Updating Integration Plan : Move Would Aid Schools Whose Ethnic Makeup Has Changed

The 1977 court order requiring integration programs in San Diego city schools has been amended to provide special money for schools whose enrollments have changed from predominantly white to predominantly nonwhite during the last 12 years.

The change will allow 17 schools that today have less than 35% white students to receive, on a priority basis, up to $150,000 annually to revamp curriculum, encourage more parent involvement and try new teaching methods to improve academic achievement.

The schools would be renamed Academic Enrichment Academies under the nine-year program being presented for approval today to the San Diego Unified School District Board of Trustees. The amendment to the court order was signed May 3 after several months of negotiations between the board and plaintiffs in the case.

Priority Rankings

If trustees approve the plan today, three schools will begin planning substantial changes in their curriculum and environment next fall. The schools would be selected each year according to a priority ranking, based on the number of students who receive welfare and have declining standardized achievement test scores, high transiency rates and a lack of English fluency.

All 17 schools show those characteristics, but, because their student population has changed since the original court order, they have been ineligible for special state integration money.

That money--$38 million this school year--has gone largely to 23 minority-isolated schools identified in the 1977 order, which called for integration through a combination of special magnet programs and voluntary busing.

The 23 schools all have magnet academic programs, such as special science or fine-arts emphases, designed both to improve achievement of minority resident students and to attract white students from the northern tier of the city.

A second component allows minority students to be voluntarily bused to predominantly white schools where the learning environment is often perceived to be superior.

A third element of the original plan has provided some special money to schools defined as ethnically balanced because their student population is within plus or minus 10% of the district’s overall white and nonwhite student totals.

The court order also said that school administrators had to bring achievement of minority students up to the 50th percentile on standardized tests, the level at which half of all students nationwide score higher and where half score lower. A specific curriculum reinforcing basic skills remains in effect at the 23 schools today.

The amendment came about because top district administrators were concerned that the integration plan no longer recognizes changing demographics.

“A lot of schools have become minority, but we had a static court order and, under that, these schools have not qualified for extra aid,” said Tina Dyer, legal counsel for the district.

In 1977, the district was about 65% white (at 80,153) and 35% nonwhite (at 41,080) with about 18% black, 16% Latino and the rest Asian and other. Today, only 41.4%, or 48,138, of all students are white. The remaining 68,233 are nonwhite, with 23% Latino, 16.4% black and 18% Asian, Indochinese and Filipino.

The new “academy” plan would begin with two elementary schools, Jackson and Hamilton both in East San Diego, and Montgomery Junior High in Linda Vista. Each of those schools would receive $50,000 next year, followed by $150,000 a year for each succeeding year.

Two schools would be added each successive year until, by 1998, the total budget would grow to $2.55 million a year for all 17 schools.

Money Alone Won’t Do It

“This provides an opportunity to take some of the schools in the Mid-City area, which have some of the greatest ethnic diversity, and really focus on how we can better meet the needs of the students,” schools Supt. Tom Payzant said. “These schools have always been behind the eight ball in terms of money.”

But Payzant concedes that money alone will not solve achievement problems, which have bedeviled educators for more than two decades despite millions of dollars and many teaching approaches. Top administrators propose having the schools design their own approaches, within the context of district policies, as part of their restructuring agenda to give individual principals and teachers more responsibility at their schools.

The new program would not directly promote integration because it affects only the neighborhood students, who are already overwhelmingly nonwhite, now attending the 17 schools. But Dyer said the program falls under the broad integration order because “the court said not just to look at the mixing of kids, but look at the quality of instruction, and this (new program) is very much in keeping with academic enrichment . . . and, if successful, that can help maintain the (white) population that is there now.”

Shuford Swift, a plaintiff in the original case, praised the district for its willingness to put new programs into place. Over the years, school administrators have changed magnet programs at some schools after they proved inadequate in improving student achievement or in attracting white students to the schools.

“Integration has focused on the problems even though the district hasn’t solved the problems yet,” Swift said.

Part of the new amendment also calls for the district to close the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students on standardized tests, not simply to bring performance levels up to the 50th percentile, when whites and many Asians are at the 70th percentile.

Four Major Groups

“I think we are pleased overall with the voluntary integration program, and we do have more integrated schools today with large numbers of students achieving better, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have problems,” Dyer said. “And we are focusing on achievement because, after you mix kids (ethnically), you need to see that they are achieving.”

Swift acknowledged some arguments that say the district should no longer call schools integrated simply on the basis of white/nonwhite enrollment, but should consider them integrated by looking at the balance among the four major ethnic designations.

“But there still is considerable bias on the part of some teachers, and we still see attitudes of discrimination in housing, in employment and in schools, so that when you get down to looking at things, most are still defined in the white/nonwhite context.”

Besides Hamilton, Jackson and Montgomery, the other schools planned for academic-academy designation are Euclid, Edison, Brooklyn, Washington, Marshall, Linda Vista, Central, Audubon, Perry, Lee, Boone, Paradise Hills, Penn and Mann.