Merit-based scholarship programs are very much in vogue. Rather than awarding state funds for college only to students who need financial assistance, merit scholarships give funds to the students who earn the highest grade point averages and the highest scores on their SATs.
However, as Charles Darwin found out ages ago, the fittest tend to be those with the most advantages. In the case of merit-based scholarships, that means white students standing on the higher rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.
In August, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the NAACP and FairTest, an advocacy group for fair and open testing, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Atlanta regional office, challenging the legality of Bright Futures, Florida's merit-based scholarships, which are funded by state lottery profits.
The complaint centers on the use of SAT and ACT scores in awarding the scholarships. Both tests are used currently to predict how well students will do in college. However, Florida is using them in a completely different way, says Victor Viramontes, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
"They've taken it out of its context entirely," says Viramontes.
Bright Futures is supposed to award high-achieving secondary school students, and grade point average is really the only way to measure that, Viramontes says. A federal court has already found that college admissions tests are not a valid measure of high school achievement.
How could they be? They're designed to predict future achievement. And they don't even do that very well, Viramontes says.
Factors such as culturally biased questions and an inability to pay for expensive test preparation classes means that Latino and black students tend to score lower on the tests than whites.
Test creators have done some work to eliminate a few of the most obviously biased questions, says Viramontes. Wealthier students are more likely to recognize words like "regatta," a boat race or series of boat races, than poorer students whose families don't own yachts or attend races. But the test creators still have a long way to go.
The racial and socioeconomic biases in standardized tests are transferred to the Bright Futures program, where most of the awards go to white students with no financial need for tuition assistance.
In fact, whites are two-and-a-half times more likely to be awarded a full scholarship than Latinos and they're 10 times more likely than blacks, according to Viramontes. That's not just unfair, he says, it's illegal.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other groups approached Gov. Jeb Bush, the state board of education and some Florida legislators about the problem, but didn't receive a response.
Viramontes says he wasn't surprised. "I would think it's a scholarship program that's difficult to defend; it has a discriminatory effect and it's poorly set up," he said. "Even without knowledge of the law, I think people can recognize that it's a bad thing when you have those two factors together."
So far, there's been no response from federal education officials. Though the complaint was filed with the U.S. Department of Education's Atlanta office, which handles issues for Florida, officials there took the unusual step of sending it to headquarters in Washington, D.C., for a ruling on jurisdiction.
Normally the Atlanta office would have made the ruling and decided whether the complaint warranted investigation. Viramontes is unsure why the Bright Futures complaint received special treatment.
"It's a very simple issue."
Viramontes won't speculate on what the folks in Atlanta were thinking, and says he is content to wait for an answer from the agency.
The group has taken the issue directly to the courts in other states, but they're not looking at that option this time. "It's their legal obligation to enforce the federal law and we think they should have a chance to do that," he says.
Agency officials can delay their response indefinitely, so the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund may be waiting for a while. With the Florida governor's brother in the White House and Jeb Bush himself in a tight reelection race focusing on education, it's probably not a complaint that will speed its way through the federal bureaucracy.
Federal education officials refuse to comment on the complaint at all.
It's not the first criticism of the program that was downplayed by the governor's office and received fleeting coverage by the press.
The Cornerstone Report, a product of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, also points to legal issues surrounding Bright Futures and questions whether it has a positive effect on state higher education.
The report points out that Florida law calls for publicly funded student financial aid to be provided primarily on the basis of need. "Funding practices, however, do not reflect this stated priority," according to the report.
Florida is among eight states that fund non-need-based aid at a higher level than need-based aid. Substantially more merit-based aid was disbursed than need-based aid during the 1999-2000 academic year, totaling $132-million to $45-million, respectively.
The national average for the proportion of total undergraduate state aid based on need in 1999-2000 was 78 percent, according to the report. Florida's proportion was 20 percent.
According to the independent and nonpartisan National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, "Florida makes very little investment in financial aid for low-income students and families."
In a state with one of America's lowest number of residents holding college degrees, targeting students who would attend college anyway for scholarship money doesn't do anything to improve the education level of the population.
In other words, the financially fit will continue to be the ones who go on to college. Everybody else will lag behind, taking the rest of the state with them.
Contact Staff Writer Rochelle Renford at 813-248-8888, ext. 163, or rochelle.renford@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2002.