subsided, and schools reopened—essentially unchanged by the greatest societal disruption in generations—I told my family I could no longer do it, and quit at the end of the year.

Now, as my 13-year-old described her own fatigue with school, I realized she’d see right through my usual responses—she’s got a keen nose for parental hypocrisy. I also realized I was no longer contractually obliged to convince any child of the value of school. So I asked her, If she didn’t go to school, what would she do instead?

Without missing a beat, she sketched her dream year of learning. She’d practice acting, dancing, and singing, which she loves more than anything else. She’d learn about space with her grandpa, tear through books and films, and study French in France. She’d even tackle Algebra, so she would be ready to enter high school the following fall.

My wife and I looked at each other. We had to admit, that sounded like a pretty terrific way for a young teenager to spend a year: exploring her interests, deepening her talents, and growing her self-discipline. What my daughter was talking about was not homeschooling, in which a child covers the conventional curriculum from the kitchen table, but “unschooling,” in which a child engages in self-directed, interest-based learning, often far from home.

Over the next few weeks, we weighed the pros and cons of this idea, which my daughter began calling her “X year.” We asked her to talk with her counselor, to make sure she really was ready to forgo daily friend time, classes with favorite teachers, and traditions like 8th grade promotion. My wife and I calculated how much money we could invest in private lessons, after-school programs, and travel. Together, we all mapped out how we might divvy up work spaces in our home, and imagined what a day might look like.

When we met again, our daughter’s resolve had deepened. So we decided—fingers crossed—to give it a try. Come August, when all the other kids start cleaning their sneakers and sharpening their number 2’s, our daughter will be… well, that’s what I’ll share here in Imbroglio, just as soon as we find out. 

Why write about this experiment into unschooling here, on a website focused on improving K-12 education? While many families may agree that school can be tiring at times, few are likely to have the interest—let alone the means—to pull their child for a year of self-directed exploration. Faced with the critical task of building a functional, equitable public education system for our nation’s 50 million school-going children, can we learn anything from the experience of one middle-class, 13-year-old child?

I believe we can. As the media sound the death knell on yet another wave of education reform, and as climate change and AI promise threaten more pandemic-type disruptions in the future, it’s time we cast a wider net for solutions. 

Beyond the picked-over ideas about how to improve our schools—the endless debates about teacher accountability, relevant curricula, and ideal class size—lies an array of worthy, time-tested approaches to teaching and learning that can, and should, become part of our national conversation about the future of learning. On the margins of education reform we find teenagers in Providence learning through internships in bakeries and bicycle shops; kids in New Mexico pursuing individual passions with community experts; homeschooling families in Oregon partnering with a school that is happy to enroll their children “part-time.”

With the right mindset, these ideas—like our X Year—can inspire schools, communities, and other families as they look for ways to engage all children in fulfilling learning experiences in and out of school. It’s a promising glimpse into reframing education as an exploration of each community’s unique “learning ecosystem,” a decentralized, interconnected web of learning places, of which schools play a major—but not the only—part.

No one should give up on schools; they’ve served millions of us well, including my daughter. We just need to reimagine education as something more than just school. If we can harvest ideas from the margins, grow them into viable alternatives for children of all ages in all sorts of settings, we’ll no longer have to convince tired kids to stay in school by snowing them with an arsenal of arguments. We’ll offer an array of options instead.

The post Beyond School: Postcards from an Unschooling Journey appeared first on The Branch.

How can we make the most of America’s plural riches? In partnership with The Children’s Equity Project, my Century Foundation colleagues and I recently published a report outlining the benefits of leaning into this national strength. As we write in the conclusion:

A plural, multilingual America is a smarter, stronger, richer—and more interesting—country. The United States is fortunate to have a large and growing population of linguistically and culturally diverse children in its schools. If policymakers commit to these children’s emerging bilingualism now with comprehensive investments in a more linguistically diverse teaching force and expanded access to dual-language immersion programs, they will have made a fundamental contribution to the health of our democracy.

America’s fraught relationship with its linguistic diversity is long-running, with pendular swings from periodically embracing to frequently erasing its multilingual heritage. For one, these lands host hundreds of indigenous languages from Yupik to Dakota, Ōlelo Hawai’i, Navajo, Sioux, and others. What’s more, many waves of immigration have brought the United States an enviable array of linguistic—and cultural—riches. American art, research, sports, cuisine, fashion, literature, technology, and music have been improved by millions of immigrants sharing the heritages of the countries and cultures of their birth. 

