In practical terms, that’s demonstrably false. Robust schools — and by extension, access to their resources — have always been a finite element distinguished by economic class. It’s the white elephant in the room (no pun intended). Otherwise, parents wouldn’t make these mad dashes for voucher programs, ‘open’ school districts, magnet school programs, and other gimmicks.

“So get another DJ.”

Changing the music wouldn’t add more chairs.

I’d agree with you to the point there’s a growing global demand for a labor force highly trained in math and the physical sciences and that, gauging from scores on standardized tests, Americans are coming up short. But economist’s hypothesis posited the social aspects of education outweigh its academic production given our economy, and that our economy is perhaps better served allocating scholastic resources by some honest application of demographics than test scores and grades, both which often tend to be polluted by bias.

Education is hardly a limited resource in this country nether is the opportunity for those who wish to enter business for themselves.

When the music stops playing, someone will not have a chair to sit in.

So get another DJ. Only those who lack self-determination and creativity are generally the ones left “without a chair”.

He opined our education system isn’t geared to developing intellectuals and scholarship as it is to accommodate ‘market demands’ and that it does so brilliantly.

The first part I agree with, however the second, hmmmm.

The current market demand is for home grown mathematicians and scientists. However when you look at the dismal product (our children) our public schools are producing with a budget that towers over countries that produce high achieving students, man, it makes you wonder. What westerners are willing to work for compared to folks from those other countries is a factor as well.

While I do agree that AA in its initial stages was something I feel was needed to jump start what was gained during the civil rights era, I think we have come to a point where we can be compared to a twenty-year old who is still sucking on his mother’s tit. Even Whitney Young (founder of the Urban League) felt that AA was something that should have lasted only a decade. Too bad his board didn’t listen to him.

The hard reality is some arbitrary method of selecting winners and losers is inevitable with the distribution of a limited resource. When the music stops playing, someone will not have a chair to sit in. AA is by no means perfect; its application does represent something of a contradiction in general terms.

So, we need to ask ourselves what greater good (if any) is served by AA — whether applied by gender, race, nationality, class, etc.. If the priority for this society is to be democracy, then exclusive programs like the one satirized in King of the Hill represent, at best, contrary forces in our culture. As counterintuitive and impolitic as it appears, the administrator would be correct to guard against ‘too many overachieving Asians’ when she understands our culture is not a strict meritocracy in theory or practice.

I once read an op-ed about education in the U.S. written by a moderately conservative economist. He opined our education system isn’t geared to developing intellectuals and scholarship as it is to accommodate ‘market demands’ and that it does so brilliantly. Within this context, attempting a demographic balance becomes an appropriate priority for school administrations.