The Topography of Segregation : Old Racist Policies Bred School Overcrowding

The ongoing, highly charged controversy over whether the Los Angeles Unified School District should mandate year-round education for all students has its roots in a long and fractious local history. Urban growth, racial and ethnic segregation and housing discrimination against families with children were major factors in establishing patterns we see today.

The Los Angeles school board has, since at least 1962, wrestled with its responsibility for dealing with the conspicuous increase in racial and ethnic school segregation. In that year, the board first formally acknowledged the existence of de facto school segregation and thus agreed, in effect, that equity is at the heart of equal opportunity.

Since World War II, there has been a steady move toward a tripartite school system among three sizable groups--black, Latino and white. Black students were concentrated in schools in the South- Central area, with sharp racial boundaries on all sides. Latino students, mainly Mexican-Americans, were concentrated in schools on the Eastside, but enjoyed a measured opportunity to move to other areas. Chinese students predominated in one school in downtown Chinatown. Japanese, after wartime internment, were more widely dispersed, except for small repopulated areas in Gardena and the Crenshaw district. The balance of the city’s students was overwhelmingly white. Whites predominated in the Westside, Northeast, South Bay and San Fernando Valley. With the 1950s Baby Boom in full bloom, double sessions and school overcrowding rose to their highest levels in all neighborhoods.

The school board 30 years ago met the challenge of burgeoning populations by constructing new schools at an unprecedented rate in the Westside, Harbor area and San Fernando Valley, principally white areas. Several new schools were built in Watts, for blacks, to meet the expansion of low-income public-housing projects in that area. Later, other blackschools were enlarged or encumbered with portable school buildings. The strategy was to contain the enrollment growth within neighborhoods, without changing boundaries or reassigning students outside their racial and ethnic areas.

At the same time that school populations were growing in the white, suburban areas, conspicuous increases in the count of black students in inner-city schools brought about a flood of transfers by white students away from those schools. The shift was supported by school district policy that permitted and encouraged white students to transfer from a largely white school where white enrollment was dwindling to an overwhelmingly white school.

Racial isolation became even more stark. By the end of the 1960s Los Angeles had developed a full-fledged tripartite school system, with large numbers of clearly racially identifiable schools, geographically isolated and unequal in their operation. Judge Alfred Gitelson’s 1968 ruling ordering desegregation was an obvious and compelling conclusion.

Racial and ethnic isolation has been exacerbated by the widespread practice of rental discrimination against families with children, condoned under California law until very recently. Certain areas of the city with high density, low-cost apartments and older, large single family homes have become veritable “children’s ghettos.” Public schools have been burdened by the concentration of school-age children in these family areas. The racial isolation has assumed an overlay of class isolation.

Litigation over school segregation has accomplished little to solve the dual problems of segregation and overcrowding. Efforts to use widespread desegregation techniques were always fiercely resisted or weakly supported. And the electorate opposed school construction bond proposals and supported Proposition 13 in 1978, thus removing the district’s ability to raise sufficient funds for new schools.

In all these years, the resolute, vocal and sometimes hysterical opposition of white parents and community leaders has scuttled every solution proposed that might require some equitable sharing of the burdens inherent in resolving the district’s inequalities.

The controversy over the imposition of year-round education in the district is but the latest example of the never-ending story of the unwillingness to spread to white students the same burdens that are routinely forced on black, Latino and Asian students. The rhetoric has changed, but the game is still the same. Parents opposing the year-round schools have selfishly declared: “We have worked hard and paid taxes to have the best for our kids in our own neighborhood. If they need more schools in those neighborhoods, then build them. Year-round schools are not for us.”

The principle underlying this expression makes a mockery of public school equity. We are being told that the quality of a child’s public education should depend on what neighborhood his parents can afford. Conversely, if a child’s neighborhood is ridden with problems of urban life--poverty, segregation, overcrowding--that child gets whatever level of public education that can survive in that environment. This is an unfair and unacceptable basis for public education policy.

The refusal to accept a proven method of reducing overcrowding--student school reassignments--has resulted in a continued policy relying on double sessions, bungalows, room conversions and other containment remedies, without success. For the last several years, only the non-white students have had to bear the burden of overcrowding relief. It is high time that we all realized the inevitability of the need to comprehensibly and fairly solve these related problems. Resorting to the “not my child” syndrome will only result in the continued inequities of political domination of one group over all the others.