Why AP and IB Schools Soar

Jay Matthews:

By the late 1990s, California voters and the University of California regents had banned admission preferences for minorities in the UC system, and several members of the faculty at the University of California-San Diego were not happy about it. Scholars like Cecil Lytle, Bud Mehan and Peter Gourevitch thought public universities had been created to break down the old barriers of race, privilege and class and give the state's most disadvantaged students the life-changing advantages of a higher education. What could they do?

It seemed obvious to them. If the university was not allowed to admit low-income students who could not compete academically with advantaged middle class applicants, then the only alternative was to create public schools that would give those low-income and minority students the encouragement, good teaching and extra time they needed to make them just as ready for college as students from the better neighborhoods.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 23, 2007 5:44 AM
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