My personal experience with formal Affirmative Action programs comes primarily from three sources.
The first is the decision, in 1974 of Loyola High School, a Jesuit college prep school in Los Angeles, to recruit its largest minority class ever. All I know about this program is that it recruited, perhaps for the first time and certainly with a greater effort than ever it it's history, from black and Latino parishes in Los Angeles. Six students from my school, Holy Name of Jesus, were invited to take the entrance exam. Half of us were accepted. Before that invitation, neither I nor my parents had ever heard of Loyola High School, although it has been consistently ranked among the nation's highest with all those typical statistics. All three of us black students from Holy Name graduated with the Class of '78. Steve is a commodities broker, Gary is a Jr. High School vice principal and I am an independent software consultant.
The second is my experience with the California State University. When I attended between 1982 and 1986 the two programs I was familiar with were the as EOP or Educational Opportunities Program and the Minority Engineering Program (MEP) headed by Dr. Raymond Landis. MEP's success was later adopted on a statewide basis. As a returning college student (I was 21 in '82) , I enrolled in 2 EOP/MEP classes, Math 104 which reviewed basics to pre-calculus and Engineering 200, a career survey seminar.
Of all the rhetoric and fury surrounding the presence of 'too many' black students on campus and in the engineering department, there are really only a few impressions that stick with me regarding the program. The first was made by 'Cool' Bob Johnson (I think) who taught Math 104, and Ms. Spengler who taught me Analytic Geometry from Salas & Hill. Both of them were, in my entire academic career, the only mathematics teachers I ever understood and admired (well there was Mr. Langston but..). The entire point of Math 104, was essentially the entire point of the EOP and MEP programs. Certain of the university's resources were made into a fifth year pre-college program to make up for the educational deficit of students attending retrograde public schools. While I had been out of school for four years, my younger peers fresh out of high school had the same foggy memory of math that I did.
I recalled that even at my prep school in 1974, my Algebra teacher was the football coach. I got a C. The next year, I aced Geometry with the assistance of a new math teacher acquired that year, Mr. Langston, who was out on his ear the next. (He was very critical of the school's math program). It became abundantly clear that in California, all the truly capable mathematicians were out making money in the aerospace industry except for Ms. Spengler's 8 year old daughter who corrected our Calculus homework. At Cal State, English as a first language was rare among the math faculty. I learned after graduation from a friend seeking a teaching credential, that the state had declared special emergency to shortcut the credentialling process for individuals willing to teach mathematics at the high school level, and even more shortcuts on top of that for individuals willing to teach in poor black and Latino school districts.
In short, California was in desperate need of teachers capable of math instruction. The shortage went all the way from the university level down through elementary school. Even at the best private schools the lack was evident. Poor communities got zilch. By the end of one semester of Math 104, I realized that I had relearned, with far greater ability everything I had learned in math since birth. My math SAT was 570. What shocked me even more, especially in light of Ms. Spengler's daughter, was despite the fact that I was considered 'gifted', I learned absolutely nothing in mathematics between 5th grade (decimals & fractions) and 9th grade (algebra).
Finally, as an intern with the Xerox corporation, I maintained several databases and ran specialized reports for the personnel department of the now defunct Xerox Systems Group. As part of that assignment I became familiar with Xerox' Balanced Workforce Initiative which set numerical goals for managers in various departments. This particular program had nothing to do with me as a beneficiary, however. My entree into the company was part and parcel of the programs surrounding my careerist college stint as well as my ineluctable charm.
mbowen, 1997