Learning Limits
March 6, 2000
How redrawn school boundaries are pitting Asian American parents against one East Bay school district
By Janet Dang
Six years ago three Chinese American parents sought to dissolve a decade-old consent decree. In the landmark case Ho vs. SFUSD, the parents took the San Francisco Unified School District to court in a class-action suit. They alleged the district’s 40 to 45 percent cap on any one racial group unfairly kept their children out of the city’s most prestigious and competitive schools. Since Chinese Americans students made up the largest proportion of the district’s students, they were the group most likely to be affected by the race cap.
The race quotas put there in the 1980s were established by a consent decree won by the NAACP, largely because African Americans and Latino students were consistently and disproportionately underrepresented in the city’s most competitive schools, such as the Lowell High School.
In 1999, a settlement was reached, barring the district from using racial quotas and race as a factor in admissions.
Most wouldn’t question the determination and tenacity of many Asian American parents, particularly immigrants who came to the United States for the sake of their children’s futures. Some have even engineered ways to ensure their children get the best education: moving to a neighborhood with the highest-performing public schools, or failing in that, faking addresses, living with relatives, and as a last resort, filing lawsuits whenever they feel their children’s education is being jeopardized.
In Fremont, California, a suburb nestled next to the lucrative Silicon Valley, many parents are clamoring to send their children to the best schools. To get there involves a meticulously plotted route that begins at the elementary level.
But recently, that path has been blocked, say some Asian American parents, namely because the school district has announced plans to redraw its attendance boundaries, sending children from the best elementary school to be fed into a lower-performing high school instead of the top-notched one their parents had planned for them to attend.
Some 20 Asian American families have taken offense to the change, and are now battling it out with the Fremont Unified School District. They’ve filed racial discrimination lawsuit alleging that the district’s plans to change those attendance boundaries are racially motivated and designed to divert high-performing Asian students into mediocre high schools in order to boost academic scores.
Chinese and Indian American parents, many of them with children in Fremont’s best school — Fred E. Weibel Elementary School — say that the district made those changes based on the racial stereotypes that Asian students perform better academically, and thus are being targeted and re-routed to low-performing schools in the district with the expectation that their performance will bolster low test scores.
At the root of the legal tangle is the controversial Academic Performance Index (API) ranking system, which is the foundation of Gov. Gray Davis’ push to improve California’s public schools by holding educators accountable for student performance. Rankings are based on the statewide Stanford 9 test scores of 4.3 million students in grades 2-11 attending the state’s 7,000 schools.When the scores were first released on the Web in February, parents and educators jammed the web site for a glimpse that their schools’ performance.
The results were used to score schools and compare each one with similar schools in order to set improvement goals. (Last week, however, that ranking system was declared invalid because more than 1,000 schools did not properly take into account low-income students. A revised list will be out in April.)
Weibel is Fremont’s highest-ranking elementary school. It scored 931 out of a possible 1000 (800 is considered high-ranking) and is the third highest-ranking elementary school in California according to the API . Under the old district assignment plan, its students were to be fed into William Hopkins Junior High School, which also scored in the high 800s, and then to the district’s top-scoring Mission San Jose High School. All three schools are predominately comprised of Asian American and white students.
Under the new plan, which was approved four-to-one by the school board Feb. 23 and is to be implemented this fall, students from Weibel and Hopkins will instead be fed into Irvington High School, a lower-ranking school, scoring 692 on the API.
After much uproar, the parents sued the district as well as the five members of the school board and the district superintendent. According to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, the parents, known only as “Concerned Fremont Parents,” believe that their children’s education is at stake because the school they’ll be attending under the new boundary change isn’t competitive enough.
“Mission High School is a high performing school compared to Irvington or Kennedy. FUSD published statistics regarding the district performance and Mission is clearly a much better school,” states one parent’s complaint.
“We believe the district attempts to artificially and quickly inflate the performance of the district by moving the Weibel students to Irvington High School,” says the parents’ lawyer Erica Yew.
Yew says that the parents’ personal account of the racial tension that had arisen during the boundary battle led parents to believe that the change was racially motivated. She points out that the district is attempting to coordinate “racial balance” within the district, which she says is a violation of the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment.
Achieving ‘Balance’
Superintendent Sharon Jones refutes the allegations that the Fremont school district’s boundary changes were made in order to increase test scores because Asians are perceived as “having high academic standards,” as the complaint claims.
Jones admits, though, that when the district looked into redistricting school boundaries, they were “cognizant of the fact” that they needed to balance the schools. “We do not want to be accused of stacking all the top-end students in one school,” she says, referring to high-performing Mission.
Though the district and the board hoped the plan would create a “program balance,” ultimately, the decision to redistrict was based on where the schools are located and their sizes, says Jones. “Some schools are very over crowded. Our goals was to get schools to the size that fit their neighborhood,” she explains.
According to Jones, there are currently 1,100 students attending Weibel Elementary, though it can only accommodate 840 students. Mission High, which is supposed to accommodate 1,790 students, currently has 2,200 students enrolled. Furthermore, she says, students at Weibel are the ones farthest from Mission High School and closest to Irvington High.
To get the school attendance down to where it should be, students just needed to be reshuffled, Jones says. “For Weibel, we have to take some students out of the Mission attendance area. Weibel has a high percentage of Asian students but not just Asian students were moved,” she says.
Jones calls the parents’ concern that their children are denied the best education unfounded. “Unequivocally, Irvington is an outstanding school. … This is the district’s most award-winning school,” she says. “It is recognized for innovative programs and its rigorous programs.”
