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TSTC dot e du go ahead, Hello, and welcome to the Texas Tribune
trip Cast for June thirty, twenty twenty three. My name's Matthew Watkins,
Managing editor of News for the Tribune. This week, we're going to have
a two topic show covering the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action and the heat
waves impact on Texas's unair conditioned prisons. Joining us for the first segment is
Kalin Belsha, a national writer for the education website Chalkbeat. Hi, Kalin,
Hey there, Hey, thanks for joining us so on Thursday. As
I'm sure most of our listeners know, the Supreme Court essentially banned universities from
using racial preferences and admissions. The decision will impact admissions at the University of
Texas at Austin, which is the only public school in the state that considers
race. It's also the most competitive public school in the state. But it
will also impact admissions at private schools and Texas such as Rice, SMU,
TCU, and it will also impact the college decisions for many students in the
state. A state where sixty five percent of students in K through twelve schools
are Hispanic or Black, and where Texas is big cities and border areas are
kind of hotbeds for recruiting for elite school around the country looking to kind of
boost their diversity geographically and racially. Kaylin, the headline from your breaking news
story yesterday highlighted how racial diversity in colleges is likely to suffer from this decision.
What can you say about what the impact of this ruling might look like
and what kind of our university leaders are expecting in the aftermath of this.
Yeah, I think something that we've heard time and again heads of colleges and
from folks who work in admissions is that their expectation is that black, especially
and Latino students will decline that they'll see a big dip immediately following, and
that there will also be some effect for indigenous students. That's based on what
we've seen in states that previously banned affirmative action. Often we saw a big
dip right away, and then some of it ticked back up over time,
but in general it doesn't stay kind of with the share of students who've gotten
more diverse. A lot of that evidence has come out Offornia, where that
state has become increasingly diverse, and even though colleges have worked really hard to
stay diverse, it has not kept up with a diversity of the state.
So that's based on kind of what we've heard from college presidents. Sure,
and you know, in Texas we've actually seen a preview of this as well.
Back in nineteen ninety six, there was a federal Court of Appeals case
that blocked state universities from considering race for a while. At UT Austin,
during that time, Hispanic enrollment dropped by fifteen percent in one year. Black
enrollment dropped by twenty five percent in one year. Of course, that case
eventually got overturned Texas schools were allowed to begin using affirmative action again. UT
Austin chose to Texas A and M, the other kind of flagship school in
the state did not. But it's been a thing where, like you said,
there was an attempt to tick back up. I mean, one of
the big things that kind of came up from that was the implementation of the
Texas Top ten percent rule, which guarantees admission to you know, anyone who
graduates near the top of their class. Seventy five of utastin students now get
in from that rule. And actually, interestingly, if you look at the
statistics, the segment of the student body is actually more diverse from that top
ten percent group than the holistic review which considers race. I think one of
the things that we're going to be kind of watching over the next few weeks,
months, years, even is what kind of steps do these universities nationally
and in Texas take to kind of still accomplish their diversity goals while kind of,
you know, living under the guidelines of this ruling and you know,
not going up against it. What are you hearing from university officials, from
people in this field so far about how that might look. Yeah, so
I think we're hearing two different things. We're hearing from colleges that they will
comply with what the Supreme Court ruling is. Some have said that they're going
to be looking for workarounds, but they can't be workarounds that basically are proxies
for race. So there's a really fine line that colleges say that they're walking.
I think at this point they're looking at some of the text of the
ruling that explicitly says socio economic factors are fine, and so I think we've
heard a lot of colleges say they're going to be looking at students from low
income families, which is already true, but kind of class based affrimative action
whether or not students are the first in their family to go to college,
which are those students are just proportionately black and Latino, so there is some
crossover there. We've also seen talk of continuing to use recruitment programs, going
after students from particular high schools, particular communities, those have That would have
been something that people were worried that the Supreme Court might address, but it's
not in the ruling, and so people are kind of still looking at recruitment
as a way to do that. We know that from the California case when
they banned affirmative action. There a lot of colleges did use recruitment and that
became something that was actually quite expensive. They spent a lot more time and
money going to schools and it did work in some fashion, but it costs
schools millions and millions of dollars. So I think some of the question is
whether or not colleges are going to want to invest that money to remain racially
diverse. We had an announcement yesterday from President Biden who said that he is
directing the Education Department and the Department of Justice to basically look at the ruling
and see what are the forms of admission policies that are still legally permissible.
