Race and affirmative action.

Two occurrences of racial stereotyping against Native Americans recently were stopped within an educational setting. The principal of a Skokie, Illinois primary school would not let his first grade class dress as Native Americans for the annual Thanksgiving celebration. After a parent complained about the offensiveness of the costumes, Principal Pete Davis consulted two Native American organizations whose advice he took in making his decision (Chicago Tribune, November 22, 2003). At Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Native American students were greeted with dorm windows painted with cartoon renderings of the decapitated heads of Native Americans stuck on poles while being scalped. This display of racism was in preparation for homecoming festivities under the theme of "Mark Your Territory." The President of the university, who had been trying to improve relations with Native American students, had the offensive paintings removed (Native Times, October 25, 2003).

Sally Lehrman, a freelance medical and science writer and Expert Fellow of the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication has written an article on how and why race-based data matters in relationship to education. Lehrman shows how "data on teacher demographics, expulsion records, test scores, and other measures" can identify patterns of structural racism that lead "to disengagement by students of color and ultimately, fewer opportunities for higher education." Lehrman sees education as "the latest arena in which community leaders, attorneys, and social scientists have increased their reliance on race-based data to identity hidden inequalities and search for ways to address them." The article ends with an excellent list of sources on racism and education (Alternet, October 6, 2003, www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=16912).

The Zero Tolerance policy, begun back in the Reagan years in the mid-1980s, and pushed further by Clinton's Gun Free School Act of 1994, has led annually to more than 3 million students suspended and nearly 100,000 more expelled, between kindergarten and twelfth grade. Legal and education experts are blaming zero tolerance for a "school to prison" pipeline, with suspension and expulsion leading to incarceration rates of "staggering disproportion" for African-American students ("Discipline and Punishment," The Nation, December 10, 2003).

Texas A&M University will drop its 20-year commitment to affirmative action, a decision made by members of the Republican establishment, including the corporate leader of Clear Channel, the former director of the CIA who serves as president of the university, and Republican Governor, and of course a U.S. President who has made the Office for Civil Rights into a silent partner (Counterpunch, January 14, 2004, www.counterpunch.org/moses011420 02.html).

In the University of Michigan Affirmative Action case, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said, "Law schools represent the training ground for a large number of our nation's leaders ... it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open" to every segment of society. While Sandra Day O'Connor is referring to race, she certainly is not referring to class. According to a recent Educational Testing Service study, the nation's 146 most selective colleges and universities have only 3 percent of their students coming from the bottom economic quarter, only 10 percent coming from the bottom 50 percent, and a whopping 74 percent coming from the top quarter ("Educating for Privilege," The Nation, October 13, 2003).

The New York Times Education Life section (January 18, 2004) examines, for its 50th anniversary in May, the Supreme Court landmark ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, rejecting "separate but equal" education for the races. Unfortunately, the articles dedicated to Brown's legacy must also focus on its lost promise. The lead article "The Supreme Struggle" describes millions of students celebrating the Brown anniversary in classrooms as segregated as when the case was decided.