Even more on high-achieving, low-income kids

A few hours after publishing an op-ed piece by an erstwhile high-achieving, low-income kid, the NY Times followed up with an opinion piece by its Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt reporting on a study that shows, “Basic information can substantially increase the number of low-income students who apply to, attend and graduate from top colleges.”  The study was a randomized experiment that involved sending useful information to high-achieving, low-income kids:

• “The packages arrived by mail in October of the students’ senior year of high school. They consisted of brightly colored accordion folders containing about 75 sheets of paper. The sheets were filed with information about colleges: their admissions standards, graduation rates and financial aid policies.”

And the result was:

• “Among a control group of low-income students with SAT scores good enough to attend top colleges — but who did not receive the information packets — only 30 percent gained admission to a college matching their academic qualifications. Among a similar group of students who did receive a packet, 54 percent gained admission.”

And the conclusion was:

• “The experiment is part of a new wave of attention on the lack of socioeconomic diversity at top colleges….  Another recent study, by Ms. Hoxby and Christopher Avery of Harvard, found that many low-income students had the high school grades and scores to thrive at the nation’s 238 most selective colleges, but never applied. And the Supreme Court may soon further restrict race-based affirmative action, putting pressure on colleges to try a class-based version instead….  Together, these developments are creating a test of whether colleges mean what they say about meritocracy and diversity….  University officials have long trumpeted economic diversity as a goal. A few colleges, including Harvard and especially Amherst, have in fact significantly increased their ranks of low-income students. But at most top colleges, the student body — while geographically, ethnically and religiously diverse — remains dominated by affluent students….  The new research shows that large numbers of talented, well-prepared low-income teenagers exist. And many of them want to attend selective colleges, once they understand their options.”

Socioeconomic diversity – that’s something worth working for.

Wetbacks

The latest scandal in Washington, D.C. involves a congressman from Alaska recounting how his family ranch would regularly hire about 50 or 60 “wetbacks.”  The timing of this Republican’s slur on Hispanics is especially bad because the GOP is in the early stages of trying to revise its reputation as being inhospitable to Hispanics. 

So how bad is the slur?  I vaguely recall hearing the phrase back in North Dakota in the 60s.    Although my family’s land wasn’t fertile enough for sugar beets, the Red River Valley was only a few miles to the east, and the RRV farmers grew plenty of sugar beets.  Sugar beets are a row crop, and it thrived back then only if someone manually hoed for weeds between the plants, and migrant laborers performed that job every summer.

Because there were no migrant laborers in my part of North Dakota, they weren’t discussed often, but rather only in passing.  African-Americans were even more of an abstraction, and I don’t recall them being discussed at all.  Once again, however, I seem to recall my dad using the term “nigger.”  (He also talked about a money cheat trying to “jew” you, and I didn’t even realize he was referring to the Jewish religion.  I never met a Jew until law school in Austin.)

As a kid, I was oblivious to racial issues, and never discussed the subject with my dad.  But, despite my dad’s use of the terms “wetback” and “nigger,” he always treated everyone he encountered with dignity and respect, and I am confident he would have done the same thing with Hispanics and African-Americans.  But he probably also believed in the concept of “separate, but equal” even though the Supreme Court declared in 1954 that separate wasn’t equal, at least as applied to education.

The term “wetback” has been in use since at least 1920.  And when Eisenhower took office in 1953, the NY Times was still using it in a non-pejorative way:

• “The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican ‘wetbacks’ to a current rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal Government.”

Based on Eisenhower’s concern about the negative effects of illegal immigrants, he initiated a program in June 1954 called “Operation Wetback” to crack-down on illegal immigrants in the southwest.  According to an article in The Christian Science Monitor, the program started in California and Arizona because there was less local resistance there (compared to Texas) and by the end of July 50,000 illegal immigrants had been caught and 488,000 self-deported to avoid being caught.  The program moved into Texas in mid-July and by the end of September 80,000 were in custody and 600,000-800,000 self-deported. 

So when did the term “wetback” become a slur?  Wikipedia provides an interesting paragraph regarding “wetback” as an ethnic slur:

• “Generally used as an ethnic slur, the term was originally coined and applied only to Mexicans who entered Texas by crossing the Rio Grande river, which is located at the Mexican border, presumably by swimming or wading across and getting wet in the process. The non-offensive Spanish term is ‘mojado’ which means ‘wet.’  It is often preferred by Mexican-Americans by blood or pure-blood Mexicans who have become U.S. Citizens, to be referred to as ‘Los Mojados’ which translates to ‘the wet ones’ or ‘wet people.’” 

