A Band-Aid on a bullet wound?

Today, Na'Shaun and I interviewed Sra. Dulce Mendes Vasconellos, who has had a long career in education, including decades of providing support for vestibular preparation to afro-Brazilian students. Sra Vasconellos has been helping prepare Black students to successfully take the Vestibular since 1977.

She does not accept the idea that the vestibular is a fair or accurate measure of merit, but does understand that it does not seem to be going away anytime soon. She has created successful students, many of whom have returned to teach young people to take the entrance exam.
Sra Vasconellos no longer focuses primarily on preparing students for success on the vestibular. She has shifted her focus to the gross differences in access to quality elementary and secondary education. Sra Vasconellos became coordinator of Rio de Janeiro schools – and discovered that even the crowded public high schools were primarily available only to the best of students. In 2000 – 2002, while she was the state superintendent, Sra. Vasconellos ad to create 36 schools just to make enough room to accommodate all the students through 9th grade [public education is compulsory through 9th grade, but there were not enough schools to provide that education] in the CITY of Rio de Janeiro. (Imagine the access problems in areas outside the city!) Most of the room in the schools that do have spaces are for students to attend night school. This is complicated by the fact that one must to be 15 years old (beyond average 9th grade age) to be eligible for night school. This is not to mention the fact that it might be dangerous for kids to be in the streets trying to get to and from school in some areas of the city.

Our conversation left me wondering - is Affirmative Action in University education a mere band-aid on a bullet wound - a small patch that covers but does not heal he real injury? I think that activist in the US and the Brazilian contexts have to be mindful of the fact that even though both proponents an opponents of Affirmative action acknowledge the problem with public elementary and secondary education, the opponents of affirmative action who ground their opposition in an assertion that the real problem is K-12 education have done nothing to fix it, and the proponents seem to have directed our energy to defending affirmative action, perhaps to the detriment of pushing for an affirmative right to adequate elementary and secondary education.