There's some things in the descent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor that suggests that there are
some things that schools might still be able to do. Chief Justice John Roberts
explicitly said that it's still okay for students to talk about how race affected their
lives, including how they experienced racial discrimination, and for schools to look at
that. They just can't award a point a tip based on the students race,
like they can't look at the essay and say, okay, I can
tell that the student is black based on the anti black discrimination that they experience.
It would have to be because that student experienced racism and has some kind
of qualification or skill that they learned from that basically. But I think what
we've heard from college admissions counselors is that that's kind of difficult to disentangle,
and so we're not really sure. You know, this might not come out
until there's future litigation. And the Students for Fair Admissions, which was the
folks who initiated these lawsuits, they're saying, you know, we're gonna be
watching really carefully to see what schools do and how they change their policies to
see if they're trying to get around the ruling by doing exactly that by looking
at the essays. So I think the personal essays are going to be like
a very fraught area in the next couple of years. Yeah. I thought
that was a really interesting point in an issue here. I mean, there
was a university president quoted in The New York Times yesterday basically imagining an essay
question similar to di statements that some university professors are asked to fill out in
their applications, you know, as a kind of a way to talk about
diversity away to kind of measure and grade it without necessarily giving people points or
or you know, extra, you know, consideration because of their race.
That made me think about how in Texas, you know that we just got
through a legislative session where the legislature sort of waged a war against those kinds
of statements, specifically targeting d EI programs and d EI statements. And I
do wonder about how in red states, Texas in particular, how there might
be some hesitation to draw those kinds of legal challenges from groups like Students for
Visions, a group led by Edward Bloom who has sued Texas universities many times
in the past. And I'm not sure they want to necessarily get entangled in
those kinds of fights when when you know, they might kind of get an
angry legislature or an angry governor or even board of regions kind of reacting to
those kinds of pushbacks. So it'll it'll be interesting to see how the combination
of this ruling the political climate affects kind of the approach to some of these
things. One thing I wanted to ask you too, a little bit about
you you've touched on this a little bit, is the idea of maybe that
this might make university admissions more opaque. I mean, one thing that we
saw in Texas in nineteen ninety six was there was this pushback against areas that
might benefit students who are disproportionately white or wealthy, and so Texas A and
M University at that time stopped considering legacy admissions and things like that. And
there's been some suggestions that maybe this will cause universities to you know, de
emphasize test scores or or even you know, class rank where maybe perhaps white
and Asian students are disproportionately scoring higher than black and Hispanic students are under other
underrepresented groups. Do you see a significant change in the way universities evaluate applicants
beyond just on the issue of race, Like, could we see you know,
other factors being more emphasized or de emphasized as a result of this.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's to get very messy. Something that
the President suggested yesterday was creating a new adversity index so that schools might be
able to create something that I mean that to me sounds quite opaque, but
using that basically as a way that you could talk about adversity, hardship,
coming from a low income family experiencing racial discrimination, so kind of finding other
ways to blend race into student experience and then finding a measurable way to include
that in the way that admissions counselors are looking at your application. I've also
heard admissions counselors say that they might introduce even more essay questions and so there
might just be more writing that will students will be having to do. Maybe
the recommendation letter will become more important because folks will be able to attest to
some of the resilience that students have. Yeah, I think it's it's going
to be a big challenge, and gen I think not every admissions counselor is
going to, you know, have the same kind of changes in policies.
And that's something else we've heard from high schools is that a lot of the
counselors are going to have to be tracking all of these changes that admissions policies
are going to be making, and so it's going to be even harder potentially
for low income students, lowmencomme students of color who don't necessarily have access to
dedicated college counselor to be able to help them go through all of these changing
policies to optimize their application. Right, if you're basically if you're trying to
cast a wide net, particularly if you're applying to elite schools, and those
schools are adding essay requirements or other requirements, that makes it more burdensome to
kind of get those out. I mean, another thing you sort of mentioned
was just maybe the idea of, like you said, students lowering their college
ambitions. You know, I am a former higher education reporter, and I
remember specifically talking to a student who was applying who had actually had been admitted
to Texas A and M. A went to a universe, went to a
high school in Dallas, and was really struggling to decide whether to go to
kind of the community college in her area or to go to A and M.
