Racialism Lives On In San Francisco Schools
SFUSD’s new assignment plan forces race mixing
By Lee Cheng

George Wallace once infamously declared “segregation forever” in blatant defiance of the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. In his later years, Wallace appeared to experience a moment of grace, and acknowledged his error in upholding the standard of separate but equal that had kept America from attaining its goal of being one nation indivisible. In the years before his death, Wallace had reconciled with many members of the civil rights community he once reviled.

Perhaps in time, present-day supporters of racialism -- that pessimistic and limiting ideology that tells its adherents that all societal actions and interactions must be viewed in racial terms -- will experience a similar moment of revelation. At that time, maybe they will also accept the law of the land, the one that requires government to view and treat all individuals as equals.

Right about now, unfortunately, the disciples of preference appear ready to engage in a protracted campaign of trench warfare to maintain unequal, racist policies despite overwhelming public opposition to entitlements based on race. Vast amounts of resources and, I’ll have to admit, creativity, have and are being spent in attempts to overturn or circumvent limitations on the use of racial preference.

In February of this year, I prematurely and optimistically celebrated the settlement of a five-year old lawsuit between a group of Chinese American parents and children and the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) over the district’s use of explicit racial classifications and quotas in admitting and assigning children to public schools. On the appointed trial date, when it seemed obvious that the SFUSD would join a long list of school districts nationwide that had or were being forced to eliminate “desegregation” consent decrees utilizing race-based student assignment, the SFUSD and the plaintiffs reached a settlement in which the district agreed not to use race as a determinative factor in school admissions and assignments and to eventually phase out the decree altogether.

The settlement also called on the SFUSD to create a new student assignment plan that would focus on improving educational achievement.

After months of study and consideration, a 27-member committee of SFUSD employees submitted their masterpiece for consideration by the parties to the lawsuit and the San Francisco Board of Education. Last week, the School Board did not even discuss the proposed enrollment plan, pulling it from the Sept. 28, 1999 meeting agenda without official explanation. However, anyone who has seen the proposal would not need an explanation; it simply will not be able to withstand judicial or public scrutiny.

In a document that was supposed to focus on advancing student achievement and on phasing out the use of race, the central and unifying focus of the proposed enrollment plan is to maintain and create racial diversity.

In certain respects, the proposed plan makes it even harder for students to avoid being racially categorized. All applicants under the proposed plan would be assigned a “diversity” index calculated in part, on how many other individuals of the same racial group were already at the school.

For instance, for schools with a large Latino enrollment, a Latino applicant would receive a much lower index score than a white candidate. For applicants who refuse to be racially classified and decline to state their race, though, the proposed plan would provide an index score of 0. No joke.

Of course, since Chinese children still constitute by far the largest ethnic group in the SFUSD, they will have a greater chance of getting a lower diversity index score at any given school, particularly the more academically-focused one

And one other little salvo in the proposed enrollment plan: the student assignment committee sneaked a tiny little section on a new admissions policy for Lowell High School, the premier academic high school in the SFUSD. The rocket scientists on the committee are presently recommending that only a specified percentage of the students at each middle or junior high school be allowed to apply to Lowell. As always, the primary consideration behind the proposal appears to be race, on the theory that certain middle and junior high schools will have a sufficiently high percentage of students from desired ethnic groups to guarantee a certain number of admits from those groups into Lowell if the overall applicant pool was limited.

Sadly, the objective of desegregation, the original underlying principle behind busing and the justification for the disaster in the SFUSD, was quite noble. Separate but equal, the thinking went, did not work because schools that were predominantly white would always get more resources than predominantly black schools; whites generally were better off and traditionally controlled the allocation of educational resources. Busing, in theory, would allow black kids to gain access to schools with more resources and would ensure that schools would be funded equitably.

Unfortunately and irrefutably, busing turned out to be a complete disaster. Forced racial mixing in public schools resulted in the wholesale exodus of white students from urban public schools. Instead of being the means to achieve the end of educating minority kids better, racial mixing became the end in itself, a holy cow that sucked up billions of dollars that could have gone into paying teachers or buying books.

Just look at what happened and what is happening in San Francisco, where minority students continue to fail after 16 years of quotas and almost $500 million spent. Think about how much effort went into putting together the latest student assignment plan: Twenty-seven district employees on the committee and all those lawyers, racking their brains to find a way to preserve racial mixing instead of improving education. Somewhere along the way, the idealists behind desegregation turned into ideologues, and the objective behind integration became obscured by the process.