The country’s unique pluralism is particularly valuable because it spans the global range of human civilization. A little over a century ago, Italian, German, Polish, and others reshaped American cities and smaller towns alike. Nearly fifty years ago, immigrants and refugees from Southeast Asia began to arrive in large numbers, bringing Vietnamese, Hmong, Khmer, and other languages to the United States. In the 1990s, immigration from Latin American countries increased, bringing Spanish—but also K’iche, Mixtec, Mam, and other languages. 

Of course, these waves showed up in schools. At the beginning of the 20th century, roughly a quarter-million Midwestern children attended schools where they learned German. The country now boasts Hmong-English immersion charter schools and Vietnamese-English immersion district schools with the goal of preserving their children’s emerging bilingualism. Spanish-English bilingual education programs have long flourished in Texas, New York, and elsewhere. 

And yet, Americans have not always embraced this unique national endowment.  American jingoism put an end to most German-English bilingual schools by World War I, with many states banning German from campuses. This wouldn’t be the last time xenophobic opportunists fixated on multilingualism as a threat to the perceived American monoculture. Though the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Meyer v. Nebraska reversed these early twentieth-century bans on schools teaching in non-English languages—particularly German—they were later replaced by late twentieth-century bans on bilingual education for English-learning students in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts. 

Pro-monolingual  politicians routinely crop up whenever immigration rates increase. They follow a tired, predictable playbook: stoking the anxieties of voters—many of whom are direct descendants of relatively recent immigrants themselves—about how the latest round of newcomers threaten the stability of the American economy, society, and/or cultural core. The dubious premise behind this rhetoric—that there is a stable American “Way of Life” separate from constant enhancements by new, diverse cohorts of immigrants—is never examined. 

Fortunately, as my colleagues and I write in our report, the pendulum has recently swung back towards a plural, polyglot democracy. 

American enthusiasm for bilingual education—and bilingualism more generally—is unmistakably growing. Decades-old bans on bilingual instruction for linguistically diverse children were recently repealed in California and Massachusetts, and pressure for a similar move is growing in Arizona. Evidence suggests that family demand for dual-language immersion programs is often greater than the supply of seats—from Washington, D.C. to Gwinnett County, Georgia, to Portland, Oregon, and in hundreds of communities in between.

Whether families, educators, and policymakers know it or not, this enthusiasm has a substantial empirical backing from a wide range of fields—which we outline in detail in the report. Children who develop their emerging bilingual abilities gain unique cognitive, academic, social-emotional, and economic benefits. These are particularly pronounced for children who speak non-English languages at home—many of whom are designated as English learners by their schools. 

Of course, these benefits are of little importance to politicians preying upon American anxieties about linguistic diversity. These folks care far less about what is best for linguistically diverse kids and far more about the power they can obtain by trumpeting about the primacy of English in America. Indeed, just a few months ago, conservative lawmakers launched a legislative effort to codify English monolingualism in federal legislation. 

Trouble is, bilingualism’s benefits are collective as well. Economic forces continue to push the world towards global interconnection. The future belongs to countries best able to work across national and cultural lines of difference—which necessarily means working multilingually. As a longstanding immigrant destination country, the United States has inherent advantages navigating that new normal. The only question now is whether we’ll recognize—and learn to revel in—that strength. 

The post Bilingualism and the Monoculture appeared first on The Branch.

This piece originally appeared in the November 28 edition of Persuasion.

On October 31, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases concerning the constitutionality of race-based admissions in higher education, one involving Harvard University and another the University of North Carolina. The Court is expected to hand down both decisions by June. What makes these cases unique among challenges to affirmative action is that where the plaintiffs in prior landmark cases were white, the plaintiffs here, represented by an organization called Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), include Asian-Americans. 

Of the two cases before the court, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard has gotten the lion’s share of the public attention not only because of Harvard’s name and prestige, but also because of what it has revealed about the school’s selection process. Admissions offices at elite universities like Harvard tend to be black boxes, sparing in the information they’re willing to share with the public. Prior to this case, we’d just have to take university officials at their word when they described their admissions practices. But because of the trial’s discovery process, the public has been granted access to years of admissions data. For the first time, the public has been able to peek under the hood of America’s most storied and elite institution, one that has served as a gateway to power and privilege at the highest levels of society. 