And really just feeling like Texas A and M wasn't made for people like
her. And it was almost like painful to hear her talk about that because
she was such a smart, ambitious, responsible student, and you would think
that she would do so well at this. But there is just a question
of certain people who maybe their parents didn't go to college. Do they not
see those types of schools as places where they are meant to be? What
are you hearing from students so far? Do you think that that's a legitimate
concern that this might affect, you know, whether they should even apply to
certain schools. I mean, this is definitely a concern that I've heard from
high school counselors who work with a lot of low income students of color who
are high achieving, I think in the past, and this has been true
over the last few years before this decision, that there's been and much more
focus from students about will I fit in on this campus and will this campus
support me? And will there be other students who look like me on this
campus. So this is something that college counselors, you know, high school
counselors had already said this was an increasing worry that they're seeing among students,
and so this decision could make this conversation even more important for students who might
say, Okay, I see this school, they're losing diversity. They don't
maybe have as good of a shot of getting in anymore. Maybe some of
their promises around diversity have changed, and so I don't want to apply here,
so that could potentially happen, and we do have some really good evidence
actually out of Texas after they lifted the ban on a government of action,
there's been a research that showed students SAT scores went up, their grades went
up, and this was especially true for high achieving students of color, black
and Latino students. And so the researcher who did that work told me she
thinks that kind of the motivation increased when students thought that they had a better
chance of getting in and they actually had better attendance and they'd spent more time
on their homework, and so you know, maybe those students aren't interested in
applying to the super selective schools anymore, but it could also lower their grades
and test scores to help them get into other schools. So I think a
lot of people are worried too that students will just end up at maybe less
selective schools that may not have as high of kind of a benefit of social
capital. A lot of high achieving students of color get a lot of benefit
out of going to highly selective schools. Some people are also predicting that there
would be a lot more interest in going to HBCUs and Hispanic serving institutions,
but those schools can't necessarily absorb all the students who might be interested. So
I think we're just going to see a lot more conversation around fit, around
what support this school actually provides to students of color, and we're kind of
graduation rates and financially aid they're providing to those students. Yeah, I mean,
I think one of the lessons that Texas provides just in general is,
you know, we have the top ten percent rule. Now we have or
we had up until yesterday, affirmative action at the top public school in the
state. And it's just a lot of hard work, right, I mean,
to get a diverse student body. Texas has an incredibly diverse collection of
students graduating from high school, but those, you know, the top universities
in the state, the most selective universities in the state, simply just don't
reflect that diversity on an even level. And I guess we'll see how this
decision affects it. What are you watching over the next few weeks, months,
maybe even years to to measure, you know, what the long term
impact of this decision will be. Well, I think first I'm interested to
see what this guidance from the Department of Justice and from the Education Department will
look like. President Biden said he expected it to come out within forty five
days, so by later this summer we should see some guidance around at least
what the Biden administration is interpreting to still be legal and what kinds of admissions
practices that colleges can still use for the upcoming application site. I will be
interested to also see what students say they're noticing about how applications are changing.
High school juniors right now are kind of in the process of getting ready to
apply, and some folks might have already written their essay and they might be
revising their essay. I've seen conflicting guidance from folks about whether or not now
students should really emphasize their race in their essay, or should they not emphasize
their race in their essay. I think I've also seen some concern about,
you know, basically like forcing students to talk about adversity adversities that they experience
because of their race in their essay, and maybe that's not the best representation
of what they would want to put forward, but they're going to feel pressure
to talk about that, So I think I'm really interested in that. And
then also just whether or not students say that they're changing where they want to
go to school, especially high achieving students of color. Are they making decisions
differently about where they would apply? Yeah, it seems like these next few
graduating classes that will be particularly challenging because they'll be having they won't have the
experience of you know, past students knowing kind of what works and what doesn't
and what the best strategies are. It'll be definitely interesting to watch. All
right, Well, thank you Kalin for joining us. We will continue to
track this story. Let's take a break in here from our sponsors, Austin
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Learn more at Good Reason Houston dot org. Okay, so it has
been unfathomably hot in Texas this month, with records being broken all over the
state, and few people in Texas feel the brunt of a heatwave more than
prisoners and prison guards. Most of the state's prisons are unair conditioned. People
inside one Huntsville prison September reached one hundred and thirty degrees last week, but
the state's prison agency has only reported five heat related illnesses among prisoners so far
this year, and the state hasn't reported a heat related death since twenty twenty
twelve. Joining us to discuss this topic is criminal justice reporter Jolie McCullough.
