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Diversity's Future?
Socioeconomic Criteria, Not Race, Used To Desegregate San Francisco Schools
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 18, 2002; Page A01
SAN FRANCISCO -- In their search for a way to promote integration without assigning children to schools by race, officials here have devised what could be the future of American desegregation: a complicated plan that relies on a broad array of socioeconomic factors instead of skin color.
Before they enroll their children in school next fall, parents will for the first time answer a list of questions, including whether they are on welfare, live in public housing, graduated from high school or speak English at home. Their responses will contribute to a socioeconomic ranking that will be the major factor in determining which schools their children will attend.
The complex ranking system, called the "diversity index," is the centerpiece of San Francisco's latest attempt to preserve the heterogeneity of the city's public schools, which is clearly threatened, and boost student achievement. School officials came up with the plan after a 1999 federal court settlement barred them from using race as a factor in school assignments in most circumstances, but required them to maintain desegregated schools.
Officials turned to socioeconomics in the hope of balancing the glaring inequities among the city's 112 public schools without stoking the resentment often prompted by racially based desegregation plans.
"We had a handful of good schools where all the active parents were going," said Hydra Mendoza, a parent leader who promotes the diversity index. "It's a cycle and it's not equitable."
San Francisco is among a small but growing number of communities whose school systems are trying the new approach to break up concentrations of poverty and salvage a semblance of integration. In December, Cambridge, Mass., joined districts such as Wake County, N.C.; Manchester, Conn.; and La Crosse, Wis., that are pursuing the idea.
It has engendered little opposition, though some critics point out that it is no substitute for racial integration.
"Race isn't class and class isn't race," said Gary Orfield, a professor of education and social policy at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. "They overlap substantially but imperfectly."
The idea of schools balanced by class is nearly as old as public schools themselves.
Horace Mann, the 19th century legislator and lawyer considered the father of public education, envisioned public schools as "the great equalizer" of the classes -- a goal few would say has been reached.
Rather than trying to fulfill Mann's vision, the current push toward economic integration is driven by a series of court decisions that struck down school busing and other racial integration strategies. But it also reflects a growing belief that income is a stronger predictor of academic achievement than race.
"One of the reasons to be supportive of economic integration is you will get, as a byproduct, some measure of racial integration as well, just given the association between race and class," said Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a New York-based research organization, and author of a book that touts the virtues of economic integration.
"Also, as a matter of improving academic achievement, having socioeconomic integration is more significant than having racial integration. Motivated students and active parents track more by class than race."
The 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study also found that middle-income parents were four times more likely than low-income parents to be PTA members and twice as likely to have contacted their children's schools about academic matters.
A 1997 study of New York state high school graduation statistics shows that students receiving free and reduced-price lunches were half as likely as black students to receive the state's more prestigious Regents diploma. Poor students are also much more likely to drop out of school than students of any race, research shows.
A growing number of districts are increasing school choice by relaxing rules that required students to attend neighborhood schools, beefing up magnet schools and creating more charter schools. The result, when coupled with housing segregated by race and class, is often schools that are poorly integrated.
"Often what is going on in school districts is essentially two programs -- one for students in more well-off areas and another in the poorer sections," said Edwin Darden, senior staff attorney for the National School Boards Association. "There are advantages for all children in a mixed socioeconomic situation."
San Francisco's public school enrollment is among the most diverse in the country, with a mix of Chinese, Latinos, African Americans, whites and others -- none of whom constitutes a majority of the system's 60,000 students.
But that balance is rarely evident at the city's best schools -- where Chinese and white students are typically overrepresented. The system's worst schools tend to have higher concentrations of black and Latino students.
In the past, black and Latino students could get into some of the city's best schools with lower grades than many Chinese and white students.
"When we were looking at race, there were all kinds of strategies going on. There were a whole lot of people walking around saying they were one-third Native American, if they thought that would help their child get into a school," said Mendoza, who has a 6-year-old daughter in a racially mixed Spanish-immersion school.
Under the San Francisco plan, students are allowed to make five school choices.
If a sibling attends a school, or a school provides a program suited to a student's specific educational need, the student will be assigned there.
If a student is applying to a school in his neighborhood, the student will be sent there as long as there are fewer applicants than seats. But when demand outstrips space in a school, students will be assigned where a computer program determines they will most contribute to diversity.
If a school has a lot of middle-class students, for example, a poorer student is more likely to be enrolled. Similarly, if many of the mothers of a school's students are high school graduates, that increases the enrollment chances of a student whose mother is not a high school graduate.
"We don't want diversity for diversity's sake," said Don Barfield, the Bay Area educational consultant who devised the diversity index. "The idea is to raise achievement."
The plan has generally been embraced by parents in San Francisco, as it has been elsewhere. "There certainly has not been a groundswell of opposition to this," said Jill Wynns, president of San Francisco's Board of Education.
"It's a noble attempt to maintain diversity," said Caroline Grannan, a freelance writer with two children in Lakeshore, one of the city's most coveted elementary schools. "But the success of this is going to depend a lot on other aspects of the school system. There is more they can do to tell parents about viable educational options and to reach out to poor communities to let people know about their choices."
The idea has raised few objections among advocacy groups and others who oppose race-based programs.
"I think it is hard to generalize about these plans," said Terence J. Pell, chief executive of the Center for Individual Rights, a Washington, D.C.-based legal foundation that has challenged race-based affirmative action programs across the country. "Unless there is some evidence of race being a motivation or a hidden factor, legally we see nothing wrong with this approach."
Some analysts warn, however, that the strategy offers a weak alternative to racial integration.
"The only reason many districts are pursuing this is because the courts are becoming so reactionary about enforcing desegregation plans," said Orfield, the Harvard professor.
He notes that an earlier plan that focused on economics rather than race had little effect on racial imbalances at Lowell High School, widely regarded as San Francisco's best.
For more than a decade, Lowell, which admits most students based on a combination of grades and test scores, operated under the terms of a court-ordered desegregation plan, which limited the school to 40 percent of its enrollment from any one race or ethnic group.
A group of Chinese activists challenged that stipulation in court, saying it effectively set a quota on Chinese students, who were disproportionately high-achieving, in favor of black and Hispanic students.
The activists won, eliminating the racial and ethnic enrollment cap.
In an attempt to keep some diversity at the school, officials moved toward giving some advantage to students based on class, but that allowed racial disparities to grow.
San Francisco officials are more hopeful about the diversity index, because it goes much further than previous efforts to balance schools by class.
Beyond its limitations in addressing racial imbalances, it is clear that socioeconomic integration can work only in public school systems which have a sizable number of middle-class students. In hard-pressed urban and rural school systems, a disproportionate share of public school students is poor.
"You have to look at the demographic profile of your district," said Darden, the school boards association attorney. "It certainly isn't something that is going to work everywhere."
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