Photos by Joyce Nishioka To African American Enola Maxwell, limiting the number of Chinese Americans at Lowell High and elsewhere harkens back to her own efforts to keep her daughter at the school in the 1940s. "You can't fight discrimination with discrimination," she says.

Life After Quotas
S.F. schools seek to ensure diversity without taking race into account

By Joyce Nishioka
Eighteen-year-old Shirley Ly contemplates what her school will be like without quotas. And like many people, she is torn. "Our classes won't be that diverse, and that's a sad thing," said the Thurgood Marshall senior. "But sometimes I think about what Martin Luther King said: 'I have a dream that one day no one will be judged by the color of their skin but rather by the content of their character.' And I think about Lowell, how they only want a certain amount of each ethnic group, how they judge people by their race. I wonder if Martin Luther King would agree."

San Francisco-which has defiantly continued bilingual education and affirmative action, despite state initiatives to the contrary-has long touted itself for its multiculturalism. Yet while no racial group dominates the city's population, the same cannot be said for its opportunities: White men get nearly 90 percent of the city's primary contracts, though they own less than half of available construction firms. Chinese Americans, who make up 27.8 percent of the district's students, occupy 42 percent of Lowell High School. African Americans, however, make up only 4.2 percent. And that was before the race caps were lifted last month as part of a settlement of a 1994 suit filed by parents Carl Ho, Charlene Wong Loen, and Jane Chen against the school district and the NAACP, whose suit had set the stage for quotas implemented 16 years ago.

Diversity on Both Sides

The Ho settlement, under which the district cannot use race as a primary admissions factor and cannot require families to divulge race, was widely reported as a victory for Chinese Americans, a loss for Latinos and blacks. But in a city whose residents have long become accustomed to seeing things in other than black and white, not all Chinese Americans support the new settlement, and not all African Americans are against it.

"We are concerned that the mainstream press has depicted the case as a challenge by the Chinese Americans to a consent decree that only benefited blacks and Latinos-this is not true," said Diane Chin, executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. "The pro-integration, pro-affirmative action voices in the community have been silenced."

But Enola Maxwell, director of Potero Hill Neighborhood House, argues that quotas have not bolstered the low test scores among African Americans cited in the NAACP's 1979 suit against the district. The suit was settled by the 1983 consent decree, which itself replaced a 1971 desegregation policy.

"You can't fight discrimination with discrimination," she said, explaining why she couldn't support the 1983 pact, which among other things limited representation of any one racial group to at most 40 to 45 percent. "The money came in our name, but it didn't go into our heads. It was supposed to be spent for justice and equality, but it didn't happen."

Despite the 1983 settlement and the $37 million that came in annually from the federal government to enforce it, black high schoolers had an average GPA of 1.81 last spring, and in 1998 they made up 1.9 percent of students who took Advanced Placement tests. Almost 72 percent of the test-takers were Asian American and 11.5 percent were Caucasian.

However, a 1998 year-end report published in January by the consent decree's advisory committee found that limited-English speaking students at the 11th grade level performed as poorly or poorer than African American students in standardized English reading and comprehension tests. Collectively, this group comprises almost a third of the district, and of those students, 40 percent are Chinese or Chinese American. Predicts Chin: "They are going to be the most damaged by the elimination of the $37 million."

Undeniably, the desegregation funds bolstered education. With it, the district built schools, bought books, paid for tutorial programs. Furthermore, schools with high Chinese American student enrollment received a substantial piece of the pie: This year, Gordon Lau Elementary School got $342,911, Galileo High received $525,185; and Thurgood Marshall got close to $1.5 million. Student bodies at all three schools are at least close to half Asian American.

The district is hoping to find other sources of funding, though it has no guarantees. "We expect when the consent decree ends in 2002 that there will still be desegregation monies available through the state that we can apply for to replace the current funds," said Sandina Robbins, director of communications and public relations for the San Francisco Unified School District.

Marshall, a college-prep school in San Francisco's Excelsior District, opened in 1994 and graduated its first class last year. Unlike Lowell, the school, almost 40 percent Asian American, admits students by lottery, not by GPA or test scores.

"Marshall was established because of the consent decree," said Vice Principal Jim Green. "It has made a lot of people happy because of its high-quality academic standards. Everyone feels good about sending their kids here: Asians, Latinos and African Americans."

The Prestige Factor

U.C. Berkeley professor Ling-chi Wang, however, says that integration has long been an illusion in the city. The district's "optional enrollment requests," which allow parents to choose schools, have over the years led to a two-tiered system, with desirable schools located mainly on the city's western half, he said.

"Upper and middle-class Asians and whites try to do everything they can in order to go to desirable schools on the west side," Wang explained. "Parents raise money to support the schools-they are good but they are also more segregated."

