Lead, Not Divide
August 29, 2003
Parents making racial stereotypes about crime, drugs, and welfare in San Francisco schools are intolerable. However, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman took the wrong approach as she insisted that some Chinese parents were racist in a recent magazine story about her school district’s controversial student assignment policy.
Ackerman’s mission should be to constructively teach the kids — and even their intolerant parents —the important values of diversity and racial harmony.
Ackerman’s remarks are quite ironic, considering she heads an institution shedding its own racist legacy.
In 1994, the district was sued by the parents of Chinese American children. Their successful federal suit forced schools to eliminate enrollment caps limiting ethnic groups in schools. The settlement acknowledged that the district’s discrimination denied Chinese American kids the protections of the 14th Amendment.
As a result, the district implemented the “diversity index,” which based student assignments on supposedly race-neutral socioeconomic criteria. In the second year of the index, the school district has struggled with student enrollments. With schools reopening, Chinese American parents have continued to demonstrate for more neighborhood schools. In this week’s issue, some parents have threatened to withhold their kids from school.
Before pointing fingers at racism, Ackerman should be sensitive to the insidious legacy of racism in the Bay Area against Asian Pacific American students.
For example, from 1850 to 1959, Chinese endured years of struggle in segregated S.F. schools as documented in Dr. Victor Low’s book, The Unimpressible Race.
The legacy of racism toward students continued well after the 1960s civil rights movement. The U.S. Supreme Court case of Lau vs. Nichols in 1974 forced the San Francisco school board to support bilingual education for immigrant kids. By 1983, S.F. schools finally agreed to desegregate. In the 1980s, the UC Berkeley chancellor apologized after officials manipulated admissions criteria to the detriment of APA applicants.
Given this legacy and the rising anger, the superintendent should lead a transparent investigation of whether the diversity index burdens children of a particular race. At the same time, the superintendent should teach the importance of diversity, rather than demonizing parents and penalizing their kids with broad brush strokes.
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