Few things are as of much interest to parents of children who will soon be entering elementary, middle or high school then how students are actually assigned to schools. In San Francisco we have had a system of family-ranked preference, called “school choice,” combined with a lottery based on socioeconomic factors for those schools receiving more requests than available openings. That system, known as the “Diversity Index,” was an effort to accommodate individual preferences while simultaneously desegregating schools and programs without using race as a factor. A tall order indeed.
At the end of last year, the legal agreement (the “Consent Decree”) that was the formal impetus behind the development of the Diversity Index expired, despite the fact that by some measures we are further away from meeting the goals of racial integration and closing the achievement gap. While the legal imperative is gone for the moment, the Board of Education, San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) administrators and many in the general community recognize the need to create schools that mirror the makeup of our city.
Integrating schools is a goal our nation has been struggling with for decades. Our commitment to it has been uncertain, as with all of our societal efforts to address the outcomes of slavery and continued discrimination in all forms. Brown vs. the Board of Education is the landmark 1954 decision outlawing “separate but equal” schools that most of us associate with desegregation. But, it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s when several other Supreme Court decisions were handed down providing more specific requirements and oversight that desegregation began in earnest.
A concise history of those efforts was recently published by the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University, which has focused a significant amount of its research energy on analyzing issues of poverty and race in the realm of public education. In their 2005 publication geared towards lay community members, “Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration” (http://tinyurl.com/mgtoe), the authors examine not only the history of desegregation efforts, but the disturbing trend towards resegregation, all in the effort to aid communities in implementing voluntary integration programs.
According to the report, the late 1980s saw the beginning of the reversal of desegregation efforts, leading us to today, when resegregation for Latino and black students is a reality in most large districts. Several primary causes exist, from the decreasing number of white students in urban areas, to the intentional dismantlement of desegregation programs to the continued existence of predominantly white schools within diverse districts.
As a measure of this latter indicator the authors state that “the percentage of white students that attend schools with black students…has been declining since 1988. By this measure, the extent of desegregation has not been this low since the 1960s, before widespread busing for racial balance began.” (p. 11)
Other vantage points are equally disturbing. While it should be no surprise to anyone that segregation and poverty go hand-in-hand, the numbers are still startling. The Civil Rights Project report states that “Nationally, about half of all black and Latino students attend schools in which three-quarters or more students are poor. Only 5% of white students attend such schools.” (p.11)
In other words, we are almost back to where we began in addressing racially-based injustice in schools. Almost, but not quite. Despite this reversal in integration (which can be understood as part of the sweeping away of the entire web of public services that began with the election of Ronald Reagan), there is now a solid body of research and public knowledge that integration—in our schools and our communities—is desirable for all of us.
The Civil Rights Project report again provides a useful summary of the positive impact of integration on children from all backgrounds. In short, schools that have substantial student populations from multiple ethnic and class backgrounds are better able to provide solid learning environments. These are schools in which all students succeed by traditional academic measures (grades, graduation rates, participation in advanced classes) and from which students’ abilities to comfortably interact with people of varied backgrounds and who can better understand the complexities of a contemporary multi-cultural society.
The benefits of integration are not news to most of San Francisco. What we really want to know is how can we most effectively achieve integration and meet to the greatest degree possible the individual preferences of families, whether those preferences are for schools close to home or schools with certain programs.
Unfortunately, despite its title, for our community the Civil Rights Project report falls somewhat short on specifics. The sections on how to organize in your community to advance a voluntary integration plan focus insufficiently on the details of matters such as assignment plans and how to talk and work through issues of concern. Many of the suggestions, such as magnet schools and school choice are where we are today. We need the next level of strategy. Public school leaders have been meeting for over a year attempting to devise such a new approach, and have in fact called on the the expertise of the Harvard Civil Rights Project as integration is such a key concern.
One suggestion that is both in the report and that was discussed in San Francisco’s own student assignment task force is the idea of creating assignment zones, which are larger than small neighborhood units. Such zones should optimally be constructed to preclude them from being homogeneous in themselves. This seems a difficult task in a highly segregated city such as San Francisco. Indeed, housing segregation is one of the great difficulties we face in trying to break school segregation.
To this concern, the Civil Rights Project posits that school integration can be a means to support housing integration, a pattern that apparently occurred during the initial phase of successful school integration the South. School integration efforts and successes can be supported and followed by housing policies that encourage a diversified housing market throughout a given area.
Another tall order. Tackling integration of our schools and our City is something to commit to for the short, medium and long-term. Come the time when a new assignment policy is announced, this will certainly be one of the goals against which it will be measured.
Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children who attend McKinley Elementary School in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of the board of directors of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco (http://www.ppssf.org).
