Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and other Democrats want to require universities that take federal money to disclose detailed statistics on the economic status and race of the alumni relatives they admit. The purpose is to dramatize that affluent whites are the main beneficiaries of "legacy" preferences and pressure universities to end them.

Students perform mock trials, engage in formal debates, and write stories, letters, poems, skits, and essays, [are] expected to spell correctly, and know English grammar, as well as the times tables and basic mathematical algorithms. In a class that we watched, the teacher was rapidly firing square root questions. The square root of 81 is? Students called on to answer rose from their chairs and gave the answer, loud and clear, standing tall. (An education in public speaking as well as math.) In other classes, students memorize poems and speeches. Fifth-graders must know the elements of the periodic table; sixth-graders can explain the process of DNA replication. – Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning

That’s the way they do it at North Star Academy, a public charter school in Newark, N.J., with a student body of almost entirely low-income, African-American kids and no whites. The school day runs an extra hour. The academic year is 11 months. The students wear uniforms. They pick up trash. The homework is hefty. Most parents sign a voluntary "covenant" to "check our child’s homework each night." The school’s founders see inner-city teaching as a calling. The school is free of bureaucratic paralysis and free to hire nonunion teachers, pay them extra for unusual success or long hours, fire bad teachers, discipline students, and allocate its small budget as it sees fit.

It works. Despite having spent five years in abysmal elementary schools before entering North Star, 78 percent of the students passed statewide tests in English language arts and 58 percent passed in math in 2002 — well over double the rates of other schools in the neighborhood. And these students plan to go to college.

Things got awkward when the word "culture" came up at the October 20 American Enterprise Institute forum about the enormous gap in academic performance that separates African-American (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) students from whites and Asians.

"We are mindful … that `[a] core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to do away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.’ … Accordingly, race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time…. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in racial diversity] approved today."

Many supporters of using racial preferences in university admissions have distorted debate about the practice by fostering some misleading myths as to how it actually works. As the Supreme Court prepares a climactic decision, to be issued by early July, on the preferential admissions systems at the University of Michigan’s undergraduate and law schools, let’s examine some of these myths and the realities they have obscured. And let’s consider the likely effect on diversity if colleges were to give preferences based on disadvantaged socioeconomic status instead of race.

During the Supreme Court’s private conference on the 1978 Bakke case, Justice John Paul Stevens said that preferences "might be acceptable as a temporary measure but not a permanent solution," according to John C. Jeffries’s 1994 biography of Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. "Powell agreed. The problem was one of transition to a color-blind society. Perhaps, Stevens added, blacks would not need these programs much longer, but at this point Justice [Thurgood] Marshall broke in to say that it would be another hundred years. This remark left Powell speechless…. He recoiled from the prospect of generation upon generation of racial quotas."

The vast majority of Americans of all races say they oppose racial preferences in college admissions. But most of us would also be highly distressed to see a drastic drop in the number of black and Hispanic students at our top universities. A Supreme Court decision banning racial preferences would produce just such a drop.