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Several years ago, I blew out a tire while I was driving at about 60 miles per hour. At such a moment, it’s amazing how quickly your driver’s ed training kicks in: Adjust your driving to get control of your car. Steer into the way your car is pulling. Don’t try to overcorrect and turn the steering wheel the other way, or you’ll spin out. Fortunately, I can attest that driver’s ed classes actually do make a difference—I was able to pull the car over to the shoulder of the road, thankfully without incident.
This lesson about the dangers of overcorrection behind the wheel also applies to policymaking. When we try to make up for past mistakes by crafting policy that overcorrects for a problem, we don’t make things better—we just create a new set of problems.
The realm of education offers up examples of how to both successfully and unsuccessfully respond to changing realities. One approach, K-12 school choice, is actually fixing disparities in education, while the other—race-based affirmative action in higher education—is overcorrecting and thus creating a set of new problems.
Interestingly enough, affirmative action and school choice both arose in response to a similar problem: lack of access to knowledge and, ultimately, opportunity for underprivileged students. Writing recently for Discourse [ [link removed] ], Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy associate professor Ashley Berner pointed to this access as the basis for K-12 student outcomes. “This is a key reason that students from wealthy families are more likely than students from lower-income families to succeed in school: Well-resourced families often provide copious amounts of knowledge about the world—from geography and current events to good literature and science museums—as a routine matter,” she wrote.
Lack of resources keeps poorer students from getting the same opportunities as their more well-off counterparts—and while there’s undoubtedly a strong relationship between wealth and race [ [link removed] ], this gap in access to knowledge isn’t based on race alone. Therefore, it stands to reason that a policy seeking to fix the access to knowledge disparity ought not to fall along racial lines—it simply doesn’t get closest to the current reality. A study [ [link removed] ] from the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University finds that “over the past 40 years, white-black and white-Hispanic achievement gaps have been declining, albeit unsteadily.”
What does explain today’s achievement gaps? Stanford Graduate School of Education’s Sean Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality, says [ [link removed] ] that “it’s not the racial composition of the schools that matters. What matters is when Black or Hispanic students are concentrated in high-poverty schools in a district.” In other words, geography matters more than skin color.
This is why school choice—giving parents and their kids options other than the local public school—is a better approach than attempting to fix this gap through social engineering. Allowing parents to choose among public schools, charter schools, private schools, education pods [ [link removed] ] and various additional educational options—is a policy that acknowledges the realities of the problem, replacing an access deficit with access abundance. What’s more, school choice programs recognize that a lack of resources and options can be a problem for a family of any race, and so does not require categorization into a certain racial box in order to qualify.
Instead, most choice programs give preferences to children from families with fewer financial resources, rather than focusing just on minorities regardless of their socio-economic status. Not surprisingly, school choice is especially popular among both minority [ [link removed] ] and low-income [ [link removed] ] families. When you’re stuck in a district with a failing public school, having other options can make all the difference, and that’s something that anyone, regardless of their race, can get behind.
But what about race-based affirmative action? Does affirmative action truly solve the problems that it was designed to correct? Does it give those it aims to help more access to education? Most Americans don’t think so: According to a spring 2023 Pew Research Center poll [ [link removed] ], only 1 in 5 Americans believe race-based affirmative action makes college admissions more fair.  Yet despite lack of support among the general public and even the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down [ [link removed] ] affirmative action in college admissions, support for race-based affirmative action persists among a relatively small but powerful group of elites and advocates [ [link removed] ]. In fact, the push for affirmative action has continued and, if anything, grown stronger [ [link removed] ].
Indeed, its influence now stretches from the classroom to the boardroom, with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—which are essentially the old affirmative action policies on steroids—commonplace in the corporate world as well as on college campuses. But as York College professor Erec Smith wrote at Discourse [ [link removed] ] earlier this year, DEI tends to contribute to Black disempowerment. “To pretend things are just as bad now as they were throughout American history is to disrespect the accomplishments of Black Americans,” he maintained.
As with race-based college admissions, most Americans oppose DEI in the business world: Fewer than a quarter [ [link removed] ] of Americans believe that companies should take race and ethnicity into account in hiring and promotion decisions. Rather than using DEI initiatives in the most effective way—to identify racial disparities and to use that knowledge to create equality of opportunity for [ [link removed] ]everyone [ [link removed] ]—corporations are using such initiatives to contribute to further imbalances. Some corporations, including Ralph Lauren and Delta [ [link removed] ], are edging ever closer to instituting racial quotas in their hiring—which is illegal according to Title VII [ [link removed] ] of the Civil Rights Act. Instead of recognizing disparities as they exist today, our institutions are doubling down [ [link removed] ] on flouting the facts.
The lack of access to knowledge and opportunity for poorer Americans and two of its more common “solutions”—school choice and affirmative action—can teach us a lot about what it means to try to correct a problem as well as what it means to try to overcorrect it. Whereas school choice tries to rectify the access problem by improving and expanding access, affirmative action tries to make up for access inequities by creating and perpetuating different ones. Anyone who’s been in a tailspin behind the wheel, though, knows that the right answer isn’t to try to respond to one extreme situation by creating another one.
Meanwhile…
What I’m doing: I’m sure you’ve heard it said that it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters. Well, in today’s fast-paced world, it can sometimes feel challenging to trade the quickest path to a destination for something more circuitous, yet more rewarding.
But on a recent drive from my home in northern New Jersey to my office in Arlington, Virginia, I did just that. Rather than take the often-punishing drive down I-95, my husband and I traded the New Jersey Turnpike for the Garden State Parkway—which runs down the entire eastern side of the state, including parts of the shore, and ends near the Cape May-Lewes Ferry [ [link removed] ], which we rode for the very first time. For the cost of a few more dollars and 90 minutes of your time, you (and your vehicle, if you wish) can take a journey across 17 miles of the Delaware Bay from the southernmost point in New Jersey to the beach town of Lewes, Delaware, trading a drive through Philadelphia and Wilmington for your own mini sea voyage.
As much as I love getting to my destination, I’m also a big fan of what I see along the way, and the ferry offers up lovely sights in spades: beautiful views of the Jersey and Delaware coastlines, the Cape May Lighthouse [ [link removed] ] and plenty of boats in the bay. With the bracing sea air on top of this, it’s really a fun and relaxing way to travel. To paraphrase Robert Frost [ [link removed] ]: I took the waterway less traveled by. And yes, it did make all the difference.
Finally: Next week at Discourse, Rob Tracinski delves into the dilemma of rural Democrats, and Ken Rapoza shares the story of how red went green—or how China became the green OPEC. Also, we really appreciate the notes we’ve received so far via our new Letters to the Editors. If you’d like to submit your own letter, click here [ [link removed] ]. We look forward to hearing from even more of you soon!
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