Affirmative Action Handicapping
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Here’s a typical backwards affirmative action approach to “evening the playing field”, as articulated so beautifully in National Review’s The Week (January 25, 2010):
The folks at California’s Berkeley High School have a problem, or think they do: The school’s black and Hispanic students score much lower on standardized tests than whites and Asians. Their proposed solution: eliminate laboratory courses in science, which according to the East Bay Express are “largely classes for white students”; lay off the five teachers who teach them; and use the money thus saved to tutor underachievers. So high-school pupils in Berkeley—home of the University of California, where so many groundbreaking scientific discoveries have been made—will no longer learn to perform titrations, dissect frogs, or analyze circuits, for fear that the wrong sort of student will learn too much and thus increase the racial gap. Why not just break the smart kids’ glasses?