Although I can’t find anything definitive on the subject, I suspect “wetback” became a slur when people started applying it indiscriminately to all Hispanics, not just illegal immigrants.  Then, as Americans have become more ethnically sensitive, the use of any informal descriptor for a group of people has become a symbol of bigotry.  This sensitivity is currently being applied to the term, “anchor babies,” which refers to children born in America to non-American parents.

I am a staunch opponent of political correctness, but as America works its way through the problems associated with diversity, I think it is a good idea to talk and think in ways that reflect sensitivity to the feelings of those in the minority and out of the mainstream.

The Supreme Court takes on another affirmative-action case

The Supreme Court today agreed to hear another case on affirmative action – Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.  This case comes from Michigan, where 58% of the voters in 2006 decided to prohibit affirmative action in college admissions as well as government hiring and contracting.  Several states, including California and Florida, have similar laws. 

In a move that defies common sense, as a dissenting federal appellate judge has pointed out, proponents of affirmative action in Michigan are arguing that a state denies equal treatment by mandating it.  But the highly politicized federal appellate court in Michigan bought the argument 8-7, with all eight judges appointed by Democratic presidents and all seven judges appointed by Republican presidents.  (Elections have consequences!)

The case already pending with the Supreme Court is Fisher v. Univ. of Texas.  In that case, which was expected to be ruled on between now and the end of June, the Court will decide if UT can consider race among other factors in deciding who to admit.  According to Reuters: 

• “That the court agreed to hear the Michigan case before deciding the Texas case is unusual. The court’s normal practice is to wait until it has issued a ruling before agreeing to hear another case on a related issue. This may mean that the court is struggling to decide the Texas case, or that the ruling could be coming as soon as this week.”

I’m not a Court watcher, so I have no idea what this means with respect to Fisher.  I would be shocked, however, if the Court decides that a state cannot eliminate its affirmative-action program.  As Sandra Day O’Connor famously said in her 2003 Grutter decision, affirmative action was only a temporary fix that should not exist in 25 years.

But I suspect that not everyone will be want affirmative action to be temporary.  Just today in the Express-News, page-two columnist Elaine Ayala wrote about some college-prep students debating affirmative action.  At the end of the debate, the students had three choices regarding the future of affirmative action – accepted, waitlisted, or denied.  Ayala reports that, although the least popular choice was “accepted,” the most popular was “waitlisted.”  From that result, Ayala concluded her column by saying, “Perhaps it’s too optimistic to think it shows affirmative action has a future in the minds of these future leaders.  But I’ll take it.”

That doesn’t sound like someone who sees affirmative action as temporary

Should affirmative action be for minority kids or disadvantaged kids

Although I am a long-time opponent of affirmative action for kids based on race, I am just as committed in favor of affirmative action for disadvantaged children.  My position is based on a smattering of statistical information, and a heavy dose of judgment/common sense.  But a recent Harvard study, as reported in an article in today’s NY Times, goes a long way toward supplying me with a solid statistical foundation for my position.     

The article contains the following fascinating information:

• “Only 34 percent of high-achieving high school seniors in the bottom fourth of income distribution attended any one of the country’s 238 most selective colleges, according the analysis. Among top students in the highest income quartile, that figure was 78 percent.  The findings underscore that elite public and private colleges, despite a stated desire to recruit an economically diverse group of students, have largely failed to do so.”  This is the essential finding of the study.
• “Top low-income students in the nation’s 15 largest metropolitan areas do often apply to selective colleges, according to the study, which was based on test scores, self-reported data, and census and other data for the high school class of 2008. But such students from smaller metropolitan areas — like Bridgeport; Memphis; Sacramento; Toledo, Ohio; and Tulsa, Okla. — and rural areas typically do not.”  As someone who grew up in a rural area, I am not surprised that rural kids have lower ambitions.
• “Among high-achieving, low-income students, 6 percent were black, 8 percent Latino, 15 percent Asian-American and 69 percent white, the study found.”  This confirms my feeling that race-neutral affirmative action would affect a lot more whites than minorities.  It would be interesting to know what percentage of each of these cohorts went to selective universities, and then compare those percentages to the overall 34%.
• “If there are changes to how we define diversity,” said Greg W. Roberts, the dean of admission at the University of Virginia, referring to the court case, “then I expect schools will really work hard at identifying low-income students.”  This sentiment is encouraging, in the event the Supreme Court puts an end to race-based affirmative action.
• “The researchers defined high-achieving students as those very likely to gain admission to a selective college, which translated into roughly the top 4 percent nationwide. Students needed to have at least an A-minus average and a score in the top 10 percent among students who took the SAT or the ACT.”   This definition of “high-achieving” seems well conceived. 
• Of these high achievers, 34 percent came from families in the top fourth of earners, 27 percent from the second fourth, 22 percent from the third fourth and 17 percent from the bottom fourth. (The researchers based the income cutoffs on the population of families with a high school senior living at home, with $41,472 being the dividing line for the bottom quartile and $120,776 for the top.)”  Although there is some relationship between family income and high-achieving kids, I am surprised that the lower quartiles did as good as they did.
• “If they make it to top colleges, high-achieving, low-income students tend to thrive there, the paper found. Based on the most recent data, 89 percent of such students at selective colleges had graduated or were on pace to do so, compared with only 50 percent of top low-income students at nonselective colleges.”  These numbers are astounding.  I would have thought high-achieving low-income students would have graduated at a higher rate at nonselective schools because they would likely be closer to home.  But it appears that these kids are better off being away from their home environment.

According to an admissions dean, the study is highly credible – “It’s pretty close to unimpeachable — they’re drawing on a national sample.”  This is the kind of stuff that will inform my thinking for years to come.

Equal opportunity in America

The NY Times today contained an op-ed piece by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz titled “Equal Opportunity, our national myth.”  I’ve probably blogged a dozen times over the years about equal opportunity, including a post about Stiglitz’s book called The Price of Inequality.   

In his op-ed piece, Stiglitz starts with the standard liberal accusation – i.e., America’s economic mobility is lower than most of Europe and all of Scandinavia.  Like most such critics, Stiglitz fails to explain his conclusion.  I wish he would respond to the following explanation provided in an article in Time magazine in November 2011 (and subsequently discussed in my blog):   

• “Yet it is important to understand that when you compare Europe and America, you are comparing very different societies.  High-growth Nordic nations with good social safety nets, which have the greatest leads in social mobility over the U.S., are small and homogeneous.  On average, only 7% of their populations are ethnic minorities (who are often poorer and thus less mobile than the overall populations), compared with 28% in the U.S.  Even bigger nations like Germany don’t have to deal with populations as socially and economically diverse as America’s.”  

Stiglitz did, however, provide a link to a decade-old study by the Brookings Institute, which contained the following fascinating details:

• Two out of three Americans have higher incomes than their parents, while one third are falling behind. After data are adjusted for inflation, 67 percent of Americans had higher levels of family incomes than their own parents.
• Compared to their parents, they also live in families or households that are smaller and where there is more often a second earner.
• It is easier to surpass parental income if one’s parents are low on the income ladder, because then one’s income can increase both because of economic growth and because of moving up the ladder relative to one’s parents. Indeed, four out of five children whose parents were in the bottom fifth of the income distribution end up with higher incomes than their parents.
• Contrary to American beliefs about equality of opportunity, a child’s economic position is heavily influenced by that of his or her parents. Forty-two percent of children born to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution remain in the bottom, while 39 percent born to parents in the top fifth remain at the top.
• Children of middle-income parents have a near-equal likelihood of ending up in any other quintile, presenting equal promise and peril for those born to middle-class parents.
• The “rags to riches” story is much more common in Hollywood than on Main Street.  Only 6 percent of children born to parents with family income at the very bottom move to the very top.

Assuming that America is afflicted with unequal opportunity, Stiglitz’s prescription is the same as most experts who study this issue – i.e., more equal education for America’s kids.  His argument for better Pre-K and more financial accessibility for colleges make sense.  His complaint about the unequal playing field due to advantages that successful parents can bestow on their kids is a “gravity” issue that he should stop wasting his breath on.  There is nothing that anyone can do to level that field.

