applicants for this grit, right? the posse foundation has a more selective, is more selective than harvard. so only about 4, 4.5% of kids will apply for a posse scholarship. the average s.a.t. score is something like 1100. these kids are enormously successful, and it's because organizations like posse and quest bridge have learned how to identify striving kids who will stick to it. kids who get a 4.0 in high school tend to repeat that kind of performance. right? a person who gets a 4.0 has set a very, very high standard for themself. those are the types of kids who need and deserve a leg up. i'm not talking about watering down merit. i'm also suggesting that we

should no longer make studying for the s.a.t. the primary junior high school activity. it's wasting kids of all backgrounds. we're wasting their time and making them miserable unnecessarily. >> i should say that i think that there's actually people on both sides of the aisle that agree with that. charles murray, i think, is also in favor of not using the s.a.t. anymore. i have no particular grief with the s.a.t.. i will say that the suggestion that it's culturally biased, i think, is not true. it may be biased in other ways, and it may not be the best predicter. but for culturally biased, then you would expect african-american students, for instance, to do better in school, better in college than their s.a.t. scores would suggest. in fact, that's not true. the s.a.t. does not underpredict african-american performance. >> all right. we're winding down our time, so i'd like to pose one last

question before we invite our panelists to give their concluding comments. i'm struck that throughout this conversation we haven't tackled some of the deep structural issues that are at the root of this conversation. so let me talk about my hometown of detroit where about 95% of white children in the metro detroit area live in very low poverty neighborhoods. these are neighborhoods with, for the most part, highly functioning schools, good jobs for their parents, places to buy, fresh fruits and vegetables, capital to start a business. in contrast, only about 40% of black and latino kids in metro detroit live in those kinds of neighborhoods. now, you might say, well, that's to be expected given differences in wealth, income and education. but let's control for that. in detroit poor white children, about three out of every four live in neighborhoods with very low levels of poverty. in contrast, there are similarly

poor -- their similarly poor black and latino peers very overrepresented in high poverty neighborhoods. so these are the issues that are at the root of our conversation. so i invite our panelists, how do we tackle these challenges? how do we begin to understand the sorting that has happened as a result of a variety of historic and contemporary factors and tackle those challenges so that, ultimately, we're not talking about preferences of any sort? >> this is the hardest issue in american society. it is. and and i are on the board of an organization that's trying to tackle these of i don't know how you get a saner politics. you have to get a multiracial majority that gets you to 51%, 55% in a policy making forum to attack that kind of structural disadvantage, right? fred douglas, power concedes

nothing without a demand. now, detroit is more extreme than almost any other place in the united states. right? but a feature in my chapter, multiracial coalitions for fair housing, for better allocation of resources, for school funding. and it helps not just to run away from race, but it helps to start with struggling, older suburbs where there are white folks who are experiencing a lot of the same, the stress and challenges that are in the inner city and building coalitions between those folks to get to 55% so you can go to the state legislature and say our communities together should be getting more of our fair share of tax dollars to equalize funding in schools. if that's your issue. or our communities have more

than their fair share of low income housing. those communities over there have none of their share, right? but, you know, you have to get your coalition together, right? and it's hard work, but it's doable work. you know, i could cite organizations that are doing that kind of work. >> any of the other panelists care to respond to it? >> i, to me this seems -- i'm a law professor, so you have to humor me. i do theory. sheryll actually does real live, life, she wants to explore the problems of the world. my job is to explain why they're really simple. that's what i'm going to do right now. what you've described is a racially-disparate impact with a heavy racial correlation. for me and also for title vii of the civil rights act of 1964,

that is sufficient to establish a pipe fay she case of racial discrimination. thanks to the supreme court, that's not sufficient to establish a constitutional violation. whenever you see a racially disparate impact, the immediate response you should have, the immediate response we should have is, wow, there's something wrong here. there must be racial discrimination happening somewhere in the system, otherwise we wouldn't be getting this racially-disrate impact. -- disparate impact. that would then cause us to try to find the problem and come up with a cure. what i'm worried about is that largely at the prompting of the supreme court we just ignore racially-disparate impact. we're only willing to consideration, to consider discriminations consisting of something that is intentional and invidious and malicious. be that's not the problem these days. so when you tell me the

statistics you just told me about detroit, i'm thinking, wow, that's terrible. we have to recognize that that is a problem of racial discrimination and try to do something about it. >> and i would agree with you. and the most successful outcomes i have seen is where you have civil rights lawyers who file the lawsuit. thank god for the civil rights movement. we do still have some very powerful tools in their housing law, in equal employment law. when you file a lawsuit based on those racial disparities and build a coalition to say, you know, we support this. those two things together get the best outcomes. and when you just file a lawsuit and don't do the work of building the coalition, often you get a lot of ugly backlash. this is happening in westchester county, it's happened in -- [inaudible] we've seen these cases before. and i think you need to do both. >> i hate the disparate impact

approach to civil rights enforcement. [laughter] and the reason that i hate it is that it inevitably does two things. first of all, it encourages people to make decisions with an eye on race and ethnicity; that is, it encourages racial discrimination. and secondly, it also encourages people to to get rid of perfectly legitimate selection devices. so i don't think that that is, you know a good approach. i mean, i don't know what you do about a situation like detroit by bring ago lawsuit. what -- bringing a lawsuit. what do we expect courts to do? to start telling people that they have to live in different neighborhood? they may be an attractive outcome for some people, but it's not to me. i think the people choose to live where they choose to live for reasons that professor cashin was talking about. they want to live in safe neighborhoods, they want the live in neighborhoods that have all of these, you know, different advantages.

there's nothing ignoble about that, and it's inevitable. you know, what needs to be done is to, you know, encourage good behavior by people and to discourage bad behavior by people. you know, you going to have assimilation, you're going to have integration when people are no longer afraid or mistrustful of living next to people that you would like them to live next to. you know, with respect to, you know, environment, when you think about it, children have three aspects to their environment. they have their home, you know, their parents. they have their schools that they go to, and then they have their friends. and, you know, unfortunately if, if you are growing up in a home,

in a single-parent home, you're not going to get the support that you need at home. if you are, if your peers think that working hard and studying hard is acting white, you're not going to get the kind of support that you need from your peers. and as for the schools, i agree that it's a tragedy that we have so many lousy public schools, but, you know, i happen to think that conservatives have better ideas about how to improve those schools than liberals do. parents need to have more choice in where they go to school. students, teachers need to be held to higher standards. there needs to be more competition among schools. that's, i think that those kind of approaches make more sense than simply, you know, throwing more money at the problem. >> okay. we've got to wrap up, so i want to invite our panelists to take one minute to just offer any concluding thoughts you might have, and let me start with you, roger, and then we'll come down the line this way for o