Quote:
Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday
Our team has been placed in an extremely awkward position by our school district. Over the last few years, we have grown exponentially--from ~20 members, to 35 in 2010, to 60 perspective members this year. Unfortunately, our school district has a policy that requires the student to teacher ratio to be 35:1 at all times, so if the team goes over that number, we require another teacher. Our team has some money, but not a huge amount, and the money for a teacher on duty must come directly from the district; through the normal payroll scheme.
It is clear that getting this funding for the extra teacher would be made easier if our team incorporated more of the diversity found at our school (right now, it's ~65% white and ~30% asian, and 70/30 male to female). Our school is obviously, 50/50 male female, and has a sizable latino/African American population (~15%)
Even with an increase in teachers, the space (physically) we have is limited, so about 10 people would have to be removed from the team. If we end up capped at 35, it would require the removal of, conservatively, 25 people.
In either of these eventualities, some people would have to be removed from the team. The question is, can gender, race, and sex be taken into the calculation. In other words, can the team take affirmative action to increase the diversity possibly at the expense of those who are deserving
I want to hear the opinions of some others before I give mine.
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I'll postpone discussing FIRST's values and/or the values of FIRST participants, and instead draw your attention to a few more general concepts.
First, look to
Grutter v. Bollinger and
Gratz v. Bollinger, which were 2003 United States Supreme Court cases that clarified limits on the ability of a school (in that case the University of Michigan) to apply affirmative action policies. If your team belongs to a public school, or is incorporated through a governmental agency,
you're probably affected. (
NPR has provided a summary.)
For details upon which you can rely, you'll probably need to speak to a lawyer or a school administrator. My inexpert appraisal of those rulings would be that it is constitutional for you to weigh factors like race and ethnicity "to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body", but that you shouldn't have a quota or automatically give certain minorities a numerical advantage in scoring their applications. If you (or rather, the people acting on behalf of the school) frame the desire for diversity in terms of attracting funding for an additional supervising teacher, I have no idea how it will turn out.
The other issue is related to the theory of apportioning scarce resources. If you follow utilitarian reasoning (i.e. Jeremy Bentham's philosophy), you should seek to maximize the utility of the society (not just the team; maybe instead the entire school community), even if that means dropping team members who are deserving. But John Rawls might argue that you should not put any person in a position where they are excessively disadvantaged, even if that means a lower aggregate utility level for the society—in that case, perhaps you might be justified in taking into account the possibility that certain minorities tend to be exposed to fewer opportunities, and that by dropping members of that group, you might harm them to an unacceptable degree.
I think that first and foremost, this is an ethical issue, then a legal one, then a political one, and only lastly a question of how the FIRST community would view it.
Aside: You'd be surprised how a school might end up with an uneven male-female split. For example, I believe Woburn C.I. had rather more males at one point, because it was composed in large part of a special education program in which males were disproportionately represented.