by Mexico News Daily

Six weeks after invalidating the first part of the federal government’s controversial electoral reform package, the Supreme Court (SCJN) has struck down the second more substantive section.

As was the case with the first part of the so-called Plan B electoral reform package, nine of 11 justices concluded that the approval of the second section by federal Congress violated legislative procedure. The ruling Morena party and its allies have a majority in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, ensuring the legislation’s passage through Congress.

The SCJN ruled that reforms to three laws and a proposal to create another one were rushed through the lower house of Congress without giving lawmakers adequate time or opportunity to understand and debate the legislation.

“The Chamber of Deputies never gave reasons to justify the urgent process,” Justice Javier Laynez said during a court session on Thursday.

“… Lawmakers didn’t have the opportunity to become familiar with the proposals because they weren’t published or distributed with the advance notice required by the rules of the Chamber of Deputies. Most importantly, they didn’t have a reasonable period to become familiar with what they were voting on as, in total, there were reforms to more than 510 articles,” said Laynez, who proposed the abrogation of the laws to his colleagues.

“It’s clear and evident that the principle of democratic deliberation was violated,” he said in reference to deputies’ approval of the laws in just four hours.

The justice also cited other legislative irregularities related to the second part of the reform package, including an order from President López Obrador to remove a so-called “eternal life” clause in one of the proposed laws, which would have allowed major parties to transfer votes to their smaller coalition partners to avoid their possible de-registration due to a lack of support at elections.

Justice Yasmín Esquivel and Justice Loretta Ortiz, both of whom were nominated by López Obrador, voted against repealing the second section of the reform package.

Esquivel noted that the laws received sufficient support to pass Congress and consequently argued that a “democratic exercise” had taken place. She accused her fellow justices of violating “the principle of the separation of powers,” and charged that the court’s consideration of the case was “superficial.”

The application of the laws struck down by the SCJN on Thursday was suspended by the court in March just weeks after they were promulgated by López Obrador. Laynez said at the time that the suspension was necessary to protect democracy and voters’ rights.

Approved by the Senate in late February, the second part of the reform package slashed the budget of the National Electoral Institute (INE), limited the powers of the Federal Electoral Tribunal and made changes to key dates related to electoral processes in Mexico, among other effects.

To demonstrate their support for the INE in the face of what they considered an unwarranted attack on and dangerous weakening of the institute, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across Mexico shortly after the second section of the package was approved. The now-annulled electoral reform laws are collectively known as Plan B as a more ambitious constitutional bill aimed at overhauling Mexico’s electoral system failed to attract the two-thirds congressional support it required.

With the Supreme Court having now invalidated the entirety of the reform package, the INE will recover powers it lost or which were diminished during the brief period that the legislation was in effect. The institute’s previous capacity to sanction politicians who violate electoral laws will be restored, its autonomy won’t be curtailed, its funding won’t be cut and it will be able to employee more people and keep regional offices open.

The first part of the reform package involved changes to the General Law on Social Communication and the General Law on Administrative Responsibilities. A key aim was to limit the responsibilities of the INE and its capacity to regulate and sanction political communication.

The second part of the package entailed modifications to the General Law on Institutions and Electoral Procedures; the General Law on Political Parties; and the Organic Federal Judicial Power Law. It also created a General Law on Means to Challenge Electoral Matters.

The second part was considered the most damaging to the INE and its capacity to oversee elections, although López Obrador rejected claims that the package he put forward was a threat to democracy in Mexico.

The president has been a fierce critic of the INE and its predecessor, the Federal Electoral Institute. At least part of his dissatisfaction with the country’s electoral authorities stems from his losses at the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections. López Obrador maintains that he was a victim of electoral fraud in both contests.

He has already indicated that he will attempt to enshrine his desired electoral reforms in the constitution if the ruling Morena party and its allies win a supermajority in both houses of Congress at elections on June 2, 2024. The sitting period of the new Congress will begin in September 2024, the president’s last month in office.

López Obrador, who is also a staunch critic of the Supreme Court and the broader judiciary,  described former INE president Lórenzo Córdova as an “anti-democratic character, but now that Guadalupe Taddei Zavala — who has links to Morena — has taken his place, his view of the institute has significantly softened.

After meeting with all 11 electoral councilors including Taddei at the National Palace last week, López Obrador declared that a “new stage” had begun in the federal government’s relationship with the elections oversight body.

