Study faults Bush diversity plan

Despite its claims, the governor's university admissions policy is hardly race-neutral, Harvard researchers say.

By STEPHEN HEGARTY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 11, 2003

Harvard researchers have taken to task Gov. Jeb Bush's claims that his controversial Talented 20 program provides a race-neutral model for maintaining diversity in universities.

Researchers with Harvard's Civil Rights Project found that "there is simply no basis for the claim that Florida's Talented 20 percent plan solved the affirmative action issue." Rather, the researchers found, Talented 20 was "virtually irrelevant" and Florida's plan isn't really race-neutral at all.

"What they're doing is race-conscious, and that's a critical distinction," said Patricia Marin, a research associate with the Civil Rights Project and co-author of the study released Monday.

The study, coupled with Gov. Bush's filing of a brief in a Michigan college admissions case before the U.S. Supreme Court, injects Florida's admissions program into the roiling national debate over affirmative action.

It prompted a top Florida education official to acknowledge that the state's efforts are not completely race-neutral.

Though universities are not supposed to make admissions decisions based on a student's race, recruitment efforts are not colorblind, said John Winn, deputy commissioner of Florida's Department of Education.

For instance, high school guidance counselors encourage minority students to take rigorous courses to be better prepared for college, and admissions officers aggressively recruit minority students to apply.

"The only things the governor opposed were the hard and fast preferences and the quotas," Winn said.

Still, Winn characterized the Harvard study as "way off base" because it focused on a narrow aspect of Bush's One Florida plan.

"They put all their eggs in the Talented 20 basket," Winn said. "That shows a lack of understanding of One Florida."

Those other aspects of One Florida -- the more aggressive recruiting efforts, the increase in the Advance Placement courses available to all students -- are important, Winn said. "It's not just Talented 20," he said. "It's all those things working together."

The Talented 20 program has had a negligible impact on admissions. The program guarantees that any student graduating in the top 20 percent of a Florida high school can get a spot in a Florida university, so long as he or she has the required 19 academic credits.

Most students who graduate near the top of their high school class already qualify for admission. The Harvard study found that of the state's 21,989 Talented 20 students in 2001, only 177 had grades low enough that they would need the Talented 20 guarantee to get into a Florida university. The rest qualified anyway.

Bush was quick to declare One Florida a success shortly after its implementation in 1999. He pointed to increased numbers of minority students entering state universities. However, overall enrollment was up, so there were more white students as well as Hispanic and African-American students. Racial percentages -- though they varied from school to school -- remained largely unchanged.

That in itself was something of a success, given the initial drops in minority admissions in Texas and California when they adopted similar plans after court battles.

Last month, Bush filed a brief in a case involving the University of Michigan's use of racial preferences in admissions, a case that many believe could be the most important affirmative action ruling in a generation.

In the brief, Bush holds up what he called Florida's "race-neutral" plan as evidence that Michigan and other states need not resort to overtly race-based admissions to maintain diversity. But Bush also details much more than just the Talented 20 program.

"Under One Florida," Bush said in a news release Monday, "more minority students are taking 10th-grade precollege tests, more minority students are taking college entrance exams and more minority students are taking Advanced Placement courses and receiving college credit."

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