Don’t Fail Kids at the Starting Line

A fifth grader’s socioeconomic standing should not obstruct future prosperity.

Three years after the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action, the Court is set to review another race and school admissions case, this time at the middle school level. The case challenges a public middle school admissions lottery in which eligibility is determined by a student’s performance adjusted for “local norms,” like socioeconomic status. While the policy is “race-blind,” more Black and Latino students have enrolled at those schools since its implementation.

Now, a group of families want to eliminate it. But in the post-affirmative action age, attacking one of the few methods left to expand educational access is dangerous. It is critical that primary schools continue to adjust for student circumstances early in their education to provide a more diversified applicant pool equipped with the necessary resources higher education demands.

We have already seen how the end of affirmative action has reshaped college campuses. Harvard’s Class of 2028, the first admitted after that decision, saw Black enrollment fall from 18 to 14 percent. Both subsequent classes have echoed this drop: Black enrollment in the Class of 2029 was 11.5 percent; in the Class of 2030, that figure dropped to 9.3 percent.

Against that backdrop, the new case is deeply concerning. The plaintiffs argue that the adjusted lottery system discriminates against Asian American students attending high-performing elementary schools. But that adjustment is what opens the door to opportunity. Support beams are instituted not with the intent of damaging the odds of another student but to introduce new players into the market.

Standards for academic excellence mean more with more context: A high-performing student in a low-performing school should not undergo the same admissions requirements as a high-performing student in a high-performing school. The two are simply not comparable.

Taking socioeconomic factors into account is a key way to expand educational access, and removing it forces schools to look at student performance in a vacuum. Moreover, placing that expected performance threshold as early as fifth grade risks abandoning students before they can even prospectively exhibit excellence.

The opponents of context-adjusted admissions seem to suggest that the proper path to a good education runs its course through a narrow, high-performance bubble. If I want to get my future child into a top-ranking college fairly, I should enroll them in a high-performing elementary school in order for them to qualify (fairly!) for a high-performing middle school to then feed into a high-performing high school that will look great on their college application. That is not fairness.

Realistically, affirmative action is not coming back anytime soon, and Harvard has little leverage to retroactively accommodate for educational disparities. Rather, we should be working on this problem bottom up. The burden to adjust for socioeconomic standing now falls even earlier in the educational process.

Wealth inequality greatly interferes with what education and opportunities students have access to. For instance, the National Association of Realtors found house prices in better-ranked suburban school districts to be 49 percent higher than national median prices and 77 percent higher than prices in low-ranked districts. Families and students are stuck in a self-fulfilling prophecy which obstructs them from equal access to education. Why penalize children whose families cannot afford to live in such neighborhoods?

Students from high-income families are also more likely to remain and even climb higher in their income bracket compared to those from low-income families. Capturing applicants from the same background — one with greater likelihood of mobilizing upwards — perpetuates a vicious cycle where no movement extends beyond a miniscule group. And the lottery serves its purpose in resolving this problem.

These socioeconomic disparities in achievement feed directly into threats to diversity, because socioeconomic status explains much of the racial gap in test scores. In a Fordham Institute study, household income best explained Black-white achievement gaps in both reading and math. Adjusting for social contexts, including wealth, helps bridge this racial gap.

Setting children up for success early is how we can serve future generations for any subsequent education. It is our duty to best equip students of all backgrounds with the tools to build the requisite excellence before reaching the collegiate point where affirmative action is no longer protecting them.

Equity in early education sets up a level playing field later in life. Diversity at elite universities like Harvard will only continue to recede if interventions fail children at the starting line.

Olivia R. Nelson ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Psychology in Leverett House.