Fleeing Public Schools: The SRB Factor : Education: Why do parents spend big bucks for private schools when an excellent public school is near? It’s a white thing.

It’s damned hard sustaining the illusion of a neighborhood school when you’re the only family among nine on the block that hasn’t pulled its children from the public-education system. And on the face of it, the reasons for this apparent exodus are difficult to comprehend.

For it is generally agreed that Emerson Elementary (K-3), situated in the center of Berkeley’s upscale Claremont-Elmwood area, is one of the safest, highest-rated, best-equipped and best-staffed educational institutions in the district. So why the antipathy? Why the relatively abrupt abandonment of their corporeal commitment to public education? Why, instead of conveniently walking their 5- to 8-year-olds to Emerson each morning, do our neighbors choose to shuttle them across town to private grammar schools costing up to $8,000 a year, with such expressively upward-driven names as Bentley and Head-Royce?

One can only assume there is something terribly wrong with Emerson. Is it class size? Religious concerns? Political objections? Possible remedies for these issues might have at least been discussed in the neighborhood PTA. Yet, inexplicably, there is nary a record of expressed concern by these parents either at PTA meetings or at public forums held by the school board. Apparently, they just cut and ran.

It’s not a classic case of “white flight,” exactly--only the subtle prelude. For though our neighbors have removed their children from the local school, they have no intention of abandoning their homes. The health of the local school may deteriorate, but the value and well-being of the neighborhood--and for that matter, the private schools--will probably remain constant. No, we must assign another name for what may be a subconscious reaction to the changing racial demographics (Caucasians now being virtually a minority) at Emerson: To be as discreet as possible, let us term it a subliminal response to busing--the SRB factor.

However, remembering that Berkeley is a predominantly liberal town, it is hardly surprising that the majority of these SRB parents have also been supportive (at least tacitly) of Berkeley’s historic voluntary desegregation program and doubtless voted against the 1993 voucher initiative. Operating in a haze of self-deception, they might easily fail to appreciate that, by denying less-advantaged parents economical access to private education, the SRB parents are essentially forcing others to bear the burden of their political beliefs for them. There is no hypocrisy here: For our SRB neighbors it is simply a matter of choice--a preference for the finest education that money can buy. They know not the harm they have done.

The syndrome is obvious, a pattern repeated in many towns across the country since 1968. As wealthier neighborhood children leave the public school, a significant percentage of local participation and interest in the operations of the school and PTA (especially as regards classroom volunteering, fund-raising, curriculum decisions and administrative policy) evaporates. In other words, the SRB parents become disengaged, not only from the local public institution, but in a broader sense from the neighborhood school’s function as a focus of community spirit, civic pride and the local culture itself.

For the remaining non-SRB parents, a feeling of betrayal soon sets in. It is as if their neighbors had deserted the ship, leaving them to shoulder alone the practical consequences of perhaps overly ambitious liberal philosophies: that the poorer children in the neighborhood become the sacrificial fodder in a two-tiered education system wherein, ironically, the upper middle class manages to segregate itself not only from other races, but even from the middle class. Thus are sown the seeds of social and economic privilege, from whose rank flowering comes the divisive harvest of bitterness, alienation and, ultimately, the flight of the average middle-class family.