The SCJN’s latest electoral reform decision, and other rulings that have angered López Obrador, would appear to make a similar rapprochement between Mexico’s top court and the nation’s preeminent political figure nigh on impossible.

With reports from Milenio, Reforma and El País.

by Joe Hong, CalMatters

Teacher turnover is high at schools with large numbers of students living in poverty. Now California is pouring billions of dollars into two programs: One subsidizes college students in credentialing programs and the other offers money to districts that want to create community schools

Teachers don’t get into their profession for money or power, but a little more of both might help keep them at high-poverty schools, where students are more likely to fall behind grade level and less likely to graduate from high school or attend college.

Across California and the nation, many of these schools struggle to retain teachers, leaving them with fewer experienced educators. Those who stay often battle the headwinds of poverty: hunger, homelessness and mental health challenges. After only a few years, many end up leaving for easier teaching jobs in more affluent communities.

California’s elected officials have tried for decades to slow the exodus of veteran teachers from schools with the poorest students. One idea that has been conspicuously absent from the conversation: paying teachers more to work at those schools. The politically powerful California Teachers Association opposes “differentiated pay” policies that would increase salaries for teachers at hard-to-staff schools, rendering that approach a non-starter.

Now, lawmakers are making unprecedented investments in two ideas that have been around for years. One offers prospective educators a grant if they commit to teaching at a high-poverty school after their training. The other, a model known as community schools, rethinks school governance, giving more power to teachers to shape every aspect of a school.

Since 2019, the state has spent close to $5 billion on these two approaches. Despite the boost in spending, it remains unclear whether the state will see a return. Teacher turnover remains a perennial challenge at schools serving more low-income families. As experienced teachers leave in search of less challenging classrooms, students at high-needs schools are less likely to have educators who can help close achievement gaps — seen in the persistently lower test scores among those students compared to their more affluent peers. The stakes are now higher than ever as educators work to help students recover from the academic losses they suffered during the pandemic and remote learning.

Staffing is usually overseen by local school districts. But amid the ongoing teacher shortage, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said the California Department of Education has “repurposed” one existing employee to help school districts hire teachers.

When he first ran for state superintendent in 2018, Thurmond said he opposed extra pay for teachers in poorer neighborhoods, disputing evidence that it would help. But in a recent interview with CalMatters, he said he would consider any evidence-based policy, especially since some districts already pay some, such as bilingual teachers, more.

“I support any idea that will support teacher retention,” Thurmond said. “We know the profession is impacted by fatigue.”

A CalMatters analysis of teacher experience data from 35 districts — adding up to 1,280 schools — across the state found that the correlation between student poverty and teacher experience is stark, especially in urban regions.

Four years for $20,000

The Golden State Teacher Grant Program gives up to $20,000 in grants to college students earning a teaching credential. In exchange, they work in a high-poverty school for four years within eight years of obtaining their credential. The state committed $500 million over five years to funding the grants, starting in 2021. Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed injecting an additional $6 million into the program this year.

Samantha Fernandez, a 23-year-old single mother from Chula Vista, received $16,000 through the grant program. She said the money covered the entire cost of earning her credential.

“It was a blessing,” she said.

While earning that credential, she worked in two schools in the Cajon Valley Union School District in eastern San Diego County. One had more poorer students while the other was made up predominantly of wealthier ones. The former, Chase Avenue Elementary, serves a large community of immigrants and refugees from Afghanistan, many of whom only spoke Pashto when they arrived. The language barrier was a challenge, but she found the experience to be just as rewarding as working in a more affluent school.

“I want to help kids achieve their dreams, no matter what struggles they go through,” Fernandez said. “I want to be the person who can be their support outside their home.”

Fernandez never set out to work in a high-poverty school, but she said “everything happens for a reason.” It’s too early to know if she’ll stay beyond her four-year commitment, but she said she’s open to it.

In the fall, she’ll start a master’s program in teaching. She said the grant will allow her to continue her education “with a sense of relief.”

This isn’t the first time that California has tried enticing teachers into working at a high-needs school by subsidizing their education. In 2000, the state launched the Governor’s Teaching Fellowship, which gave prospective teachers up to $20,000 in grants for committing to work in a school where test scores rank in the bottom half of the state’s public schools.