Hey, Jolie, Hey, So, I just have to ask very quickly
first, these numbers, no heat related death since twenty twenty twelve, only
five heat related illnesses. How skeptically should we be viewing these numbers? I
would say, Gary, So the reason why isn't so. Twenty twelve is
the last time that the agency officially said, Okay, someone died of heat
stroke in our prisons. Since then, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has
been hit with a lot of lawsuits, wrongful death lawsuits of men who died
of heat stroke for the prison not you know, doing enough to help help
them and safe them and keep them safe. There have also there's also been
a long year's long civil rights lawsuit at one a class action lawsuit at one
prison, a geriatric prison, essentially saying that it violated the Constitution's protection from
cool and unusual punishment to not have air conditioning in a geriatric facility. After
years and millions of dollars fighting that lawsuit, the department actually did settle and
agreed to install air conditioning in that one prison. So the incentive is not
really there forever for them to say that a death was heat related, because
it has landed them in court a lot and very costly court battles. Aside
from that, in terms of heat related illnesses, as you said, they've
reported five this year, they've reported nine among staff. And that's something that
prisoners and advocates really hard on, UM, saying that you know, the
prisoners are there twenty four to seven, they get no relief, they don't
get to go home, they don't get to you know, sit in air
conditioning or take a cold shower very often, um, despite them being supposed
to. And it's there's also seven times more prisoners than there are staff,
UM, So they don't really think it's they're they're not logging most of these
inmate deaths and I are inmate illnesses and can tell you, um, just
based on what I hear from prisoners and letters and also from their moms and
loved ones, their girlfriends, their wives, UM, their husbands. Um,
this is you know, I've I've heard way more than five m situations
where inmates have said they've passed out. Um, you know, it just
there's a there's a lot more than you know it is being reported to me
and to advocates that is being reported by the States, the State Department.
So that that's kind of where I get into in terms of how skeptically we
should be viewing these numbers. Well, what can you tell us just about
what it's like to be in a prison in Texas in the summer. Yeah,
So basically in these prisons, it's about seventy prisons that don't have air
conditioning in most of the facilities in most like the living areas where the prisoners
are usually these are concrete and metal buildings, oftentimes with like metal beds.
So you know, inmates have said it's it's basically impossible to lay on their
bed because it's hot to the touch. It's just a metal slab um.
You know, they if they're in the cells, they will have a sink
that has water, but they often say it's almost it's incredibly hot water that
comes out of the sink. But even still, I've had so many prisoners
tell me that they will wet their sheets in the hot water and just put
it on the concrete floor and try to weligh in the water to try to
get some relief. That way, you hear of a lot of prisoners will
break their windows because they're just desperate for any type of air flow to come
in. Even though the hot the air is hot outside. You know,
when you're inside these prisons, the temperatures are generally much higher than the outside
temperatures, which are already at this point and incredibly high. So it's really
you know, um, prisoners report like they have heat rash. They're often
dizzy, they have they're often fainting. They're reporting that they're fainting, and
these are just I mean, it's a miserable situation for everyone involved. I
think is fair to say, yeah, and it's not just you know,
there are some people who might be dismissive of this because these are people,
you know, serving time for serious sentences, and of course, you know,
there are legitimate questions to ask about whether anyone should be treated like this,
no matter why. But it is also an if shoot that affects the
prison guards right in the prison staffing in terms of people whose job it is
to do this, but also who's going to want to work in a prison
that's one hundred and thirty degrees right, And so that it's kind of a
vicious cycle because these are and you know, corrections officers have also been at
the legislature asking for this money, like, hey, can we please put
air conditioning in prisons because this isn't like it's an unsafe work environment. Prisons
are, you know, the Texas prisons have been understaffed since I can remember,
since I know, since I've been here, you know, and they're
getting they were severe, you know, severely understaffed during over the last few
years, it's gotten worse and worse. So the prisons are very hard.
