A major concern for young people and academics is the plight of minorities in America. Voters of all races, however, would do well to rethink the conventional thinking that the Left is best equipped to help blacks.
To combat racial inequality, liberal administrators at universities give preference in admissions to blacks. As a result, many employers do not take the degrees of black applicants seriously, assuming they were attained through favoritism and not merit. Furthermore, by admitting some black students into programs they might not otherwise qualify for, universities frequently doom them to underachievement. A UCLA study by Richard Sander determined that there are actually fewer black lawyers as a result of modern affirmative action programs. Sander found that law students who are admitted based on affirmative action sometimes find the coursework too challenging, which hurts their grades and impedes their learning, contributing to difficulty on the bar exam or even to failing out.
Another hallmark of the Left’s ‘black agenda’ is raising the minimum wage. Increasing the cost of hiring workers dilutes the incentive to hire, and hiking the minimum wage increases unemployment for low-skilled workers, who are disproportionately black. This increased cost of production also raises prices, which would affect black and low-income consumers the most.
Neither of these policies gets at the real problem: education. Black high school students have significantly higher dropout rates, and blacks at every age level do substantially worse on educational assessments. The Democrats’ solution is more spending. But per-pupil expenditures have increased by a whopping 130 percent in real terms since 1970, and education outcomes have not improved. In fact, public school reading scores for 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have actually decreased in that time span.
The answer is major educational reforms. The ideal solution would be a voucher system that gives inner-city families the freedom to choose better schools for their children and forces schools to compete with each other for students. Other options include basing teachers’ pay on merit and not seniority, as well as making it easier to fire inept teachers. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, it typically costs the Cleveland Metropolitan School District between $200,000 and $300,000 to fire a single teacher, mainly due to legal fees. The Democrats, who rely on political donations from the self-serving teachers’ unions, have no stomach for such reforms. Republicans support all of them.
The GOP also opposes raising the minimum wage, opting for substance over a policy that sounds good but would, in practice, hurt black workers. And Republicans are strong supporters of free trade initiatives, which give American consumers access to cheap goods and make poor families’ incomes stretch further. Indeed, the benefits of free trade accrue disproportionately to blacks and low-income consumers.
Liberal public policy is full of ideas with good intentions and disastrous consequences. It’s time that blacks ditch a Democratic Party that puts emotional flourish over policy substance, aims at treating the symptoms and not the causes of inequality and sides with teachers’ unions over black parents and students.
