Long School Commutes Anger S.F. Asians

Les Ho is 13 now, old enough to know that he had plenty of reasons to fail. Instead, the boy who grew up speaking Chinese, the son of a single, immigrant father, mastered the routine of public education, often slogging through three hours of homework a night. He will begin high school this fall with a tidy transcript of A’s and Bs and aspirations of becoming a doctor.

Then he will begin a new routine.

Denied admission to one of the city’s best schools, just blocks from his home on the west side of San Francisco, Les will rise early. He’ll dash off, catch the N Bus, then the 28, then the 30--an hour’s commute to an inferior school across town where he’s been enrolled by a computer.

He is the future, many Asian Americans fear, of public education in San Francisco. Often by design, but this spring because of a computer glitch too, the city school district is sending scores of students away from their schools of choice and across town to campuses that they deem inferior.

The shift has rekindled charges that Asian Americans, the majority group at many top schools, are forced to shoulder the weight of integrating and strengthening the city’s troubled public schools. Asian Americans have renewed charges that they are victims of their own academic success.

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Proposal Raises Fears

And now a self-styled firebrand on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has supercharged the debate by raising the possibility of splitting the city school district in half. The proposal has set the city abuzz with fears that Supervisor Leland Yee and his supporters are attempting to create two separate and unequal school districts--in loose terms, one for Asians and whites, the other for blacks and Latinos.

Yee, a shoot-from-the-lip child psychologist who emigrated from China at age 3, says he’s merely trying to reduce red tape and make one of the largest school districts in California more responsive to parents and children.

Suddenly, though, this Democrat and child of ‘60s protest is fending off charges that his district breakup proposal may cripple the long struggle to integrate schools.

“This would mean disaster for just about everybody,” said Michael Harris, assistant director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, a nonprofit law firm that has operated in the Bay Area for 30 years. “It just strikes me as being extraordinarily unfair.”

Yee insists that he’s simply trying to represent the interests of his constituents in a middle- and upper-middle-class district on the west side of San Francisco. The region, near Golden Gate Park, is known as the Sunset and is populated largely by Asian American families.

San Francisco educators, he said, don’t like to be second-guessed--and have made him the target of unfair criticism since this spring, when he first hinted at the possibility of splitting up the school district.

“It’s the institution,” Yee said of the school system, sounding more like the UC Berkeley student he once was than the vote-hungry politician he’s accused of becoming. “Whenever there is any attack on that institution, they get their dander up, and they will distort and do what they need to do to protect themselves.”

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Yee has tapped into a deep bed of resentment among Asian Americans in the fierce debate over how to properly shepherd one of the state’s most diverse school districts.

In March, a computer program apparently botched its enrollment program, sending hundreds of children either to the wrong school or to no school at all. Many Asian American parents remain convinced that their children made up the bulk of those affected by the glitch.

To Asians and Pacific Islanders, who make up 35% of San Francisco and 50% of the school district, it was a slap in the face. Reaction to the glitch rapidly ballooned into full-fledged panic.

One mother told community leader Jane Kwong that she was considering committing suicide--thereby cashing in on a life insurance policy that could go toward private school tuition for her child, who didn’t get into his neighborhood school.

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Parents Are Suspicious

Many Asian American parents believe the school district is shuffling their children around to boost test scores at bad schools and make the district eligible for more grant money. School administrators deny that.

“This system punishes people who work hard, and they don’t realize how many real lives are being affected,” Kwong said.

Yee quickly stepped into the fray. He has asked the city attorney’s office to study the legal possibilities of not only splitting the school district in half, but of allowing the city to take over the school system.

Yee says nothing less than the survival of the public education system is at stake.

“There were days when parents would just suck it up and send their child to whatever school they were told,” he said. “Now you have better-educated parents with a little moxie, who say: ‘If you don’t give me what I want, I will take my kid, I will work seven days a week, and by golly I will get the best education available. And that’s in a private school.’ ”

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The ruckus is the latest chapter in San Francisco’s long debate over how much weight should be placed on ethnicity when determining where children should go to school.

Despite its liberal reputation, San Francisco was no different from most other cities across the country 25 years ago when it came to segregation. Its best schools were typically left for white students.

A 1978 lawsuit by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People forced a court decree that instituted busing and overhauled staffs at poorly performing schools, which had been largely attended by black students.

The district also put in place a racial quota system, capping any one ethnic group at either 40% or 45% of a student body, depending on the school. That system, initially, was praised by civil rights organizations as promoting diversity.

But by the mid-1990s, the glow of the court victory had faded. Latino and African American students were still dropping out at alarming rates.

Asian Americans became the majority in many schools, as many whites began moving to the suburbs or placing their children in private schools.

But because of the quotas, some Asian Americans were having trouble getting into their neighborhood schools. At the prestigious Lowell High School, Chinese Americans became a dominant majority of the student body. To maintain the balance mandated by the NAACP consent decree, officials required Chinese Americans to score higher on standardized tests than other ethnic groups to gain admission to Lowell.

In 1999, Chinese American families filed a lawsuit claiming that racial balancing violated their rights. San Francisco agreed to stop using race to place students in classrooms. Instead of quotas, school administrators began relying on other factors to place students, including test scores and a broad definition of “merit”--community service, family income and “ability to overcome hardship.”

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Yee has not heard back from the city attorney’s office about his school district splitting proposal and says it could be months before he does. Most analysts believe his plan is illegal.

Under state law, a new school district cannot be created if it will increase the cost of educating children or increase segregation. School administrators believe Yee’s proposal would fail on both counts. The plan would also have to be approved by the local and state boards of education, which is not likely.

Faced with outrage from across the school district--some from Asian American leaders--Yee seems to be backpedaling. Last month, he joined the rest of the Board of Supervisors to unanimously approve a resolution--entirely symbolic and nonbinding--calling for a single, unified school district.

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Political Motives Seen

Many remain confounded by Yee’s proposal and believe its roots lie in the murky pool of politics.

Yee recently won the Democratic primary for a state Assembly seat, and will compete against Republican Howard Epstein in the November general election. Yee’s prospective district would include much of the Sunset neighborhood--home of most of the parents upset over the treatment of Asian Americans--and many believe he is pandering for votes. Others feel Yee may be floating the proposal to draw attention to his would-be successor, another Chinese American politician, Ed Jew.

Meanwhile, amid all the contorted debate over race, diversity and politics in San Francisco are the underlying realities that have made the issue so emotional for many Asian Americans.

To John Ho, a plant operations engineer at an Oakland hospital, it’s about the fact that his son, Les, can’t get in to his neighborhood school. Can’t go to school with his friends. Won’t be home in time to help his father, who is disabled, around the house.

It’s about the fact that, right or wrong, Les believes he’s being targeted because of his ethnicity--that his hourlong commute isn’t designed to improve his education, but someone else’s.

“I work hard. I pay my taxes,” John Ho said. “I want to know why my kid can’t go to school in my neighborhood. That’s it.”

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Times staff writer Erin Chan contributed to this report.