Chinese School Board Members Should Do the Right Thing
February 18, 2005
The history of urban America is one of ethnic communities striving to elect their own representatives to address their specific needs and concerns, as well as to represent the larger communities. For three decades, voters have opted to include Chinese American representation on the San Francisco Board of Education.
Today, three Chinese Americans — all of whom claim to advocate for the needs, aspirations and desires of the Chinese American community — sit on the board of a public school system that has shaped the lives of my family and other Chinese Americans for more than a century.
The historical experience has not been a totally happy one.
At the outset, the school district refused to admit Chinese American students at all. When forced to accept them in 1885 (see Tape v. Hurley), the board created a special “Chinese primary school” so that Chinese American children would not contaminate others. For 50 years, no new school was built in Chinatown. The advent of “forced busing” triggered vehement protests by Chinese American parents who argued that the cure was worse than the disease of segregation. Chinese American children were arbitrarily dispersed at great educational, academic and emotional cost — once again, pawns in others’ plans.
Today, Commissioners Eddie Chin, Eric Mar and Norman Yee must guide the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) as it grapples with severe fiscal and operational constraints. History, however, has summoned them to confront not only the broad public interest in quality urban schooling but also the profound failures and injustices inflicted on Chinese American families, most recently by the so-called diversity index.
Chinese American parents have condemned quotas since the 1980s, and they are now fighting the diversity index that assigns Chinese American and other students out of their neighborhood schools to other parts of the city. Polls indicate more than 70 percent of every ethnic group in the city supports a return to neighborhood schools. Whites, blacks, Latinos, Chinese and others all agree it is time to junk the present system and return to neighborhood schools.
Yet SFUSD continues to pursue ineffective social experimentation instead of educational excellence.
San Francisco’s families are voting with their feet and deserting the public schools in droves. In July 2002, the school district’s own research reported that one-fourth of the children born to San Francisco residents leave the city before entering kindergarten-enrolled schools on the eastern side of the city. Another one-fourth of them attend private schools. Only one-half attend public schools.
Overall, “about 25 percent of San Francisco’s school-aged residents attend private schools,” the SFUSD report stated, compared “to a California average of about 10 percent and 11.3 percent nationwide.”
Moreover, the total number of children will decrease during the next 10 years. The declining population and increased private-sector competition for enrollments will deepen existing reductions in public school funding because of falling enrollments.
San Francisco parents who can afford the expense are choosing to desert a system that refuses to meet their needs. Working Chinese American families cannot yet afford such choices. However, if things do not change soon, so-called white flight will be followed by yellow flight.
Last year, Chin proposed a return to neighborhood schools and the repeal of the school district’s diversity index. The three Chinese American commissioners on the Board of Education (plus one more vote) can stop the insanity and consign the diversity index and its two decades of failure to the trash bin of history. They can replace the current system with a new school-assignment policy that will emphasize neighborhood schools and accommodate to the greatest extent possible the choices of individual students to attend their neighborhood schools.
Mar and Yee must now decide either to support neighborhood schools or perpetuate an irrational system that has penalized Chinese American children and bitterly alienated their parents. No one said it would be easy, but Mar and Yee should know well that the restoration of public school excellence will be a long march that begins with but a single step — toward neighborhood schools.
Douglas S. Chan is a native San Franciscan who lives in the Sunset district. He is a city police commissioner and member of the California Small Business Board.
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