We should be alarmed at what we’re seeing.

Let’s square up to one issue right at the start: SFFA is the brainchild of a man who is neither a student nor Asian, but a career conservative lawyer named Edward Blum who has prosecuted previous cases against affirmative action. To source plaintiffs for this case, Blum set up websites called harvardnotfair.org and uncnotfair.org, which invite anyone who has been rejected from either school to join the case. SFFA’s funding comes overwhelmingly from two conservative trusts.

It’s tempting, therefore, to dismiss SFFA v. Harvard as a purely political exercise, as the cynical ploy of a man whose previous attempts to destroy affirmative action failed, and who settled on sowing discord between minorities. Yet the uncomfortable reality is that if we can peer through the politics enfolding it, the case very well may have legal merit. 

For much of its early history, Harvard’s admissions process was based solely on academic performance. In the 1920s, however, the university’s leaders grew alarmed by the increasing number of Jewish students who were earning admission. The university president proposed a fifteen percent cap on Jewish students, but that was deemed too overt by other Harvard administrators, who instead opted for what they called a “policy of equal opportunity.” In doing so, they moved from an objective system to one that adopted Columbia University’s pioneering “college application,” which was meant to assess “character” and “fitness.” Buried in Columbia’s eight-page document were two questions: “religious affiliation” and “mother’s maiden name in full.” Harvard and other Ivy League universities adopted similar application forms (one administrator gushed that there was “consequently no Jew question at Princeton.”) This more subjective system of admissions allowed Harvard to develop a plausible explanation for a nearly fifty percent drop in Jewish students in the years to come. 

SFFA and its supporters believe that Harvard is using some of the very same tricks today to exclude Asian-American students. A brief jointly filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights and the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation argued that the “similarities between Jewish admissions being reduced in the 1920s and 1930s and increased Asian-American admissions being reduced since the 1990s are unmistakable.” 

Applicants to Harvard are now principally evaluated using five ratings: academics, extracurriculars, athletics, recommendations, and personality.  The most objective of the measures, the academic rating, is composed of the student’s standardized test scores and grade point average. The personality rating is far more subjective and is based on an admissions officer’s appraisal of each applicant’s capacity for various character traits such as likeability, courage, and integrity through a review of alumni interviews, high school recommendations, and admissions essays. 

SFFA believes that discrimination against Asian-Americans mostly took place in the personal ratings. To illustrate that point, they hired Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke economist, to delve into Harvard’s data from the past decade.

Arcidiacono found that 60% of Asian-Americans received one of Harvard’s two highest academic ratings compared to 46% for whites, 17% for Hispanics, and 9% for blacks. UCLA economist and law professor Richard Sander, writing in an amicus brief, compared those numbers to the “personal” ratings, finding that “for applicants in the 10th (top) academic decile, the percentage of applicants with high personal ratings was 49% for blacks, 36% for Hispanics, 31% for whites, and 23% for Asian-Americans.” This pattern was repeated at every academic decile. Harvard’s extracurricular ratings (presumably a proxy for leadership), which are more objective and mechanistic than the personality ratings, follow a similar pattern as the academic ratings—with Asian-Americans ranking at or near the top among racial groups. Put simply, in Harvard’s eyes, Asian-Americans were most likely to be elite in measurable academic performance and extracurricular leadership but least likely to show exceptional personal character. 

In other words, whenever a measurable and observable metric is used, Asian-Americans do well, but whenever discretion is given to admissions officers and they don’t have to be transparent about their process, the advantage for Asian-Americans mysteriously vanishes. This would be like Usain Bolt beating his nearest opponent in the 100-meter sprint by a full second, only to lose the race because judges felt he didn’t run with enough effervescence (an actual trait Harvard claims to look for in its personality ratings). 

I asked SFFA’s former Executive Director, Cory Liu about this discrepancy. “The personal rating is another way for them to consider race,” Liu said, “to further amplify the overall consideration of race and to get to the results they want.” To Liu, even if we took Harvard at their word that they intend the personal rating to be race-neutral, that would give rise to the question of implicit bias. “If the person thinks they’re being race-neutral,” Liu said, “but actually the results, year after year, show that Asians are disadvantaged, then maybe there’s something wrong in the evaluators’ eyes and perhaps students who come from immigrant backgrounds who spoke two languages at home, maybe they’re going to be a little less confident or a little less outgoing because they’ve struggled to fit in and things like that.” 

