How colleges hide quotas, California’s deadly economic model and other commentary

Campus watch: How colleges hide quotas

“The demographic makeup of the class of 2028” — the first admitted after the Supreme Court’s racial-preferences ban — “suggests that at least some colleges were playing games rather than obeying the Court’s edict,” reports Naomi Schaefer Riley at Commentary.

At schools like Princeton, Harvard and Yale, the racial make-up changed only slightly or not at all, likely because they used proxies for race, such as information about the challenges applicants faced based on their schools and neighborhoods — info admissions offices get via Landscape, a tool provided by the College Board, the nonprofit that runs the SATs and AP exams.

“The College Board is colluding in the creation of a complex new system for schools to identify the race of a student without explicitly asking for it.” Universities need to be held “to account.” 

Eye on NY: Keep local races local

“Lots of well-intentioned political leaders . . . think it’s a great idea” to move city elections to “coincide with the year we pick presidential candidates,” but “I don’t,” warns New York magazine’s Errol Louis.

“National political dynamics would inevitably cause vital city issues unique to New York to get swallowed, distorted, or ignored.” “Imagine trying to help voters focus on strictly local matters . . . while national candidates are spending hundreds of millions of dollars” on “ads for and against sweeping” national proposals. This is exactly why city elections got moved to odd-numbered years in the first place.

“New York is better off deciding local issues without a lot of political noise coming from — or intended for — other places.”

Education beat: New Orleans’ charter miracle

Five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Big Easy, Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the storm “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans” — crass words, admits Ian Burrek at Unherd, but “as we can see clearly” now, true ones: The disaster “shattered the systemic inertia and stifling bureaucracy that had betrayed generations of children, unleashing a schools revolution unmatched anywhere for its radicalism and scale” by “converting all New Orleans schools into charter schools.”

That has proved “a huge success,” per Tulane University experts reviewing “scores of studies conducted over more than a decade into this bold experiment.” Indeed, “it’s the largest, broadest and most sustained improvement we’ve ever seen in a US school district” — on everything “from test scores and parental satisfaction through to college access and reduced involvement in crime,” says Doug Harris of the Education Research Alliance.

From the right: Fringe theories fuel black paranoia 

The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Felix is far from the only black journalist caught “ranting” about “whiteness and white people in explicitly racist terms,” tuts Mark Hemingway at The Federalist. She used the Nation of Islam term “tricknological” to condemn how “white people invoke the holocaust . . . and slip on fake oppression.” Historical racism is real, but “prominent black commentators and politicians” regularly cite “fantastical notions of trickery, theft, or hidden forces” to explain blacks’ struggles. “Even Barack Obama seems to have bought into the black conspiracy nonsense,” as when he refused to condemn a Chicago mayoral aide who accused Jewish doctors of “infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans.” 

Urbanist: California’s Deadly Economic Model

“For decades,” notes Joel Kotkin at City Journal, “Colorado, Washington, and Oregon were widely hailed as states with bright futures.” But now their “lower job growth, sluggish housing-construction rates, a deteriorating business climate, and surging domestic out-migration” have indicated their growing “Californication.” Colorado’s “leftward lurch” and “rising regulations” have placed it “among the least attractive states to outsiders.”

The three states are “mimicking California energy policies,” while “regulation-heavy land-use policies” are “driving up housing costs.” And the “increasingly radical politics dominating” Denver, Seattle and Portland have degraded “urban livability.” “The California model is a prescription for decline.” 

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board