Innovation and creativity used by Joaquin Castro against the radical, crazy Republicans

Express-News columnist Brian Chasnoff’s column today appeared to have a two-pronged purpose:

1. Advance the deification of the Castro twins.
2. Create a perception that Democrats are on the verge of becoming competitive in Texas.

Chasnoff addresses the first prong by telling a three-act story involving Joaquin Castro.  In the first act, Castro is block-walking on the Republican northwest side of San Antonio.  Then in the second act, Castro is depressed because his list of targeted houses – those with reliable voters – causes him to walk past most of the houses.  And in the third act, Castro has an inspiration, which is to get the reliable voters to influence their unreliable friends and family to vote.  For melodramatic measure, Castro names his idea the “Victoria Project” after his late grandmother.

Your response to Castro’s inspiration might be, “Duh?  Tell me something I didn’t know,” but that is not how Chasnoff characterizes it.  Instead he describes it as an epiphany – “Castro’s idea, conceived that day on the campaign trail, is more modest in scale. But its creative approach might inform the myriad efforts here to revitalize Democrats, who haven’t won a statewide election in two decades.”

And that brings us to the second prong of Chasnoff’s column – i.e., there is a serious movement underway to make Texas a competitive state for Democrats within the decade.  Chasnoff refers to an extensive new article in Politico.com that describes the myriad, far-reaching efforts to revitalize Democrats that might be informed by Castro’s creative approach, but instead of discussing those efforts, Chasnoff decides to elaborate on Castro’s “more modest in scale” project:

• Each voter would cast a personal appeal powerful enough to motivate nonvoters to cast ballots.  Castro offered a fictional example: Maria Fernandez, whose father died from diabetes, emails 10 people “who really cared for her dad” with a message that “combines a personal narrative with a policy imperative.” In other words, Fernandez mourns both her father and GOP policy on health care.

The column concludes by suggesting that the Victoria Project would work perfectly against Republicans if Governor Rick Perry and party leaders persist in refusing to extend Medicaid under ObamaCare to two million poor, uninsured Texans.  According to Castro (and Chasnoff?), this position is beyond radical, it’s crazy.

Although this simple concept of trying to leverage your voters unquestionably makes sense, its effectiveness is questionable.  As Castro says, “It’s very intensive work.  There’s a lot of follow-through and a lot of handholding because you’ve got to help people craft the message.”  You think?

Think about crafting a message from your voters to their friends telling them about their poor family member who can’t afford ObamaCare, but would be eligible for free Medicaid if more people would vote Democratic.  Good luck on that in Texas.

Women in combat

Last week, the Obama administration’s Leon Panetta announced that women would be allowed in front-line combat units – infantry, armor, Special Forces.  I heard an excellent debate of the issue on a Sunday talk show between a female captain who has flown attack helicopters and a male general who opposes women in combat. 

The general’s principal point was that women, on average, are significantly less physically able than men, and the captain’s response was that, instead of thinking of averages, it is more reasonable to think of the physical ability of men and women as on separate, but overlapping bell curves – e.g., G.I. Jane.      

The general’s secondary point was that front-line unit cohesion would be weakened by mixing the sexes, to which the captain countered that the sexes would learn to accommodate each other.  They ultimately agree to disagree about this social engineering, with the captain saying that women should be subjected to the draft, and the general saying that in his world his daughters would not be subjected to the draft.

The San Antonio Express-News published an editorial today in which it came down on the side of the captain. 

I agree with the captain and the Express-News.  My only concern is whether the overlap of bells curves is so slight that this social experiment is not worth it.  The overlap of bell curves does not enable women to play high-level football, basketball, or baseball, but I have heard that they could play high-level tennis.    

Perhaps the military should have studied whether there are significant numbers of women who can compete with the physicality of male soldiers on the low-end of their bell curve.  My guess is there are.

Feminism and abortion

The NY Times’ conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, wrote a column today positing that abortion rights and feminism are two separate things; that one can oppose abortion rights while at the same time favor feminism.  Not surprisingly, the liberal readers of the Times disagree. 