The trial record is rich with information that suggests something more explicit may have been at hand. Perhaps the most damning was testimony from William Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s Dean of Admissions, who shared that they routinely sent letters to what they deemed “sparse country”—states that are less dense, and ostensibly underrepresented at Harvard. Sparse country students with Preliminary SAT scores of 1310 or higher would get such letters—except for one group: Asian-Americans. For an Asian male to get such a letter, they’d have to score at least 1380. 

At trial, the plaintiff’s attorney asked Fitzsimmons to explain why Asians had to clear a higher bar to receive letters. Fitzsimmons gave a convoluted answer that compared students who’ve “only lived in the Sparse Country state for a year or two” with students who’ve “lived there for their entire lives under very different settings.” He never explained how he was able to determine this duration based on ethnicity. 

Taken together, the divergence between the personal rating and more objective measures, the inexplicable discrepancies in “sparse country” recruitment, and the pernicious origins of Harvard’s holistic admissions process combine to make a compelling case for a finding in favor of the plaintiffs. Given this overwhelming evidence, and the current makeup of the court, SFFA will almost certainly win this case—and do so with a more diverse group of plaintiffs than affirmative action opponents have put forth in the past. 

The conflict at the heart of this case is personal for me. My name is Ravi Gupta. If you Google my name the first two results are a partner at Sequoia Capital and a scientist who cured a man of HIV. I am neither of those people, and I don’t know them. But there’s a good chance they had South Asian parents who were obsessed with academics, as my father was. That’s likely where our similarities end. My Indian father left me when I was in middle school and I was raised by my white mother in a blue-collar neighborhood in Staten Island. In my teenage years, I got my stomach pumped for alcohol poisoning, was caught cutting school, was suspended multiple times for fighting, and was arrested once after a fight gone wrong. 

My mom pulled me out of the local district public school and enrolled me in Catholic school, which—to use a well-worn cliche—saved my life. Through a stroke of luck, I was accepted to Binghamton University, the leading light of the State University of New York system. I was such a screw-up that my high school guidance counselor called Binghamton’s admissions office because he thought I was lying about getting in. At Binghamton, I turned myself around, earned straight A’s, and was rewarded with admission to Yale Law School. 

When I wrote essays to Yale and other top law schools, I was well aware that the adversity I’d overcome was an asset, and I leaned into it. If the admissions office took that into account for their equivalent of a personal rating, I’m glad they did. But I was also aware, even back then, that my name wasn’t an asset. Whenever given the choice, more often than not I declined to fill in a bubble for “race” in applications. I know many Asian-Americans who do the same, knowing full well it’s futile because our names give us away. 

This case, despite its cynical origins, has merely given Asian-Americans proof of something we’ve long known to be true: The very policy that was established to even the racial scales in higher education has systematically punished us for our race. 

But of course, it isn’t just about us Asian-Americans. In my late twenties and early thirties, I founded and led a charter school in north Nashville that served mostly black students hailing from a neighborhood with the highest incarceration rate in the country. I love my former students, and if they can get an edge in admissions at the expense of people who grew up middle-class like me, I’d gladly make that trade. But for us to create a legitimate system that can both withstand legal scrutiny and garner political legitimacy, we have to be more honest with the people we are asking to sacrifice for the greater good. And we have to use admissions preferences to help the truly disadvantaged. That’s why I support a system that favors students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds over a system based on race. Given that black children are much more likely to experience poverty than white students, such a system would disproportionately help many of the students who would have benefitted under the old system. But it would do so without giving preference to students who don’t need the boost, or by pitting different disadvantaged ethnic groups against each other.

After June, race-conscious measures will likely be off the table, which means that policies I support, like those based on class, will likely rise in prominence. Those policies are allowed to be more heavy-handed and explicit, as neither the Civil Rights Act nor the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits discrimination on the basis of wealth. Liberals will claim this shift will be a step back for marginalized populations, but I’m inclined to believe the new reality could be more progressive and considerably more popular. At the very least, soon enough, our most storied institutions will no longer be allowed to blatantly discriminate against Asian-Americans. And for that, we should all be grateful. 

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