But Sander also found that black students did far better if they attended law schools with students whose undergraduate grades and law school admission test scores were similar to theirs. Black students who didn't rely on affirmative action to get into law school had similar first-year grades with their white counterparts and passed the bar at similar rates as all students from the same tier law school.
Of course the affirmative action establishment denounced Sander's study. But more perniciously, they conspired to deny access to a body of evidence, a 25-year archive of California state bar results, that could definitively prove Sander's thesis that mismatching black students with law schools where they were less likely to succeed actually resulted in fewer black lawyers than there would be without affirmative action.
The Civil Rights Commission has now recommended that Congress enact legislation that would require law schools that receive federal funding to make public the extent to which they consider race in their admissions policies. The Commission also recommended that the National Academy of Sciences or other independent grant-making institutions fund studies on the impact of racial preferences on racial disparities in academic performance, graduation rates and future income.
In recent years, the Civil Rights Commission has come under fire for being unnecessary, even counter-productive. But the Commission's latest report shows that its work is not yet done. Few would have imagined 50 years ago that programs enacted ostensibly to benefit minorities would one day be shown actually to harm them. But the Commission's insistence that this information be made public shows why the agency is still needed today as the nation's civil rights watchdog.