Date sent: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 08:31:44 -0400 (EDT) From: "Brown, Andrea" To: "'c-news@world.std.com'" Subject: C-NEWS: "Access to Equality of Opportunity" Send reply to: "Brown, Andrea" "It's Not Equal Opportunity, Sir, It's Access to Equality of Opportunity" By Governor Pete Wilson Sacramento Dear Mr. President: Welcome back to California. The reported purpose of your first appearance here since the November election is to launch a national dialogue on race relations. A White House spokesman has stated that you selected California because of its extraordinary ethnic diversity. California is indeed the most ethnically diverse society in history. Los Angeles Unified District seeks to educate children whose native tongue is one of over a hundred languages. We are a nation-state of legal immigrants and proud of it. We don't just tolerate our diversity: we celebrate it. We recognize it as both culturally enriching, and as providing a competitive edge to California in continuing to be the largest and most vibrant economy in all the energetic and entrepreneurial Pacific Rim. At the same time we are mindful that our national motto in this nation of immigrants is "E Pluribus Unum": "one from many". It reminds us, as we celebrate our individual heritage, that we are one people from many lands and many ethnic groups. It reminds us that America - if it is to remain true to the ideal, to the promise that has drawn generations of eager immigrants to our shores - must be a community whose members share rights and duties . . . and opportunity. No one is in a better position than the President of the United States to appreciate the importance of restoring to the American people this sense of community. It is the motivational well-spring of the concerted public action needed for the successful undertaking of any great national initiative - from winning a war, to defeating gravity by putting a man on the moon, to reversing centuries of injustice by enacting the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. America must again regain that spirit of community so essential to achieving national purpose. Nothing can more certainly and perniciously undermine it and make impossible a sense of common purpose than racial divisions. We simply must eliminate the kind of unfairness that is virtually guaranteed to produce them. On this much, I'm sure we agree. But with all respect, Mr. President, if you desire to eliminate racial divisions and to bring Americans together, you've been going about it the wrong way. Two years ago, here in Sacramento, you told the Democratic faithful that it was in their best interest - politically - to reconsider their support for racial preferences. Yet in the current year alone, the Federal Transit Administration threatened to withhold money from the city of Houston's transit authority unless it reinstated race-based preferences in its contracting programs. The U.S. Department of Education threatened to withhold federal higher-education money if Texas complied with the Hopwood v. Texas decision outlawing race-based admission rules. When an appellate panel lifted an injunction on California's Proposition 209, your Justice Department filed a brief supporting a rehearing - before the ACLU even asked for a rehearing. Last week's decision by the Justice Department - changing sides a second time and asking the Supreme Court not to accept an appeal which they filed in the Piscataway school board case - shows how internally conflicted your administration is. If the legacy you would leave is enhanced racial justice and harmony, it will require leadership. And to lead, you must begin by being honest with the American people. Don't persist in fuzzing up a clear issue by pretending that it is possible to "mend . . . not end . . " unconstitutional racial preferences. Yes, unconstitutional: a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just said so in no uncertain terms in upholding Proposition 209. The court held that racial preferences violate the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. And the Supreme Court so held with respect to public contracting in the Adarand case. But you don't have to be a constitutional scholar to understand what's wrong with race-based preferences in public hiring, contracting and university admissions. Preferences are unfair. The people of California just said so in no uncertain terms: in the same election, more voted for Proposition 209 than for the Clinton-Gore ticket. And because they are unfair, racial preferences are inescapably divisive. Prop 209 did not cause that divisiveness; preferences did. To the contrary, the divisiveness caused by preferences is what caused Prop 209. It was a response by people who had strongly supported federal and state civil rights protections to end not mend racial discrimination. The fact is, however well-intended, racial preferences are by definition the very racial discrimination that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to outlaw. Mr. President, I respectfully urge that rather than continuing to fight the wrong fight in the courts, you focus instead upon what is in fact required to bring about true equality of access to opportunity in America. You and I both know that preferences are not the answer. Not only are they unconstitutionally unfair and poisonously divisive, preferences are a cop-out. As a just society, we owe genuine equality of access to opportunity to every child of every ethnicity in every community in California and America. We have not achieved it and we must. But we will not and cannot by resorting to artificial and divisive preferences. No, it's time to do the heavy lifting of changing children's lives by expanding their access to opportunity. Specifically, we must assure first that every poor child comes to school healthy and able to concentrate. Second, we must assure that the school so challenges and motivates the child to learn and meet high standards that we can be assured that our kids will be empowered to compete and win in this shrinking and fiercely-competitive global marketplace. That's what we're doing in California, beginning with pre-natal care not just for Medicaid recipients but for working poor mothers and their babies. We are at the same time conducting a vigorous campaign against out-of-wedlock pregnancy, especially teen pregnancy. We are expanding pre-school. We've invested in school-based Healthy Start and early mental-health counseling for kids in primary grades. We are reducing class sizes so that every child in grades K-3 will be in a class of no more than 20 students. We're determined to bring about the more individualized instruction that can assure that every child will be a proficient reader by the end of grade 3. And we are determined that all kids will be both literate and, by the end of high school, computer-literate. General Colin Powell and Ray Chambers have publicly praised the California Mentor Initiative which seeks to recruit 250,000 caring adult role models into the lives of at-risk kids to help them make the right choices. And there's one more thing we'd like to do, Mr. President, to expand educational opportunity for poor kids who are trapped in poor schools. Perhaps you'd be willing to use your bully-pulpit to help rescue them. It's terribly unfair to these children to cheat them because their parents lack the means to place them in a better school. So I've proposed for the last two years that children in the bottom 5% of California's schools be given "opportunity scholarships" so that they and their parents can choose a better school. But the teachers' union, threatened by the prospect of competition, has killed the bill both years. As the head Democrat and the man to whom teachers' unions listen, you could help a lot to expand access to educational opportunity for these poor children. These are the things that will expand opportunity for all our kids, including the poorest, so that all are adequately prepared for life's competition. It is a terrible shame and a disservice to attempt to cancel the competition and confer the prize by preferences based on race rather than merit. Finally, let me conclude with the observation that we are not compelled to choose between diversity and individual excellence. Inherent in the advocacy of racial preferences is the assumption that certain racial or ethnic groups require this artificial crutch. Proponents of preferences argue that the educational value of diversity warrants apportioning opportunity to the less-qualified member of a politically-preferred ethnic group. The underlying assumption of ethnic or racial inferiority is both insulting and contradicted by the abundant evidence that access to opportunity will produce legitimate high achievers of every racial and ethnic group. If we do the heavy lifting to provide that access, we'll have diversity on the natural - without unfairness, without divisiveness, and without sacrificing educational excellence. Just across the Potomac River from the White House, in Virginia, is the Arlington Traditional School. When this "magnet" school had more applicants than openings, it admitted pre-schoolers based upon the color of their skin. A federal judge recently decided that the school had no right to do this. What a shame, so long before they've studied the Constitution much less learned the meaning of "access to opportunity", that four-year-old children would be denied it because they're members of the wrong race. Mr. President, this is America 33 years after enactment of the 1964 Civil Right Act. There is no wrong race in America. It is time for the President of the United States to stand up and say so. It is time for the President to abandon preferences, to lead us in the heavy lifting . . . to declare that opportunity in America does not depend on race. ------- To subscribe to c-news, send the message SUBSCRIBE C-NEWS, or the message UNSUBSCRIBE C-NEWS to unsubscribe, to majordomo@world.std.com. Contact owner-c-news@world.std.com if you have questions.