Texas Ten Percent Plan is Fine

Ruben Navarrette Jr.

DALLAS -- From school finance to desegregation to affirmative action, Texans make education policy more complicated than it needs to be.

For instance, who knew that attending an elite high school could be considered a disadvantage?

That's how some wealthy and well-connected parents see it now that their children have suffered the indignity of being ranked below the top 10th percentile of their graduating class. That sort of thing matters in a state with a race-neutral plan to promote academic diversity.

In Texas, students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class are guaranteed admission to the state college or university of their choice.

That's simple enough, but getting even this far was anything but simple. After the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996 banned racial preferences at the University of the Texas, legislators dreamed up the 10 percent plan to maintain racial and ethnic diversity. It worked. Now UT officials say that the incoming freshman class is more diverse than any other since before the court decision.

But there are new protests. Wealthy parents insist that it's not fair that kids who went to rural and inner-city schools are admitted to the University of Texas or Texas A&M while their own children, who they say attend more competitive public and private schools, are turned away. The parents claim that their kids are being unfairly penalized for going to "better schools."

I've heard it all now. I understand people being discriminated against because of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. But are we now expected to believe that someone can be discriminated against because their own academic achievements put them outside the top of their class? As tempted as I am to dismiss this trend, I can't. The parents have gotten the attention of politicians and other officials, as people with money tend to do. Gov. Rick Perry now says he sees problems with the 10 percent plan.

The question of whether the law should be modified is to be hashed out before a state Senate committee next week. Even the president of the University of Texas at Austin, Larry Faulkner, says the law needs tinkering and that capping the number of students admitted in this way would give the university more control over the process.

But university officials also challenge claims that poor kids admitted under the 10 percent rule flounder once they get in. Not true, say the officials who insist that students admitted under the 10 percent plan, once enrolled, do better than other students. Texans can be a fickle bunch. They said they wanted a race-neutral system, and they got one. Now they don't want it anymore. They said they wanted admissions decisions to be based on merit, but now we find out that some of them didn't really mean it.

After all, what could be more of a meritocracy than a system where a student has to put in the time and effort necessary to work his or her way to the top of the class? The 10 percent plan does that, while providing opportunities to poor kids in small towns and inner city schools who might not think of themselves as university material. Once those kids arrive on campus, they enrich the learning environment by providing a perspective that might otherwise be missing. Remove those students and the whole educational process will suffer.

Instead of encouraging their children to see themselves as victims, I wish these parents had seized the opportunity to do what good parents are supposed to do: impart lessons and teach values. They could have explained to their children that we don't always get everything we want in this world, and that, if we're lucky, we learn as much from the failures as from the success. They could have told them that you get out of education what you put in and that if you study more, party less, work harder, and never give up, you won't have to worry about going through life thinking that -- in a race that really mattered -- you were beat out by a nose.

This isn't complicated. These are young people who went to what we are told were better schools. They probably live in what are considered better neighborhoods. They may even think they're better people. Now all they have to do is become better students.

Ruben Navarrette's e-mail address is rnavarrette@dallasnews.com.