The program was short-lived. It ran out of money in 2003. A 2009 study found that about 75 percent of teachers in the program stayed at high-poverty schools beyond their three-year commitments.

As a reincarnation, the Golden State Teacher Grant Program is attracting applicants in droves. So far, almost 11,000 prospective teachers have committed to teaching at a high-poverty school. The state handed out more than $132 million in grants in the past two years.

None of the teachers have yet completed their four-year commitments, but the state plans to track how many stay beyond that time.

Some research suggests the Golden State Teacher Grant Program could lead to less turnover in the long run. The Learning Policy Institute, an education research group, found that reducing the cost of teacher training can increase recruitment and retention. Tara Kini, the chief of policy and program at the Learning Policy Institute, said the program will help relieve a financial burden on teachers amid the academic fallout from the pandemic.

“The past couple of years have been pretty challenging,” Kini said. “It points to a need for greater incentives for teachers.”

The California Student Aid Commission, the state agency that oversees the Golden State Teacher Grant Program, expects to give out over $157 million by the end of this school year. That puts the state on track to use up the entire $500 million before the 2025 deadline.

Kini said she expects the program to have an added benefit of encouraging more teachers of color — who are already more likely to work in high-poverty schools and carry more student debt — to enter the workforce.

While experience is just one factor, research shows that students do better with teachers who have at least five years of experience. This is where a second statewide initiative, community schools, might help get teachers to stay.

Giving teachers power

Community schools partner with local health or social service organizations to become a one-stop shop for students and their families. Schools tailor the partnerships to what their families need.

The community schools model has been around for decades, but in the past three years, Gov. Newsom and the Legislature poured an unprecedented $4.1 billion into the program.

The state’s investment might not end up in teachers’ pockets, but the money could give teachers at those schools more of a voice at their campuses. Both teachers and experts say that giving educators the power to design lessons and decide how to use a school’s money to help students could be as effective as pay raises to get teachers to stay in challenging work environments.

The community schools model requires:

• Shared governance — Teachers, parents, students and administrators all have a say in every aspect of a school’s operation, from curriculum to after-school activities;
• Autonomy — School communities can make decisions on their own without interference from district bureaucracies;
• “Integrated student supports” — Schools can partner with local organizations to provide health or social services based on the unique needs of their students;
• A community school coordinator — One full-time employee handles administration.

For some educators, the model is an obvious solution to teacher turnover at high-poverty schools.

“A lot of teachers feel disempowered and not part of democratic decision-making,” said David Goldberg, vice president of the California Teachers Association. “They feel like their needs are not being met at schools.”

Giving educators more authority at their workplace makes them feel like respected professionals, said Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied community schools for decades.

“We’re not making automobiles here. You can’t have one-size-fits-all,” he said. “Those closest to the kids need to be given a lot of discretion.”

Kyle Weinberg, president of the teachers union at San Diego Unified, said making sure teachers have a say in how schools serve the most vulnerable students will help keep them on the payroll.

“We know that when we increase educator voices in school decisions, that educators are more committed,” he said. “They’re more committed to working on strengthening what we’re doing as a school, and they’re more likely to stay at that school when they know they have that voice.”

While districts have a lot of autonomy in designing community schools, implementation can be bumpy.

At Sacramento City Unified, the teachers’ union claims that the district has shut them out of the community schools process. According to teachers union President David Fisher, the district applied for the state grant and received some money, but teachers had no say in which schools were selected.

At Twin Rivers Unified, north of Sacramento, teachers union President Rebecca LeDoux said the district is excluding teachers from decision-making, undermining the key tenet of the community schools model. She said the district chose which schools to turn into community schools without any teacher input.

“My problem isn’t with which schools were chosen, my problem is with how it was chosen,” LeDoux said. “It can’t be through the vision of administrators who sit in the ivory tower, farthest from our students.”

Thurmond said he wasn’t aware of these issues at local districts and said his team would investigate further. Steve Zimmer, a deputy superintendent overseeing community schools grants for the department, said the agency would first try to resolve these issues and only resort to taking away money if there’s a clear unwillingness from administrators to get input from teachers.

“I’m not looking to go to this place… but of course we could take adverse action,” Zimmer said. “I feel confident we’re prepared to make course corrections as necessary.”

