By Benjamin King
Members of the community last Friday aired their grievances about the “Excellence for All” plan to retool the San Francisco schools’ assignment system by order of Judge William Orrick. This “fairness hearing” signaled one of the last steps in a saga that started over 15 years ago with two law suits: San Francisco NAACP v. San Francisco United School District (SFUSD) and Ho v. SFUSD.
Parents and community members continued to express concerns about busing students to different neighborhoods and parental choice in school assignments, while trying to keep the importance of diversity in mind.
In 1983, a lawsuit raised by the San Francisco NAACP was settled with a “consent decree” which stated that no single school could have more than 45 percent of one ethnicity. The SFNAACP contended that because the schools were effectively segregated and that the level of education varied so greatly across districts, certain populations were being denied equal education.
However, in 1994, a group of Chinese parents filed a class action suit against the SFNAACP and the SFUSD accusing their “consent decree” as being in violation of the 14th Amendment. As a result of the 1983 ruling, cut-off numbers for magnet schools admissions tests were adjusted for each ethnic group. In Ho v. SFUSD, the plaintiffs argued that it was unconstitutional and reverse racism to keep higher-scoring Asian Pacific Islander American students out of the top schools in the name of diversity.
The Ho family won against the SFNAACP and the SFUSD and, as a result, the practices were eliminated. However, because both sides agree that some sort of balance needs to exist, as diversity can be a learning device in and of itself, a new plan has been drafted.
Not About Race
The plan, given the name “Excellence for All: A Five-Year Plan to Achieve Educational Equity in the SFUSD” addresses educational disparities that may be a result of effective segregation.
This plan, however, discontinues the use of race as an indicator of diversity. In its place, a new “diversity index” has been created that uses characteristics such as a student’s language spoken at home, his or her English proficiency, the mother’s educational level, or the family’s income in place of strictly race-based assignments. Each criterion will be designated a point value of either one or zero, and ideally, each school will represent a spectrum of numbers, which will translate into a student body, diverse in many aspects, not only in race.
Work in Progress
At the hearing held in the United States District Court, Northern District of California, on Sept. 21, the lawyers representing the SFNAACP, SFUSD, and the Ho plaintiffs started the hearing by praising the new plan as visionary and expressed their full approval for it, while also recognizing that it was still a work in progress.
Members of the SFUSD noted that the plan was “lawful and fair” and that “it will preserve choice for the parents of children in the school district while distributing students in a charitable way”.
Patricia Gray, principal of Balboa High School, is in full support of the plan, calling it a “great start for equitable education for all students” and David Campos, representing SFUSD, highlighted the fact that parental choice is a major component of the assignment process and more importantly that there is no racial element in the index.
After the initial statements by the attorneys on each side, the judge called several community members to the stand and voice their opinions.
One parent, Denise Lam, was concerned with the plan because it seemed to nominally consider parental choice by increasing the choice of schools, because a parent could list five schools instead of three, under the previous plan.
However, she argued that parents should be able to receive their first choice to ensure that “kids will be assigned to their own neighborhood [schools].”
She also echoed the concern of many of the Chinese American parents present that admittance to certain “magnet” schools such as Lowell should reflect academic performance, not other factors considered under the diversity index.
While many other parents like Henry Louie, who is also vice-president of the Asian American Legal Foundation, agree that “diversity enriches all of our lives,” he finds solutions such as busing students across town to increase diversity a failed attempt at “social engineering.”
Louie argued that students’ attendance of schools in their local neighborhood is essential to parent involvement and thus, fosters a better educational experience. He provided an example of a parent being much less likely to use public transportation to travel 30 minutes to a PTA meeting than if the meeting were just down the street.
Everyone has the common goals of “all kids in the SFUSD doing well,” Louie said, but that there were different opinions on how to achieve these goals.
Not all opposition came from the Chinese American parents. Professor Gary Orfield, an expert in racial quotas and who has been particularly involved in the proceedings of the SFUSD, admitted some misgivings about the plan. He felt uneasy about the plan because it doesn’t address important sectors of the population such as the Chinese American English Language Learners (ELLs) who score at the bottom, below Latino and African American students.
He said he is worried that groups like the Chinese ELLs who had no spokespeople, were being left out of the plan. Orfield also expressed concern about the amount of freedom the schools had been given to use federal funds. He said the “court [should] take an active role that students’ rights are realized.” The current plan does not allow for that, he added.
While the consensus among the community seemed to be that the plan is a decent first step in securing “equitable educational opportunity” for the children of San Francisco, it is clear that work still needs to be done.
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