The following response by “Winning Progressive” earned the Times’ most-liked designation (liked by 390 other readers):

• To call anti-choice activists “feminists” is to remove all meaning from that word.  Feminism is about providing women with the same choices and opportunities around education, careers, domestic affairs, and reproductive issues that men have always had. The anti-choice movement is about removing, through the hand of intrusive government, women’s ability to make those choices with regards to reproductive issues. The resulting impact is not only to force women to carry a pregnancy to term (even, in the fantasies of many anti-choicers, in the case of rape and incest) but would often be curbing women’s choices with regards to all those other areas of life, as reproductive freedom is critical to women having freedom with regards to education, careers, etc.
• If your religion or personal values teach you that abortion is immoral, then don’t have one. In a pluralistic, secular society such as ours, however, you shouldn’t be trying to limit the freedom of everyone else to make that decision and choice for themselves. But, if you are going to impose that sort of restrictive, anti-choice agenda on the rest of us, please at least have the decency to not pretend like doing so is part of feminism.

Although Douthat neglected to provide his readers with a definition of feminism, the definition provided by Winning Progressive in the first paragraph comports with most dictionary definitions – i.e., the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.  The problem with that definition is that bearing a child is not analogous to any activity in a man’s life, and so in that sense it seems that Douthat in correct in pointing out that being for or against abortion rights has no connection to any type of equality with men.

I found the second paragraph from Winning Progressive to be similarly problematic in claiming that, because America is a secular society, people shouldn’t attempt to enforce their religious or personal values into our country’s laws.  Number One, America isn’t secular; it is one of the most religious nations in the world.  Number Two, just because the personal values of many people are informed by their religious values doesn’t render those values any less worthy of recognition.  Clearly, America’s generous safety net exists in large part due to the religious value of caring for your fellow man.  Further, religious values affect a person’s view of capital punishment, but there is no movement to somehow nullify those views.

Atheists and agnostics have no right in America to disenfranchise personal values that flow from a person’s religious beliefs.

Sunday Book Review #97 – No Matter What… They’ll Call This Book Racist

Prior to stumbling across No Matter What… in the New Book section of my local library, I had never heard of its author Harry Stein.  I find this anonymity surprising because, despite Stein’s advanced age (born 1948), his powers of observation and analysis of contemporary political and cultural issues are remarkable.  His ability easily surpasses that of most political pundits on FOX News. 

The gist of No Matter What… is to make accurate, common-sense insights about the status of race in America.  Most of these insights are not necessarily brilliant, but nevertheless are uncommon because extreme political correctness has stifled talk and even thinking with respect to race.  Examples of Stein’s insights:

• The fear that any criticism of President Obama will be characterized as racist.  One wag attempted to avoid this criticism by prefacing it with – “For the record, I have no problem with Obama’s black half.  His white half is the most incompetent, anti-American asshole ever to inhabit the office of the presidency, but his black half is fine.”
• Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in 2006 declared – “Affirmative action today, tomorrow, and forever.”  Author Stein explains why so many advocates for racial preferences refuse to recognize that skin color no longer is the dominant reason for black poverty – “That is to say, the understanding that it is not the color of their skin that minimizes the life chances of inner-city kids, or even their undeniably difficult economic circumstances, but the culture into which they are born; from then near-certainty they will grow up fatherless to the attitudes they are likely to internalize about education and hard work to general chaos and lack of order in their homes.”

The book consists of five “Let’s Pretends”:

1. Affirmative action is reasonable, not racist.  Not surprisingly, a 2009 poll revealed that whites are 64-27 against affirmative action while blacks are 78-14 in favor of it.  “Yet no matter how readily [blacks] may justify that advantage based on their forebear’s tragic history or even slights they’ve personally suffered, most surely grasp on some level that they’re gaming the system.  Nor does it take a doctorate in human behavioral science to know that such an assumption becomes internalized and self-fulfilling….  In the end, there is no way to change that or any of the rest, but one: Scotch the whole ugly business, root and branch, so that all accomplishment is understood to have been justly earned.  Absolutely, let’s promote early childhood education, if that can be shown effective, as well as tutoring and job training programs for those in the minority community eager to get a leg up.  But for the good of everyone, we’ve got to end, abolish, forever rule out programs that discriminate against anyone on the basis of race or ethnicity.”
2. Fathers don’t matter.  “This, of course, is what fathers do, at least the good ones: They instruct by example.  Instilling a strong work ethic is simply part of the job description, which is to live with integrity even when it is not easy; and so, too, even more vitally, to treat women with tenderness and respect, and to make one’s children the absolutely highest priority.  This is why, unquestionably, the single greatest tragedy for black people in today’s America – indeed, the greatest calamity since slavery itself – is that scarcely one in four black fathers is on the scene….”
3. Crime has nothing to do with race.  Author Stein tells the story of Jesse Jackson hearing footsteps behind him in a lonely location at night, and then being relieved when he looks behind to see white faces.
4. Multiculturalism makes for better education.  Author Stein derides the lax standards in most urban schools and extols the virtues of programs that demand discipline.
5. “Acting white” is a problem.  This chapter is replete with examples of black behavior being criticized for being white, behavior such as being disciplined, polite, and academically successful.  The best example was former basketball player, now ESPN commentator Jalen Rose saying that he hated Duke because it “didn’t recruit players like me.  I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.”  Rose was promptly and effectively rebuked by former Duke player Grant Hill – “In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only black players that were Uncle Toms, Jalen seems to change the usual meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families.”  Rose subsequently apologized and called his earlier remarks “ignorant.”  Recently, too new for this book, another ESPN pundit made the same mistake by questioning RG3’s blackness because he was a Christian with a white fiancée and Republican leanings.    

