SACRAMENTO, CA. -- Life is full of bizarre ironies, especially in public policy. Take, for example, last
week’s two race-related headline events.

On February 17th, a federal district court gave preliminary approval to a plan that would end racial
admissions quotas for San Francisco’s public schools. On the next day, UC Regents seemed to edge closer to
adopting the racially-motivated plan to admit students ranked in the top four percent of each high school’s
graduating class (SAT scores wouldn’t be considered).

In the San Francisco court case, Chinese-American parents had sued the San Francisco school district
because a 1983 federal consent decree placed percentage caps on the number of students from a racial group that could attend individual schools. The perverse result was that at Lowell High School, San Francisco’s top
academic high school and the subject of the just-concluded lawsuit, Chinese-American students were
forced to score higher on entrance exams than students from other racial groups.

Aside from their justifiable constitutional complaints, Chinese-American parents had the very practical concern
that by consigning their children to lesser quality schools, the quota program was an obstacle to their
children’s chances of gaining entrance into top universities such as the UC schools. According to Gray
Davis, however, the Chinese-American parents didn’t have to worry about educational quality after all.

Governor Davis told the UC Regents that under his four-percent plan: "It would no longer matter what
school you attend. It would only matter if you excel at the school you attend." Translation: you can attend a
low-performing public high school, but as long you’re in the top four percent of the school’s graduating
class you can be admitted into the UC. Why fight to get into Lowell and compete against the best and the
brightest when you can enroll elsewhere and coast? If Gray Davis doesn’t think that will happen, he should
listen to students.

"I think there will be a lot of transferring to where there isn’t a whole lot of competition," says Brian Ah,
a student at Sunny Hills High School in Orange County. "[Students] will just work the system."

Further, counselors at low-performing high schools point out that many of their students who have high
grade-point averages but low SAT scores are not prepared for UC-level work.

Dee Ransom, head counselor at Orange County’s Santa Ana High School, which only sent six students to the UC
last year, says: "Our concern would be that [the UC] might admit students of ours who are not prepared. Our
goal is not just enrollment, it’s staying power." UC’s own data shows that the lower a student’s Academic
Index score (which combines SAT and GPA scores), the less likely that student is to graduate.

Chris Haynie, a student at Santa Ana High School, provides an astute summary of the crucial problem with
Governor Davis’ proposal: "They are teaching the wrong lesson," Chris says. "I think the students should mold
to the quality of the system, not the other way around. This is not the way the world works."

--By Lance T. Izumi

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