There are also success stories. At San Diego Unified, the teachers union and district leaders are clearing the same hurdles materializing at other districts. In April, they signed a contract that codifies the principles of community schools into the bargaining agreements at the 15 schools that received state grants.

At the Anaheim Union High School District in Orange County, the community schools model has been implemented at 13 schools. At one school, Sycamore Junior High, which serves a large immigrant population, the district used community schools funding to connect parents to immigration legal services and created a social science curriculum focused on immigration policy in the United States. The school also uses community schools grants to host a farmers market once a month on campus.

Throughout the year, teachers assigned “soapbox speeches,” asking students to give a presentation on any social issue affecting students at the school. Topics ranged from immigration and mental health to pet adoption and food waste.

Nicholas Cordova, a seventh grade history teacher at Sycamore and an Anaheim native, said it’s rewarding to see schools tackling the issues facing students. During the last week of school in May, some of his students presented their speeches. Students stood at their desks as Cordova flipped through their slideshows. His students are soft-spoken and clearly not comfortable with public speaking. Awkward silences punctuated their presentations, but for Cordova, they’re opportunities to encourage his students.

“This is as close to home as we can get,” Cordova said as one student started her speech about mental health.

He said Sycamore has a reputation as an under-performing school, but becoming a community school allows teachers to counter that.

“That’s something we’re always fighting against,” Cordova said. “If people actually took the time to come and talk to the teachers and students, they would see what we’re doing to make the school a better place.”

The community schools model also gives students a voice. Yvonne Walker, a Black seventh grade student at Sycamore, asked staff members to convene a restorative justice session with the eighth grade student council to discuss the rampant use of racial slurs on campus. The session was held on the last Monday of the school year in a portable classroom at the edge of campus.

Restorative justice is an approach to student discipline and campus culture that emphasizes open communication over punishment. A school that embraces restorative justice might have a staff member oversee a discussion with students who just got into a fight instead of suspending or expelling them. A restorative justice approach in Yvonne’s case meant students sat in a circle and shared their experiences with racial slurs.

Yvonne is one of the few Black students at Sycamore, where 93 percent of students are Latino. As the discussion started, it was clear that some of the eighth-graders were unsympathetic. Several were having hushed side conversations. When Yvonne shared how hurtful it is to hear the n-word around campus, the eighth-graders got defensive. “What do you want us to do?” one quietly mouthed. Others talked about how Latino students use slurs with each other as terms of endearment.

At the end of the session, Yvonne, who also identifies as Latino because her mother is from El Salvador, said she was “disappointed by her community.” She said she was hoping at least one of the eighth-graders could empathize.

“I was thinking that there’s probably someone out there who has the same feelings as me,” she said. “I didn’t want to be a part of the silence.”

But staff members did hear her. Brenda Chavez, director of restorative justice at Sycamore, also sits on the community schools steering team.

The steering team represents the shared-governance component of the community schools model. It’s made up of teachers, parents, staff members and the principal of Sycamore Junior High. They meet once a month.

During their final meeting of the school year just hours after the restorative justice session, Chavez mentioned the discussion led by Yvonne. She says that next fall, the steering team will discuss ways to better teach about the history of racism to reduce the use of racial slurs on campus.

The steering team meeting blends the professionalism and formality of a school board meeting with the warmth of a family gathering. The meeting starts when two student members walk into the room with three boxes of pizza.

The teachers, students and parents on the team spend most of the meeting analyzing survey results. The survey asked teachers, students and parents about the school’s strengths and challenges. More than 1,000 responded. Teachers called for more staff and smaller class sizes. Parents wanted more security on campus. Students said they just want to be heard.

At the end of the meeting, some parents and teachers suggest that the steering team should meet more often. Most of the other members nod in agreement.

Grant Schuster, the president of Anaheim Union’s teachers union, said this type of outreach will keep teachers in the district. He’s optimistic that the voice teachers have on the steering committee will keep them at high-poverty schools.

“This isn’t just another statewide program,” Schuster said. “It’s a systemic change to how you run a school. I think it’s going to bring results.”

A simpler solution?

As for the idea California won’t consider — paying teachers more to teach in schools in poorer neighborhoods — Wisconsin’s experience is instructive. Under a Republican legislature and governor, that state gave school districts full power to determine teacher pay. That meant collective bargaining was no longer required by state law.