It's very hard for them to keep officers in this job. And a lot
of the times that's at least partially contributed attributed to the heat. These officers
have to work in these same environments that they're having to wear off in like
heavy gear. And that's also in terms of what prisoners are saying is why
and sometimes they don't even blame the officers why they're not getting the relief that
the Texas Department and Criminal Justice is meant to give them these mitigating factors,
which is supposed to be all prisoners are supposed to have unlimited access to ice
water. That is I can't I hear over and over again that that just
doesn't happen because the guards who are supposed to be passing that out just are
not. They don't either there's not enough of them or the ones who are
there are just not willing or able to go into these areas to hand out
this ice water. And so it's it's really it's yeah, it's bad for
everyone involved. So tell us about some of the recent deaths that you've been
looking at that have not been attributed to heat at least so far. Yeah,
So what I've been doing in the last few weeks during this heat wave
as it's kind of spiked up as I've been looking at. The prison agency
is required to report all deaths within their custody within thirty days of the death
to the state. They report they report it to the Attorney General's office,
and there's an online database of those reports. So I've been looking at those
reports every day and just looking for anything that is unexplained or maybe a little
bit seems a little off. So what I found were as well as of
yesterday, as of this week, there were now in my story from earlier
this week, I say nine, now I say ten ten deaths since the
middle of June that were either heart attack, cardiac arrest, or undetermined cause
of death at not not only ten deaths overall, but these were ten deaths
that happened at prisons that did not have air conditioning during days where the heat
index was above a hundred degrees in that region, in the region of the
prison. So you know, six six prisoners died of cardiac arrest, heart
attacks, some sort of cardiac event, three of whom were in their thirties,
which is always a little bit surprising. You know, heart attacks,
cardiac arrest among people in their thirties is not super common. And so you
know, one of the things that one of the cases that I looked at,
I was able to talk to his sisters, a thirty five year old
who died in a hunt Slow Prison last week and he was out his job.
He was an inmate who had kind of limited supervision. He was well
trusted by the staff to be able to, you know, do jobs that
many prisoners are not trusted to do, such as mowing the lawns, maybe
outside the fence lines. And he was out mowing during the day and he
collapsed and died of what the prison system says was cardiac arrest. And so
the thing with this is if it was cardiac arrest. You know, doctors
and scientists have long said that heat deaths are very undercounted. And a doctor
told me, an emergency room physician told me that it's really hard to say
if heat stroke caused a cardiac arrest or if it caused some other type of
death unless you're they're measuring a body temperature at the time of death, because
you know, bodies cooled down. And also, like it's really hard to
say something was heat stroke unless you can say that this person's body temperature was
elevated at the time of death. And that's something that I asked the prison
system if they measure when these are when these types of cases happen, when
people are collapsing in very hot prisons, and they have not been able to
give me an answer on if they do that or not. So lastly,
I wanted to just ask about the effort to air condition these prisons. This
was a topic that came up during the most recent legislative session, but maybe
fell short. What is the status of this kind of attempt? Yeah,
so this was actually I think tensions are really high going into this summer already
among prisoners and prisoner rights advocates, just because this was the closest the legislature
had ever gotten to putting real money towards air conditioning prisons, and as you
say, it fell short. So essentially, the Texas House proposed putting about
half a billion dollars over the next two years towards cooling large a large number
of prisons and with the ultimate goal of getting all prisons air conditioned by twenty
thirty one, but that didn't go anywhere in the Senate. The Senate didn't
want to provide any money for air conditioning prisons. Ultimately, what finally passed
there was about eighty five million dollars that was set aside for quote deferred maintenance,
so the agency does not have to use that for air conditioning costs,
but it's it's expected that that money will go towards air conditioning some prisons,
and that's what they have right now. They were also already plans with existing
budget funds to start putting some air conditioning and other units, including at least
one of the units where a man recently died of a heart of a cardiac
arrest. So they're basically what t DCJ the Department has been doing, is
trying to kind of pick away at how much air conditioning they can install with
the funding that they they're existing funding, but the legislature has not put any
money directly towards this project. Do you have any sense of how far eighty
five million could go? Yeah, So the department had issued a plan at
the during the last few years when the House was looking at how to fund
this, and they had put forth a plan and it really the thing is
is it really depends on the prison. Some prisons they estimate and it's also
unclear how well the department can estimate how much prison air conditioning will cost,
because they've grossly overestimated how much it would cost in the past. But they've
estimated that at one some prisons. It could be about forty million per prison,
at others, you know, four to five millions, So it really
depends on the units themselves. And just because there's there's heat, all prisons
have heat, so the ducks are there. It's just in terms of getting
the air conditioning system into those prisons as well, can apparently be vastly different
costs it well. I sorrowly recommend folks read Chilie's articles are Dying and Cycling
Texas prisons, but the state seldom acknowledges heat as a cause of death.
You can find it at Texas Tribune dot org. Thanks Jolie for joining us.
Thank you to our producer Justin, and thank you to our sponsors Texas
Farm Bureau, Texas State Technical College, Austin Community Foundation, and Good Reason
Houston. We'll talk to y'all next week, but you always here from Colin
all Red, Barry Weisse, Douglas Brinkley, Mary Trump, and many others.
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