Harry Stein is a smart, good-hearted man and an excellent writer, and I look forward to reading more of his books in the future.

The city of San Antonio considers a return to quotas

The San Antonio Express-News reported today that the city of San Antonio is considering a return to quotas (racial, ethnic, and gender) in awarding contracts.  According to the city’s economic-development director, Rene Dominguez, the city will resort to quotas only if its new affirmative-action initiative fails.  How does San Antonio define failure?  Currently, only 19% of city contracts go to minority- or women-owned businesses, while the city has an objective of 29%.

The article in the Express-News raises so many objectionable issues that one hardly knows where to begin.  The biggest objectionable issue is the law.  Many years ago the United States Supreme Court abandoned quotas as a constitutional means to address past discrimination, and it currently is considering whether to similarly abandon affirmative action.  Yet, despite this precarious legal status, the San Antonio City Council cavalierly adopts an affirmative-action initiative and talks about resorting to quotas.

The next most objectionable issue is that San Antonio’s affirmative action is granted to everyone except white, non-Hispanic males, who comprise less than 15% of San Antonio’s population.  So-called minorities comprise almost 75% of San Antonio’s population, and to make the coalition even bigger, it adopted white women.  This makes political sense (right out of the Obama playbook in getting the 99% to raise the taxes on the 1%), but it makes the legal defense even more precarious.  Wouldn’t it make more sense for the city to advocate for, and reach out to, all disadvantaged businesses, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender?     

The third objectionable issue is that the city’s plan implies that everyone who is not a white-Hispanic males cannot compete on a level playing field with white, non-Hispanic males.  This is not only divisive, but also demoralizing – in the words of Bush-43, the soft bigotry of low expectations.

The major driving force advocating for quotas is the Fair Contracting Coalition (FCC), which consists of the NAACP, the Alamo City Black Chamber of Commerce, the Alamo Area Chamber of Commerce, and the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.  (Where is the SA Women’s Chamber; perhaps they don’t want a quota.)  The name of the FCC could have come from the pages of classic dystopian novels 1984 or Atlas Shrugged because the coalition is for anything but fair contracting.

A pro-quota activist, Lou Miller, extensively quoted in the Express-News predicted that affirmative action would not be enough and quotas would eventually be needed:

• “Twenty years ago, African-Americans were receiving zero percent of the contracts from the city, and now it’s still less than one percent….  Segmentation would be the better tool used to clear up discrimination.”

Unfortunately, the Express-News reporter failed to follow-up on Miller’s allegation of discrimination.  I would have asked what and when.

I’m not sure where the term “segmentation” came from (Miller and the city use it), but the article defines it as “a method that would consider each racial and ethnic group separately and set hard goals for awarding contracts to each.”  I don’t know how that is different than a quota.  If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck….

The article concludes by suggesting that the FCC might have a strange political bedfellow because the city’s large contracting vendors do not sound averse to quotas.  According to the EVP of the Associated General Contractors (AGC):

• “We are sympathetic to the FCC’s concerns.  If the city wants to have a race-based procurement program, that works if you do things correctly.”

Anyone who has read Atlas Shrugged would not be surprised about the FCC and AGC getting into bed together.  Big government and their big vendors often unite to stifle competition and the free market.  ObamaCare is a great example of that. 

The free market and a meritocracy are anathema to big government and its big vendors.