Yale University economist Barbara Biasi, who studied the results, found that districts offering higher salaries got better teachers and saw higher test scores. But high-poverty schools in districts that kept collective bargaining struggled more than ever to recruit quality, experienced teachers.

“I’m not sure why we make salaries so rigid and so low for the profession that has so much impact,” Biasi said. But, she added, you can’t have higher salaries across the board, strict salary schedules and tenure rules.

“You can’t have a job where people cannot get fired and also have everyone paid a lot of money,” she said. “You can’t have everything. It’s not what other professions do.”

Al Muratsuchi, a Democratic state Assembly member from Torrance and the chair of the Assembly’s Education Committee, this session authored ambitious legislation that would increase teacher salaries by 50 percent. The bill passed the Assembly floor on June 1 with a 77-0 vote.

Muratsuchi said he would also consider proposals for higher salaries for teachers working in high-poverty schools.

“I think it only makes sense that teachers are an important part of any education policy being considered,” Muratsuchi said. “At the same time, we want to make sure that no special interest is obstructing any necessary reforms.”

Currently, the California Department of Education doesn’t have a team focused on statewide teacher staffing. The agency doesn’t track teacher salaries, vacancies or turnover rates, and it’s unlikely to do so anytime soon considering that the state budget isn’t providing the department with additional funding. Thurmond said he’ll commit the few resources he has to “cobbling together” a variety of sources — from teacher pension data to teacher polls — to better understand the staffing needs across the state.

“We’ll look for ways to gather information to help us define the shortage,” he said. “I just have to be honest, we have to work on it in a modest way.”

(Joe reports on the students, teachers and lawmakers who shape California’s public schools. Before joining CalMatters in 2021, he was the education reporter at KPBS, the public radio station in San Diego.)

by Itzel Luna

As a first generation student of color, JP Flores credits much of his academic success to his ability to attend Occidental College, a small, private college in Southern California with what he describes as an inclusive culture.

“It changed my perspective on the world and changed the trajectory of my life,” said Flores, who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in bioinformatics & computational biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

That trajectory might have been different, Flores said, if Occidental had been barred from using affirmative action in admissions  — a situation that could become reality this summer if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against the practice in two widely watched cases.

Anxiety about the ruling is mounting at the state’s private colleges, which until now have not been subject to a California law prohibiting public universities from considering race, sex and ethnicity in admissions and hiring. Administrators at those colleges are turning to alternative policies that could help boost diverse enrollment, while student activists are trying to increase awareness on their campuses about the possible impact of an affirmative action ban.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule in June on two lawsuits filed by Students for Fair Admissions — a non-profit group led by conservative legal strategist Edward Blum — after hearing arguments in the cases in October. One suit argues that Harvard University’s admission policy discriminates against Asian American applicants, while the other  asserts that The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discriminates against Asian American and white applicants.

Although it is unclear how limited or expansive the ruling might be, many university leaders and student activists are bracing for an outright ban on affirmative action on all campuses, given the court’s conservative majority.

Flores said he worries especially about the impact on diversity in the STEM professions. He founded a podcast “From Where Does it STEM?” in 2021, where he interviews scientists from diverse backgrounds about their experiences in the field, and helps recruit and retain underrepresented minority students to STEM programs. If private universities are banned from using affirmative action, he fears, it will “only bring one perspective to the forefront.”

“I think people in science are really starting to realize that in order to solve biological problems like cancer, Alzheimer’s, or different diseases, it takes an interdisciplinary approach,” Flores said. “People really underestimate the power of having a diverse scientific workforce behind these problems.”

Universities bracing for impact

Some California private universities have flagged that an affirmative action ban could constrain their ability to review applications holistically — taking into account all aspects of an applicant’s identity, including experiences, attributes and academic metrics.

A holistic admissions process is essential to creating a student body that equips “students to become the citizens of the world (needed) to meet the greatest needs of our society,” said Eva Blanco Masias, the vice president of enrollment at Santa Clara University.

And race is often deeply embedded in a student’s application, said Masias — not just in the demographic information, but also in their essays. Students often write about life experiences, where race can play a factor, she said.

While it’s impossible to predict the court’s ruling, “there might be some limitations put on institutions’ ability to consider race (and) ethnicity as one of many, many factors in holistic admissions,” said Julie Park, an associate professor of education at the University of Maryland, College Park.

