In 2019, the four-year graduation rate of all University of California (UC) undergraduates was 72.9 percent, while that of black UC students lagged behind at 59.9 percent. This disparity was emblematic of broader imbalances in college preparedness: In 2019, 74 percent of Asian Americans, 53.8 percent of whites, 36.1 percent of Latinos, 25.9 percent of American Indians, and 23.7 percent of blacks in California were prepared for college or professional careers according to the state’s “college and career indicator” factors.
This unfortunate deficit was a result of persistent achievement gaps at the K-12 level. A CalMatters analysis in 2020 revealed divergent high-school graduation rates among different student groups in California: 94 percent for Asian Americans, 88.4 percent for whites, 82.1 percent for Latinos, 76.8 percent for blacks, and 74.8 percent for American Indians. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NAEP), there was a 36-point gap in math scores and a 23-point gap in reading scores between white and black eighth-graders.
The public education system in California is failing all students.The California Smarter Balanced Test results in 2022 failed to close longstanding achievement gaps among students in grades 3-8 and 11. Compared to white and Asian students, who had 61.36-percent and 75.27-percent reading proficiency rates, respectively, only 30.33 percent of black students were reading at grade level.
Education reformers and policy analysts should at least agree on two things. One, the public education system in California is failing all students. Two, the system failure impacts socioeconomically disadvantaged students and non-white/Asian students disproportionately. Fierce disagreements arise over the desired solutions to low performance and learning gaps.
With an understanding that the issues have nuanced root causes, often beyond the control of the education realm, serious observers unbound by ideology argue for long-term policy redress to revive competitiveness, uphold standards, and improve instruction across the board. Others look to promote equity and further lower standards as politically expedient solutions.
In February 2024, Democratic lawmakers in California, who have, for the last two decades, occupied the state legislature with supermajorities, proposed a new state bill to support “Black and African American students attending postsecondary educational institutions in California” and reduce the “academic equity gaps.” Senate Bill 1348, authored by California senator Steven Bradford, aims to address “barriers and disparities for Black and African American students” by establishing the designation of “California Black-Serving Institutions” for eligible state colleges and universities.
Schools will receive this “Black-Serving” certification, subject to renewal after an initial period of five years, if they have a student body that is at least 10-percent black or enroll at least 1,500 black students. Designated colleges must also implement various programs to support these students. Such measures may include a strategic plan, a mission statement, outreach services, campus affinity centers, and the planned allocation of resources, all of which must target black students.
The proposal is modeled on the federal designation of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), defined by the Higher Education Act of 1965 as “any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans, and that is accredited by a nationally recognized accrediting agency or association determined by the Secretary [of Education] to be a reliable authority as to the quality of training offered or is, according to such an agency or association, making reasonable progress toward accreditation.”
The bill’s author, Senator Steven Bradford, served on the California Reparations Task Force.While HBCUs nowadays are required by federal law to “offer all students, regardless of race, an opportunity to develop their skills and talents,” future California Black-Serving Institutions will be tasked with combating the recent decline in college and university enrollment among black students, as well as discrimination.
The latter is an overtly ambiguous goal—intentionally ideological if one considers the historical context of California entering the Union in 1850 as a free state. In fact, SB 1348 aligns with the state’s recent flurry of reparations-themed bills, introduced by the California Legislative Black Caucus to dismantle “the legacy of slavery and systemic racism.” Among these grievance bills, AB 1929 intends to create a grant program for career technical education benefiting slave descendants, AB 1815 prohibits “hairstyles discrimination” in all competitive sports, and SB 1089 tackles “food injustice” by demanding a notice of closure from a grocery store before it exits an underserved community.
The “Black-Serving Institutions” bill’s author, Senator Steven Bradford, is a career politician who served on the California Reparations Task Force. During the current legislative session, Senator Bradford also sponsored SB 1403, another reparations bill seeking to establish the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency to implement recommendations from the task force’s sweeping, 40-chapters-long reparations report. Last year, after California governor Gavin Newsom scaled back his support for cash reparations upon seeing the task force’s suggested price tag of $800 billion, Sen. Bradford pledged in defiance: “Reparations payments are more likely to come in the form of education, housing, land, and access to other resources.” He was not joking, as you can see with SB 1348 and SB 1403.
California’s reparations scheme has a fatal pitfall that is unavoidable due to race being front and center in the progressive movement. It does not accommodate today’s multiracial complexities, nor the fact that many self-identified white Americans could trace their ancestral roots to slavery. For instance, the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency would give special consideration only to “African Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States,” according to SB 1403.
This emphasis on race and color echoes the racialized nature of the California Reparations Report, which goes beyond addressing the harms of slavery and tackles the hotly contested concept of “institutional racism,” an allegedly permanent feature of American society. As it stands, the task force and supporters of reparations argue that California owes African Americans for its complicity in slavery and its subsequent culpability in post-Civil War discrimination. They decry that systemic discrimination embeds white supremacy in American institutions in the present day.
The proposal does not specify how a stamp of certification and campus affinity centers can help close the achievement gap.At any rate, the “Black-Serving Institutions” proposal does not specify how a stamp of certification and campus affinity centers can help close the achievement gap plaguing black families and students. Nor can it begin to solve the painful lack of educational-excellence metrics that can be largely attributed to an obsession with equity. In fact, as long as California’s focus is on race and how students in certain subgroups are handicapped by institutional racism, no meaningful change will happen: Schools will be preoccupied with pushing victimhood and excusing non-performance for “equitable” reasons.
And what will happen to low-performing and failing students who are not black? After all, less than 25 percent of Pacific Islander students in California are proficient in math, and only 33 percent of American Indian students can read at grade-level. A side effect of channeling public resources and energies into race-based programs is that there will always be losers in a zero-sum game of identity balkanization.
Putting aside the substantive issues, the “California Black-Serving Institutions” idea is nothing but another money grift for schools and collaborating nonprofits. California colleges and universities can and will apply for more state resources and funding to serve black students. They can earmark funds for far-left organizations to conduct focus groups, professional training, community partnership programs, and so on.
In the meantime, taxpayers, families, and students, including black students, will not be better off.
Wenyuan Wu holds a Ph.D. in international studies from the University of Miami and is the executive director of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation.