THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 18, 1995 TAG: 9505180702
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 120 lines
Despite court rulings and affirmative action, Southern states still operate a two-tiered college system with blacks on the lower rung, said a report issued Wednesday by the Southern Education Foundation.
``Opportunity for minority students is limited, fragmented and uneven,'' the study said. ``For them, the promise of equal opportunity for a high-quality education has not been kept.''
The foundation, an Atlanta organization that studies equality in education, reviewed 12 states, including Virginia, which generally ranked in the middle. It found that blacks make up 25 percent of the college-age populations in the states, but only 16 percent of the freshmen, 10 percent of bachelor's degree recipients and 4 percent of doctorate recipients.
The differential was even sharper for graduation rates: 56 percent of white students who enrolled in 1985-86 graduated after six years; only one-third of blacks did.
To erase those imbalances, the report offers recommendations that extend beyond colleges:
Increasing funding for poor public school systems, student financial aid and historically black colleges.
Encouraging more minorities to take college-prep courses in high school.
Establishing benchmarks to measure achievement of all college students.
Highlighting community colleges and lifting barriers that block students from transferring from them to four-year schools.
Encouraging states and individual schools to draw plans to increase access to minorities.
The foundation comes down in favor of race-specific scholarships, a leading issue in the simmering debate on affirmative action. But the report does not advocate preferential treatment for minorities in admissions.
Instead, it suggests that colleges not rely primarily on standardized test scores, where huge gaps remain between black and white averages, but give more weight to such factors as grade point averages and extracurricular activities for all students.
``The affirmative action debate is being used by some opportunistic politicians to divide people by trying to play the race card,'' said Jim Dyke, a former Virginia secretary of education who was on the 27-member panel that wrote the report. ``What we're trying to propose is a very positive way of achieving desegregation and increasing opportunities for all people.
``We're trying to bring people together as opposed to trying to split people.''
But Chester E. Finn Jr., a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and former assistant secretary of education under President Reagan, said the answer is not to switch policies in colleges, but to improve public schools. He cited a recent study showing a majority of black 12th-graders read below grade level.
``You can't just fix it all by letting in more black students'' to college, Finn said. ``In many instances, they're recruiting students who are not ready for college work. . . . We are still, as a country, doing a wretched job of getting kids out of high school with a proper secondary education.''
Virginia generally falls in the mid-range in most categories. Yet it has a larger percentage of black students at black colleges - 48 percent - than any other state surveyed. Thirty-one percent of Virginia's black students attend predominantly white four-year schools, and 21 percent go to community colleges.
Gordon K. Davies, director of the State Council of Higher Education, said the state and its colleges have pushed hard to increase black enrollment since at least the late '70s, when courts found that 10 states, including Virginia, still operated segregated college systems.
Virginia, he said, already has carried out several of the foundation's recommendations - including a statewide integration plan, ironed out with the federal government in the '70s, and a plan to smooth transfers from two- to four-year schools.
``I don't think there has been a lack of attention to these issues in Virginia,'' he said. ``I think the state has been fulfilling its commitment, but this is a long process.''
Dyke said the problem is that politicians have not pushed hard enough for change: ``To get this done, we have to have continuous pressure from state leaders to say, `This is going to happen.' There has to be accountability.''
Blacks also still face a hostile climate on campus, the study says. It cites a national survey last year that found that more than half the nation's black students felt excluded from school activities because of race, and 32 percent reported being insulted or threatened by a fellow student because of race.
To improve the atmosphere, the foundation suggests increasing student contact with faculty - for instance, an ``early warning system'' to alert counselors when students are having problems in class - and boosting the number of black professors, who serve as role models. In Virginia, 8 percent of faculty members and administrators are black, the study says.
Black colleges are ``central to efforts to ensure access for black students,'' the foundation says, and should be given more support. States should also give them ``high profile, high demand'' programs to attract whites. But the report says black schools generally have lower graduation rates than predominantly white schools and must draft plans ``to promote success'' for students.
The other panel member from Virginia is Ruby Martin, former state secretary of administration. Both she and Dyke worked under Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, who sliced state aid to colleges more than 20 percent.
Dyke, now a partner in the Richmond law firm of McGuire, Woods, Battle & Boothe, defended the cuts as needed to make up for a $2 billion state shortfall. ``But now we're not in the same recession situation we were in in the early '90s. We need to put the type of resources we can into higher education.''
Finn, the former Reagan official, said the push for money is typical of the report's ``archaic brand of liberalism.''
``It's a curricular problem, it's a standards problem, it's almost every type of problem except funding.''
The report was released on the 41st anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision declaring racially separated public schools unconstitutional.
``What began in 1954 still remains to be realized in higher education,'' said Robert A. Kronley, senior consultant for the foundation. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
STAFF
STUDIES OF MINORITIES IN EDUCATION
[For a copy of the graphic, see microfilm for this date.]
SOURCE: Southern Education Foundation
KEYWORDS: STUDY HIGHER EDUCATION MINORITIES by CNB