“So is that going to be some sort of limitation? Is that going to be an outright ban? We don’t really know,” said Park, who has studied race and admissions for nearly two decades and served as a consulting expert for Harvard on the SFFA case until 2018.

Another concern is that students from underrepresented backgrounds, aware of the ban, might opt out of applying to private colleges, said Kristen Soares, president of the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities, a trade group of more than 80 colleges.

“People know about this decision being debated right now in the highest court of law in the nation,” she said.  Private colleges, she said, are “really worried” that families might interpret a potential affirmative action ban as a message: “You’re not welcome at these institutions.”

Flores, who now mentors high school students and serves as an alumni interviewer for prospective Occidental College students, echoed that concern. “A lot of students from underrepresented backgrounds, they are so scared to just even apply because they feel they’re not qualified.”

And that can have a ripple effect on diversity among graduate students, he said:  “A big part of getting underrepresented students to get their Ph.Ds or MDs or even a master’s degree is to make sure they can actually get to undergrad.”

Motivated in part by the Supreme Court cases, the association this year launched the California Private College is Possible Alliance, a joint outreach effort that works with high school and community college counselors to break down barriers that might prevent low-income students and students of color from pursuing private education.

The alliance has created a centralized landing webpage where counselors can find information about private colleges throughout the state, including their application process, available financial aid and unique programs they offer. It plans to host college fairs across the state for high school and community college students.

“We want to be loud and clear that they should not (opt themselves out),” said Masias, whose university is participating. “Still be intentional and strive for your educational aspirations. We’re still here. We still welcome you. Please apply.”

However, Zachary Bleemer, a Yale economics professor who studied the impact of affirmative action at the University of California before California’s Proposition 209 made it illegal in 1996, notes that these initiatives might not be as effective as affirmative action.

He compared affirmative action to two alternative UC policies to increase representation of underrepresented minorities, a category that includes Black, Hispanic, and Native American students.

Bleemer studied the admissions cycles between 1994 and 2021 and found that both alternatives — guaranteeing UC acceptance to the top 9% of California students and holistic application review — had a much smaller impact than race-based affirmative action. While affirmative action increased underrepresented minority enrollment by over 20%, the UC’s top percent policies  increased it by less than 4% and holistic review by about 7%, he found.

“Despite the fact that universities are going to go out of their way to try to implement replacement policies for race-based affirmative action to maintain diversity on campus, nevertheless, diversity is going to fall, Black and Hispanic enrollment and expectation is going to fall, at selective private universities,” Bleemer predicted.

At UC Berkeley and UCLA, the two most competitive campuses in the UC system, underrepresented minority enrollment dropped significantly after Proposition 209, plunging by about 50 percent at Berkeley.

Although underrepresented minority enrollment on those campuses has increased during the past 30 years, it does not reflect those groups’ share of California high school graduates, and Black student enrollment still has not returned to pre-Prop 209 levels.

The ban led to a cascade effect, Bleemer said, where Black and Latino students fell down the ladder of selectivity within UC and it ultimately pushed some students who were at the bottom completely out of higher education.

“Kids who had previously gone to Berkeley, the affirmative action ban goes into place, now they go to Davis. Kids who were previously going to Davis now go to Riverside, etc,” Bleemer said. “So you see this sort of shift of the full distribution of Black and Hispanic students into somewhat less selective universities.”

UC Berkeley has partially reversed that trend; for the freshman class of 2020, Black and Latino enrollment increased by about 40% over the previous year and has stayed steady since.

Olufemi Ogundele, the university’s dean of undergraduate admissions, said since being hired in 2019, he’s focused on altering three aspects of the admissions process: student outreach, application evaluation, and messaging.

He and his team worked to ensure that their outreach was tailored to the specific needs of the students and communities they were speaking to. Given how selective UC Berkeley is, he noted that “it’s not just about going out into communities and talking about coming to Berkeley. It’s much more about going out into communities and talking about college options that they have, and using Berkeley as a template to describe those options for those families.”

He worked to “humanize the evaluation process” by requiring admissions counselors to have “local expertise on the environments that they were reading from.”

“This has been allowing diverse versions of excellence to emerge in our evaluation process, which has been incredibly helpful, especially when we start thinking about geographic range,  which we’ve been trying to really capture, as we are a public flagship trying to represent the entire state, and not just pieces of it,” Ogundele said.

