A report from the Southern Education Foundation has found that the South has become the first region in the US where more than half of public students are poor and more than half are members of ethnic or racial minorities. The report said that the shift was not a result of white flight from public schools to private schools -- a trend that they say spiked during desegregation and has not had much effect on school demographic since the early 1980s. Instead, what has contributed to the change is an influx of Latinos and other ethnic groups, the return of African-Americans to the South, and higher birth rates among African-American and Latino families. Four of the fifteen states in the report -- Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas -- now have a majority of both low-income and minority students. Only one Southern state, Virginia, has neither.
The article also mentioned research from the Pew Hispanic Center. They found that more minority students in a district does not mean that classrooms are more integrated. Instead, research shows that most white children in the South attend predominantly white schools and an even higher percentage of African-American and Hispanic students attend predominantly minority schools. Furthermore, minority schools tend to be larger, have higher student-teacher ratios, and have higher poverty rates. The co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA said that Southern schools are more segregated now than they were at the height of integration in the '70s and '80s. (Full Story)
A study by a Columbia Law School professor found that while law schools added about 3,000 seats for first-year students from 1993 to 2008, both the percentage of African-American and Mexican-American law students declined in that period. In 1993, among the 43,520 new law students, 7.9% were African-American and 1.6% were Mexican-American. In 2008, among the 46,500 new law students, 7.3% were African-American and 1.4% were Mexican-American. While some might say that is not a huge drop, it is still a decline -- when it should be an increase; and the low percentages are indicative of a problem as well.
From 2003 to 2008, 61% of African-American applicants and 46% of Mexican-American applicants were denied acceptance to all of the law schools that they applied for; this is compared to 34% for white applicants. In that same time period (1993-2008), both African-American and Mexican-American applicants improved their college GPAs and their scores on the LSAT. The researcher said, "Even though their scores and grades are improving, and are very close to those of white applicants, African-Americans and Mexican-Americans are increasingly being shut out of law school."
Interestingly, the study found that Hispanics other than Mexicans and Puerto Ricans made gains in enrollment -- from 3.1% of new law students in 1993 to 5.1% in 2008. The researcher said he did not have an explanation for the disparity, particularly because the 2008 LSAT scores among Mexican-Americans were, on average, one point higher than those of Hispanics, and one point lower in 1993.
The problem of low admissions among these groups is not because of a drop in applicants. The number of African-American and Mexican-American students applying to law school has been relatively constant, or growing slightly, in the past two decades. An associate dean of Thomas M. Cooley Law School's campus in Auburn Hills, Michigan (which enrolls a high percentage of African-American students) said, "A big part of it is that many schools base their admissions criteria not on whether students have a reasonable chance of success, but how those LSAT numbers are going to affect their rankings in the U.S. News & World Report. Deans get fired if the rankings drop, so they set their LSAT requirements very high. We're living proof that it doesn't have to be that way, that those students with the slightly lower LSAT scores can graduate, pass the bar, and be terrific lawyers." The co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers said that while she understands the importance of rankings, law schools must address this issue of diversity -- "if you're so concerned with rankings, you're going to lose a generation." The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003, in Grutter vs. Bollinger, that race can be taken into account in law school admissions because the diversity of the student body is a compelling state matter. The associate dean from Thomas M. Cooley Law school added, "What's happening, as the American population becomes more diverse, is that the lawyer corps and judges are remaining predominantly white." (Full Story)
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