The lawsuit does not just focus on education, however. It is laden with other racial discrimination allegations, as well, like how white parents allegedly made disparaging remarks toward the Asian families during public meetings, “mimicking and mocking [those] who spoke with accents,” and “accusing [them] of abusing their children by ‘forcing’ their children to study.”
Furthermore, it claims that some white parents refer to people in the Weibel community as “immigrants,” “excessively wealthy” and “elitists,” “not assimilating,” and that the district and board members share similar sentiments.
But Jones flatly denies those claims. “I don’t believe that the public — even the Asian public — believes that the decision is about race. We’ve been talking about moving Weibel for years…”
The lawsuit goes on to allege that the changes in boundaries devalue the parents properties by “forcing children … to attend Irvington High School instead of Mission High School …” and by “adversely impacting environmental issues impacting plaintiff’s residences.”
Attorney Yew says that though the case is not a class-action suit, the parents — numbering over 20 — are seeking the court’s intervention, and an undisclosed amount in compensatory damages.
Paying the Price
Many of the parents have paid a premium to own homes within the vicinity of high-ranking schools and now they fear the re-boundary will result in a loss of property value. Historically, school performance scores have been used to determine real estate value.
“Everything is based on the test scores,” says Fremont real estate agent Sandi Ohms. “They [buyers] just look at the test scores.”
The Fremont Mission area, which is affluent and known for its good public schools, markets homes for $75,000 to $100,000 more than comparable homes in other sections of Fremont, she says. Though the area is a “very pretty” one, it is undoubtedly recognized more for its schools.
“They moved [to Mission]. They paid extra money for it, then to redraw the boundaries, to me it would be a big deal,” Ohms says.
The residential area where Irvington High School students live is mixed with a significant number of rentals and apartment buildings and a population that varies in terms of socioeconomic status. Similarly, Irvington High is 25.1 percent Asian and Pacific Islander and 56.6 percent white, 13.6 percent Latino, 4.2 percent African American and 0.5 percent American Indian, according to the state’s school profile. Furthermore, about 15 percent of its student population is enrolled in CalWorks and/or free or reduced price meals.
In contrast, Asian Americans comprise about 50 percent of Mission High School’s student body and whites make up 44.3 percent. Latinos and Africans, on the other hand, comprise just 3 percent and 1.3 percent respectively. And less than 3 percent of the students enrolled are in low–income family programs such as CalWorks and reduced-price lunches.
Tests, Class and Confucianism
In Los Angeles, Hancock Park is a central city neighborhood that is home to a large contingence of Asian Americans who have moved to that area for a specific reason: Third Street Elementary.
The school’s API ranking, coming in at 819, has already set off a flurry of inquiries at the school. Since test results have been released last month, Principal Susie Oh says she has gotten some 60 inquiries — more than ever before. Oh estimates over half are from Asian American parents. The rest are from white, primarily Jewish families, who tend to ask about the ideology of the school, whether it’s progressive, says Oh. In contrast, the Asian American parents, she says, ask about the school’s gifted program, as well as their music and math programs. “They want to know if the classes are advanced enough.”
Out of a student enrollment of 850, Oh estimates that 60 percent of the students are of Asian descent, mostly Korean and Chinese.
Oh estimates that about 10 percent of the student body entered the school by using false addresses. “They tend to be Asian families,” she says and calls the situation an “ongoing saga.” This month alone, she has sent transfer notices to four students. “I need to reduce enrollment. I cannot save the world.”
The API ranking system, similar to those used in Asia, resonates well with immigrants from Asia, where tests are the primary measure of academic achievement and the level of education is a social status indicator.
Sunjung Cho, a coordinator for Oakland-based Asian Mental Health Service’s children’s division, says a common perception among Asian American immigrants is that educated people are of a higher class.
“If you do well in school, you will go on to a good college, you will have a better future and spouse,” she says. “Going to a good college is not just related to the future but to Confucian ideals. Immigrants bring that mentality to this country.”
Many educators agree that Asian American immigrants place more emphasis on education than non-immigrant families. Some attribute that to Confucianism, which ranks educated people high on the hierarchy. That value system still exists in many Asian countries, such as China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Vietnam.
“Korean parents value education,” says Cho. “It’s not just here. It stems from Korea. Parents compare their children with their friend’s children in terms of education. Or they will compare the child to their siblings and say things like, ‘Oh, your older brother is doing so well.’ Education is embedded in the social fabric.”
But other non-Confucian societies, such as India, Pakistan and the Philippines, value education as well. “It’s more of a class issue,” says Asian American studies professor at San Francisco State University Lorraine Dong. “Education is associated with upward mobility, and in most Asian countries, education is a privilege.”
Dong believes the immigrant experience may contribute to the success of Asian American students. “People come here for survival. You are not happy where you are and go to the United States to improve your life,” Dong says. “The higher the generation, the less aggressive parents are with their kids.”
Whether Confucian, or not, Asian American parents have distinguished themselves from other parents in shaping their children’s education.
Dong has seen how San Francisco’s magnet Lowell High has garnered more and more interest from Asian American parents who rely on its academic reputations.
“Many parents brag, ‘My kid’s going to Lowell.’ They’re always saying that,” Dong says. “With the parents bragging, how do you think other parents feel?
“Parents are smart,” she says. “They scout out the best school. They make sure the elementary and junior high schools are feeder schools to Lowell. You should hear them in the schoolyard, especially when it’s time to apply to Lowell.”
Though she concedes the ranking system helps identify schools who consistently perform poorly, it also creates a class system. “In the worst case scenario, the API will create more Lowell’s, where parents clamor to make sure they’re kids go to that school.”
Comments
Got something to say?