San Francisco Schools To End Desegregation Plan

SAN FRANCISCO (KRT) -- On a rainy day that forced an indoor recess at Garfield Elementary School, an African-American girl in Room 106 played with a penguin puppet. A girl of Chinese descent put the finishing touches on her witch picture, while a Hispanic girl was busy stapling pages of her handmade storybook. Black and white boys played with blocks on the floor.

Principal Karen Law gazed across this kindergarten classroom, admiring the diversity.

Within the next few years, Law suggests, this class, as well as the rest of the student body in the bustling Chinatown neighborhood, will be largely one ethnic group: Chinese.

A recent court ruling on behalf of Chinese students has forced the San Francisco Unified School District to dismantle its highly regarded desegregation plan, which for 17 years has kept all 115 schools fully integrated.

Under the plan, racial quotas were used to ensure that Chinese, white, African-American and Latino students were represented at each school, with no group's enrollment exceeding 45 percent.

Moreover, the desegregation plan tackled low student achievement scores among blacks and Hispanics by providing enrichment programs and new schools in their communities. Minority achievement surged under "reconstitution," a process later borrowed by the Chicago Public Schools, which allows officials to replace the entire staff at a troubled school.

But the problem was that the caps ended up penalizing Chinese students, whose numbers since the adoption of the desegregation plan have grown so dramatically that they have become the largest single group in the district. As 16,000 Chinese students indicated in their class-action lawsuit against the district, the quotas shut them out of their first, second and sometimes even third school choices.

Still, as the district phases out the consent decree, administrators and teachers are lamenting the loss of $30 million a year in state funds for the program and what they term the inevitable resegregation in the schools -- as has happened in Boston, Denver, Kansas City, Mo., and numerous other cities that have dropped their voluntary or court-supervised desegregation programs.

Until the recent lawsuit was filed, San Francisco was exempt from Proposition 209, the 1996 initiative that struck down government-sponsored affirmative action programs in California, because the federal court order that led to the desegregation program superseded state law. But now, district officials must grapple with the same issue their counterparts at the University of California have faced the last three years: They are looking for creative ways to maintain student diversity without resorting to race-based admission policies.

"The multicultural richness, the ethnic diversity provided an excellent platform for kids to learn and appreciate each other," said Law, the principal.

"In the field of education, we've been trying for decades to desegregate," she added. "I'd like to think it would happen (naturally), but realistically it doesn't happen unless you use some regulation in the form of desegregation legislation."

The current wave of orders reversing desegregation plans are the result of several U.S. Supreme Court decisions establishing that court-supervised remedies to historic discrimination should be temporary, not long-term, and that school districts are in a better position than federal courts to determine what's best for students.

The Chicago Public Schools' 1980 federally monitored desegregation plan remains in effect, though a provision setting racial quotas among the faculty has come under heavy criticism from principals for exacerbating vacancies. Because of the quotas, schools in white neighborhoods often have to reject talented white teachers because of a requirement for more black teachers. Schools in black neighborhoods face the same dilemma of having too many qualified black applicants and too few white ones.

Researchers say that in the past 15 years they have noticed a disturbing trend in the districts that have dropped desegregation programs: African-American students at resegregated schools are falling further behind whites and their black counterparts at integrated schools.

"You see the pattern all across the country," said Gary Orfield, an education professor at Harvard University, who compiled the studies in his 1996 book "Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education."

"The inner-city schools are more unequal now than they were in the past (during the days of legalized segregation). In the past you had the black middle class," he added. "Now you have a whole set of schools that are entirely black and entirely poor with most of the kids coming from housing projects."

A 1993 study of the school district in Norfolk, Va., which dismantled its desegregation program in 1986, showed that the test scores of black students have dropped an average of 5 points on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills since the schools resegregated. Moreover, the already wide gap in achievement between black and white students grew by 3 points after forced busing ended.

The NAACP filed suit against the San Francisco district in the late 1970s, charging that more than 80 percent of the schools were composed of one racial group. The consent decree hammered out by the NAACP and the district had an immediate impact: All schools were fully integrated with at least four racial and ethnic groups.

Under San Francisco's desegregation plan, special programs and new schools were opened in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, boosting overall achievement among those groups. In 1998, 41 percent of students at such targeted schools scored at or above national average in reading, compared with 21 percent prior to the implementation of the desegregation plan. Moreover, 51 percent scored at or above the national average in math in 1998, compared with 24 percent before the desegregation program.

Experts say the plan succeeded as much for the city's size as its liberal attitude toward race: The city is only 49 square miles, making it relatively easy to move students by public or district transportation from one end of the city to another.

Yet the plan had one big problem: It was written when blacks were the largest minority group and it didn't foresee that the city's Chinese enrollment would grow so dramatically. Since 1983, blacks' representation in the district dropped from 22.5 percent to 16 percent, while Chinese grew from 20 percent to 28 percent.

"Chinese students were capped out in one-third of the schools, including all the magnet schools," said David Levine, a San Francisco lawyer who filed the class-action suit on behalf of 16,000 Chinese students. Some of the plaintiffs, he added, were turned down three and four times for schools that had openings, but not for Chinese students.

"Here are kids turned away on the basis of their race and nothing else," he said. "There's no dispute whatsoever that diversity is a good goal. But it's wrong when black kids are turned away and it's wrong when Chinese kids are turned away."

Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who led the fight for the state's anti-affirmative action law in 1996, said, "The decision in San Francisco is consistent with national trends: It is not coincidental that race-based college admissions ended at a time when desegregation plans are ending in elementary and high schools."

Connerly added, "There is a value in integrated schools. The choice that we all have is whether we still want to use the power of government to engineer the outcome or do things that are non race-based to lead us to that same conclusion."

Last spring, the school district opted to settle the 5-year-old lawsuit filed by the Chinese students. The federal judge hearing the case ordered the district to phase out the consent decree by 2002 and devise a new enrollment plan.

But in December the judge rejected the district's plan that used several socioeconomic factors -- the student's neighborhood, primary language, parents' education -- because it included race.

The Board of Education is awaiting word from its legal counsel on whether to appeal the judge's ruling and submit another plan.

In the meantime, the district is continuing a race-neutral student assignment plan introduced last fall that allows parents to select where their children will go. Already officials at many schools say they are seeing signs of segregation.

"The notion that I subscribe to is that students get a better education in an integrated environment," said Michael Harris, a lawyer for the NAACP who is involved in the case.

"It has long been true that whenever you have racially divided schools, minority students get less resources."

Knight Ridder-Tribune