S.F. Schools Seek Ethnic Balance Without Using Race

With educators across the nation watching, the city’s school district is struggling--unsuccessfully, so far--to create a school assignment formula that can maintain an ethnic balance in each school without using race as a criterion.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick has ordered district officials to submit a race-blind plan Friday for the 2000-2001 school year. In December, the judge rejected a proposed plan from the district because it still used race as a factor in deciding where new students are assigned.

Orrick said any use of race would be unconstitutional and violate a legal settlement reached between Chinese American parents and the district last spring to eliminate race from the assignment process.

The judge’s decision has added a layer of uncertainty to a process that many parents say they already find confusing and stressful.

“I’ve been getting a lot of phone calls from parents asking: ‘What does this mean for us?’ ” said Sandra Halladey, a founder of the San Francisco Chapter of Parents for Public Schools, a nationwide advocacy group for the public schools.

“It seems worse this year than usual, “ said Lee Ann Slaton, education coordinator at A Parents’ Place, a family resource facility offered by the city’s Jewish Community Center. “I do many, many workshops on choosing schools and it has been very difficult this year, because nobody really knows what is going on.”

In San Francisco, families must apply to attend the public school of their choice, and competition for the best schools is fierce.

District officials said they are advising parents to submit forms requesting particular schools by the Jan. 7 deadline. At some point, the forms will be fed into a computer that will make assignments based on an as-yet undetermined formula.

District officials argued in court last month that a temporary, race-blind plan they implemented in the wake of the spring settlement had “rapidly resegregated” some schools for the current school year, and that greater ethnic concentrations would occur in more schools if the district is barred from using race at all in school assignment.

Chinese Americans make up 28% of the school population and are the largest group in city schools, which are 21% Latino, 16% African American, 12% white, 12% other nonwhite and the rest Korean American, American Indian and Filipino American.

“We basically had our old school assignment plan minus race and ethnicity for 1999, and we could see how the incoming kindergarten classes in a number of schools was significantly more racially identifiable,” said Jenifer Hartman, special assistant to the superintendent.

According to district figures submitted to the court, the incoming class of Garfield Elementary School, in a heavily Chinese American neighborhood, jumped from 44% Chinese American in 1998, when the old desegregation formula was used, to 73% in 1999, when the temporary formula was used. The incoming class at Lowell High School, also in a heavily Chinese American neighborhood, went from 47% Chinese American in 1998 to 51% in 1999, and the incoming class at George W. Carver Elementary School, in a largely African American neighborhood, went from 53% African American in 1998 to 77% in 1999.

The figures, Hartman said, indicated that more parents simply began sending their children to neighborhood schools when assignment was not based on race. Even in a city as ethnically diverse as San Francisco, Hartman said, “we still have neighborhoods that are racially identifiable and isolated in some instances.”

“What is difficult and stressful is that in many ways, there is no way to please everyone and do what the courts have requested us to do,” Hartman said. If the district eliminates race from its formula, she said, it may have to limit parental choice and randomly reassign children to schools to achieve ethnic and racial balance.

Race-Based Plans Often Ruled Illegal

Across the nation, more and more judges have ruled that race-based assignment plans are unconstitutional. San Francisco is one of the first districts, however, to try to achieve ethnic balance in school assignments without using race as a criterion.

“They are really on the cutting edge,” said Richard Kahlenbring, a researcher with the Century Foundation, a liberal, nonprofit public policy research institution in Washington. “Districts across the country are wrestling with this issue of whether they can continue to use race in student assignment and, increasingly, the courts are saying that the circumstances under which one can use race are extremely narrow, basically only when you are remedying the lingering effects of past segregation.”

Other districts “are all trying to figure out ways to promote racial integration without the use of race,” said Kahlenbring, who has been working on a book in which he argues that the real issue driving school quality is the economic status of the students. “That’s why a lot of attention is being given to the San Francisco case.”

Other districts want to know, Kahlenbring said, whether it is possible to use other criteria, such as socioeconomic status or language spoken in the home, to achieve racial balance in the schools.

The January hearing is to decide which permanent assignment formula will replace a 1983 federal desegregation plan that governed San Francisco schools until last February. Under the old plan, no more than 45% of a single ethnic group could be represented at any one school, and each school had to have at least four ethnic groups represented.

Chinese American parents sued the district, arguing that the plan was unconstitutional because it discriminated against their children, limiting their numbers at Lowell High School, the city’s elite public high school, and other desirable schools.

Because each year so many academically qualified Chinese American students apply to Lowell, the district was requiring them to score higher on the entry exam than other ethnic groups.

Tony Lee, an attorney representing the parents, said district officials misinterpreted the agreement if they believed they could still use race in assigning students.

“Our interpretation of the settlement agreement has been that they cannot use race or ethnicity as a criterion,” he said. “The district cannot assign any particular student to a school, program or class on the basis of race or ethnicity.”

Lee said that even if using another formula--say, one based on socioeconomic status--fails to achieve ethnic balance, “our position is: Whatever problem the school district might see in that, the district cannot use race-based means to reduce this so-called resegregation. They can’t say: ‘Uh-oh, too many kids of Chinese descent are going to school X, so we are going to limit the numbers.’ ”

Hartman said that San Francisco’s ethnic mix prevents socioeconomic status alone from achieving ethnic balance in the schools.

“In many other cities, they may have just two primary ethnic groups and they are more highly correlated with socioeconomic status,” Hartman said. Here, “we have poor Chinese, poor African Americans, poor whites--we have poor and middle-class children in all ethnicities, so socioeconomic status just doesn’t serve as the proxy for race that we thought it would.”

Hartman said the district is determined to comply with the judge’s order, and officials are discussing other types of information they may legally gather on families to help achieve ethnic balance across the district. “But there aren’t too many stones we’ve left unturned,” she said.