Ogundele also stressed the importance of ensuring that every admitted student understands their value to the university.

“We changed our messaging from ‘You’re so lucky to be here’ to ‘We are lucky to have you,’ ” he said.

Based on UC’s experience, Bleemer predicted that a nationwide affirmative action ban would cause declines in Black and Latino enrollment at California’s highly selective private colleges such as Stanford University and the University of Southern California. The effect could be muted, however, if there’s less student awareness about the Supreme Court’s decision than there was about Proposition 209 in the 1990s, he said. And part of the decline at UC was driven by the fact that students had other high-quality options, including private schools across the country and public schools outside of California, where affirmative action was still in effect. A nationwide affirmative action ban would change that picture, he said.

Concern at Stanford 

Much of the concern at California’s private universities has revolved around diversity within STEM fields.

Stanford University filed an amicus brief in support of Harvard last November. As one of the nation’s most selective colleges, with a roughly 4% acceptance rate, the university argued that an affirmative action ban would particularly negatively impact its programs in STEM, “which has historically been marked by greater limitations in diversity than most fields of study.”

Stanford student Phong Nguyen is part of the 22% Campaign, a student-led initiative that works to increase representation of Southeast Asian students on campus, including those from Hmong, Lao, Khmer, and Tibetan communities. The initiative has led protests, coordinated high school outreach programs and called for Stanford to disaggregate its admissions data so that these Asian communities can be recognized as underrepresented.

During his time on campus, Nguyen — a first generation and Asian American student — has joined the Asian American Theater club on campus and spent time in Okada House, Stanford’s Asian American cultural-themed dorm.

He said he worries that an affirmative action ban could decrease diversity in the student body and negatively impact race-based student groups that make him feel more at home at a predominantly white and wealthy institution like Stanford.

“A huge part of what has made my experience at Stanford University so enjoyable are those cultures that I’ve been exposed to,” Nguyen said. “There is some sort of beauty in the phrase ‘Everyone is going to a different Stanford’ and I think the Stanford I’m going to is quite beautiful now and I don’t want that to change.”

Nguyen has partnered with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a national nonprofit legal aid and civil rights organization, to spread awareness about a possible affirmative action ban through tabling on campus and leading a teach-in alongside Stanford ethnic studies professors. The teach-in focused on the history of affirmative action and how an end to the admissions policy could impact discussions and learning in ethnic studies courses.

The Stanford College Republicans, on the other hand, would view a Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action as a win, said their president, Seamus Callaghan.

Affirmative action seeks “to draw out racial divisions within our country,” Callaghan said in a statement to CalMatters.

“All American communities, regardless of racial makeup, deserve to prosper, but affirmative action in hiring and admissions has done little to advance this cause,” he said. “It does nothing to address the underlying causes of continued racial disparities, such as differences in grade school quality, the epidemic of fatherlessness, or a culture of grievance that suppresses wealth creation.”

Impact of a ban

Park, the University of Maryland education professor, said that despite some students’ fears, a Supreme Court ruling is unlikely to impact race-based student groups or scholarships. But some universities, she said, might “overread” the decision, and impose restrictions beyond the scope of the ruling. This is already starting to happen in places where race-conscious admissions are still legal, Park said.

“We’ve seen for instance, institutions have made sort of shifts in things like scholarship programs or other initiatives. Scholarships that used to be explicitly for, say, BIPOC students are now kind of diversity scholarships that white students can receive,” Park said. “Some of these steps have been done even while race conscious admissions is still the law of the land.”

Ogundele described affirmative action as a “necessary band-aid solution that our profession has used,” and its potential loss as an opportunity for universities to look deeper at how to solve educational disparities.

“If the results from the Supreme Court case come back in a way that does create a national ban on the ability to use race, I think it would be a real gut check moment for many institutions to understand, well, what is your true commitment to diversity and to equity?” he said.

A particularly challenging part of his job, he said, has been increasing Black students’ application and enrollment numbers at Berkeley.

“When we take a look at all of these institutions across all nine of the states that have similar bans like Prop 209, it is Black people for the most part are the most impacted by these types of bans,” Ogundele said. “So that’s my greatest fear — is what does this mean for Black enrollment at highly selective and highly resourced institutions?”

Luna is a fellow with the CalMatters College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. This story and other higher education coverage are supported by the College Futures Foundation.