As a result, he said, several schools-not just Lowell High-have come close to or exceeded their quotas of Chinese Americans. Last year, Galileo High School was 43.1 percent Chinese American; Lincoln High School, 46.7 percent; Washington, 40 percent; and Lowell, 42.2 percent.

The Ho plaintiffs argue that their case was not just about Lowell, though one of them, Loen, joined the suit after her son fell short of test cutoffs-then set higher for Chinese Americans than for anyone else. After the suit was filed, Lowell abandoned race-based cutoffs for a more flexible plan.

Lowell is undoubtedly among the state's best high schools: It boasts a 97.7 percent graduation rate and ranks above the 90th percentile in test scores. It sends a higher proportion of graduates to the University of California than any other school in the state.

"Many parents want their kids to have a good education-and Lowell represents that," said Democratic County Central Committee member Henry Louie, a Lowell alumnus who supports the lawsuit.

But for many families, especially Chinese American ones, Lowell High has evolved into a symbol of exquisite cachet, one that many adolescents have been prepped for since early childhood.

"Lowell is the only school everyone talks about," said 17-year-old Helen Tong, a senior honors student at Galileo High School, itself nearly half Asian and Asian American. "Most people want to attend, especially Chinese parents want their kids to go there. And if kids attend Lowell, their parents are really proud and tell their friends."

Seventeen-year-old Alex, who did not want to give his last name, scored a spot at Lowell. He said his parents didn't pressure him, though he says he was "encouraged." As he explained: "My parents wanted me to go to the best- they wanted me to have a good education."

However, Marshall High senior Brian Washington said all youths need to have access to good educations-even if doing so requires quotas. "I lean more toward having racial caps and giving kids opportunity," he said. "It's not cool to have more than half of any one race. If one race dominated, it wouldn't reflect San Francisco, and it wouldn't be a public institution. I'm looking for a more diverse school, with people of different colors, poor kids, rich kids."

But Enola Maxwell says she sees parallels between her fight to keep her daughter at Lowell in the 1940s and the Chinese American families struggling to get in now."It is unfair not to allow qualified Chinese students in because there are too many," Maxwell said. "Their being denied is not what integration was meant to be."

The just-lifted quotas on Chinese Americans and others have historical parallels as well, said Joseph Lam, director of planning and evaluation at the Mayor's Office of Children, Youth and Their Families in San Francisco.

In 1884, Chinese American Joseph Tape's daughter, Mamie, was denied admission to San Francisco's Spring Valley Elementary School, where more than half the students are now of Chinese descent. Tape took his case to court. Fearing an adverse ruling, the Board of Education established a separate primary school for Chinese children. Mary Tape, the mother of Mamie, wrote the board the following note:

"I see that you are going to make all sorts of excuses to keep my child out off the Public Schools. Dear sirs, Will you please tell me! Is it a disgrace to be born Chinese?...What right have you to bar my children out of the school because she is a chinese Descend."

"We hear hundreds of parents with these same complaints more than 100 years later," said Lam, who added that he saw last month's settlement as "truly a victory for the parents. Whether you think the lawsuit was right or wrong, it was a courageous act, and the community should support the struggle of Chinese parents who are fighting for the rights of their children."

Beyond Lowell

The settlement, though, doesn't negate the district's mandate for diversity. Instead, it directs the schools to achieve it through other ways, perhaps by considering applicants' zip codes or family incomes. Whether that means Lowell will become more Chinese American or less so is unknown. But to U.C. professor Wang and others, the solution lies beyond that school. Since 1994 he, Galileo's staff, and community organizations such as Chinese for Affirmative Action have worked on restructuring curriculum at the school, where half the students speak little English and half are low income. Many live in Chinatown or the Tenderloin. "Don't those people count?" Wang asked rhetorically.

"If parents were really concerned about education they should be concerned about other high schools. The Chinese community should get together and force the district to improve the quality at all schools so that not everybody would have to squeeze into Lowell.

"This whole thing is tragic in the sense that people spend so much energy on trying to fight for getting a few more Chinese kids into Lowell, while the educational needs of others are ignored. At Galileo we are slowly changing the school around, and hope one day it will be as competitive as Lowell."

The school, now known as Galileo Academy of Science and Technology, offers 11 Advanced Placement classes. Students are required to take 230 units to graduate-10 more than previously-and they are placed on tracks including biological and environmental sciences, engineering and media technology, and aeronautic science.

Ly, whose ethnically Chinese parents were born in Vietnam, identified herself as Chinese American when she applied to Lowell. She missed the cutoff by one point.

Still, she has no regrets.

"I never wanted to go because my parents pressured me from the seventh grade," she said. "They told me, 'Lowell is really good. If you go to college they will see you went to Lowell and they will think highly of you.' The only reason I was interested in the school was because a lot of my friends went there. But I'm glad I came to Marshall because of the diversity-and all the students are so dedicated here."