RELATED ARTICLE: La Raison d'Etre
"When I listen to the rhetoric of affirmative action, almost all the arguments are couched in terms of making up for past discrimination or somehow compensating for the lingering effects of past discrimination. For me, this is very much about current discrimination. I don't have to go back even a minute to be able to document lingering and serious inequities between how we educate poor minority kids and how we educate other kids.
"Rather than just compensate for that at the point of [college] admission, I would argue that we ought to fix that once and for all. That's really the driving passion here. Twenty or 30 years ago people really did believe that Black or Hispanic kids needed something different -- voodoo education, multicultural, whatever. What I think is so clear now is that what they need is the same thing White kids need, the same thing suburban kids need.
"It's high quality education with high expectations from teachers who know their stuff. There's no mystery about this and there's no reason we can't supply it to all our kids.
"We [The Education Trust] exist primarily to argue that case and to try and get the nation to go about the business of doing it."
-- Kati Haycock, director, The Education Trust
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