Daddy, Papa and Me

There is yet another case before the Supreme Court this week on race. This time it is to decide whether Seattle and Louisville are allowed to use the race of the student in that student’s placement in a public school. And from comments it seems that the court will bar public schools from doing so.

I attended Walter Reed/Lee elementary schools when Arlington county and Virginia finally got around to fully desegregating their schools. That desegration and busing experience changed my life. We now have a daughter entering kindergarten next year and are faced with choosing a school for her in a district, San Francisco Unified, that has faced this very issue (raced-based placement) and is facing it again. It will have a lot of impact on the school she attends and the experience she has.

You could say that history has come full-circle… or that nothing has changed.

As with many of my diaries, there is no answer explicitly given (though perhaps implicitly implied), just an experience because the political seems always personal to me and the personal political.

The Case

The case was brought forward by white parents in Seattle when their children didn’t get into their preferred school. The Seattle plan is thus:

“Seattle’s “open-choice” assignment plan lets students choose their preferred high school. For those schools where requests exceed space, officials give first priority to siblings of current students and then in some cases consider race.

The most recent rules call for race to serve as a tiebreaker in schools that are more than 65 percent white or 75 percent minority. Because of the litigation, the school district hasn’t used race in assigning students since 2002.”

From the looks of it, the case is dividing into easily-predicted sides (above linked article):

The four that support the cities’ plans:

“Inside the courtroom, Justice Stephen Breyer was one of four justices who defended the plans, saying they addressed what he called a “terrible problem.”

and

“Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens also signaled they likely will vote to uphold the plans.”

And the other side:

“Justice Anthony Kennedy, who looms as the reconstituted court’s swing vote on race questions, suggested the school districts were violating the Constitution’s equal protection clause. He joined Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Antonin Scalia in criticizing the plans.”

Of course that appears to be four to four… but there was Thomas:

“Justice Clarence Thomas, perhaps the court’s most ardent critic of affirmative action, was the only justice who didn’t ask questions. Thomas typically doesn’t ask questions during arguments.”

So it looks like we might predict the way the court will rule, but of course we won’t know exactly till the ruling comes sometime next year.

Me, Virginia and the Supreme Court
In 1954 the Supreme court explicitly outlawed racial segregation of public education facilities in Brown v. Board of Education. Soon after, the Virginia General Assembly passed a series of statues called the “Massive Resistance” to desegregation, which were finaly enshrined in the State’s constitution by 1956 (does this sound familiar to anyone?). “Massive Resistance” was soon ruled unconstitutional in 1959, the year I was born.. and it still took a decade to integrate Virginia schools.

My elementary school was integrated through court-ordered busing in my 2nd grade year…1966. (and I just found out that the reason I went to Lee elementary in 3rd grade…and returned to Reed in 4th.. was due to integration.. anyway…)

That changed my views and experience of ‘race’ for the rest of my life. I never saw ‘black’ and ‘white’ in the same way again and my view of what it meant to be ‘white’ changed forever. I count it as one of the experiences of my life that I am thankful to have had, very much so. I believe I’m a better person for it. That experience also affects my thoughts about how we want our daughter’s school to look.

Our daughter, San Francisco and the Supreme Court

So now the Supreme Court is revisiting the issue and their ruling will directly affect my daughter’s education.

Interestingly, San Francisco had a similar system to the Seattle system under review now and is considering returning to it in some form. This is from a recent San Francisco Chronicle article:

In 1983, as today, San Francisco’s schools were effectively segregated. The 1983 federal court order for the city mandated the use of race in assigning students to address the lack of diversity, saying no more than 45 percent of one race could make up the enrollment of any public school.

But in 1994, Chinese American families sued the district to eliminate the race factor, which they said kept their children out of preferred schools solely because of their race.

That case was settled in 1999, and the district created a complicated formula using family income and other factors to determine which students would be placed in the most popular schools. That system is still in place.

The San Francisco school board is carefully watching this case because it is also considering bring back race as a criteria. The court could rule race can be used, limited to Seattle and Louisville alone, or can’t be used at all.

We are watching it too. Our daughter enters kindergarden next year. In San Francisco’s current system, there are no neighborhood schools. You choose and apply to seven schools out of the nearly 70 elementary schools and through a complicated lottery system (family income, education level, distance, etc… but not race), you are assigned a school. It might be one of those seven (usually is), or it might not.

We are going through the process right now. We’ve chosen 10 schools and will narrow it to seven by the application deadline through school tours (I’ll report on our first two soon).

We have a number of criteria: focus (arts and sciences top the list), number of GLBT families and GLBT-friendly staff (not all SF schools are), achievment, distance, size, etc. Frankly, this is one of the strengths of the SF system. It creates choice. Schools focus on language immersion, science, arts, standards, etc. We have a lot of choice of what kind of school we want our daughter to go to. One of the main criterias for us is diversity.

Specifically, the balance of race. Between 1983 and 2000, SF schools were desegregated. The court mandated that no school exceed 45% of one ethnic group. After the court ruling that changed (from linked article above):

“Last year, in 49 of the district’s 104 schools, a single ethnic group exceeded 45 percent of overall enrollment; in 22 schools, more than 60 percent of students were of one race.

By comparison, in 1997, 27 schools exceeded the 45 percent cap, with only one school exceeding 50 percent enrollment by a single racial group.”

We eliminate from consideration ANY school that has more than 60% of a single ethnic group. Why? We are a transracial family. I of Anglo/German w/ some Native heritage, my partner of Anglo/Latino heritage and our daughter of mainly African descent. We are also same-sex parents.

There are a lot of reasons for that criteria we have set, but the main one is that we don’t want our daughter to stand out as the odd girl out any more than she has to. She already has two different race parents who are both male. If she goes to a school where _all kids are different_, then she will be in a school where _all kids are the same_, including herself. She won’t stand out as the different “black” kid, she won’t stand out as the kid with the “white” parents. Every kid will be different, so no kid will stand out. It’s the experience she now has in the school she’s in.

And also, we want her to learn that the _real_ world is one of many different types of people of different races, sexualities, ethnicities, languages, political persuasions, views, etc., to learn not to make judgements based on race or religion or ethnicity or whatever. To learn that many different viewpoints can come to the truth better than just a few.

This is getting more difficult in San Francisco as you see from the quote above.

We eliminated a lot of schools based on that criteria. We have eliminated some excellent schools. Still, there are a lot of excellent schools that meet that criteria, like Rooftop Elementary: 15% African-American, 28% Asian, 24% Latino, 24% white and the rest (11%) ‘multiple’, Native American and others, or New Traditions Elementary: 40% African-American, 26% white, 6% Latino, 14% Asian, 11% multiple, 3% others.

But a lot of schools are resegregating. And the trend is worsening. It might be one day most of our schools are segregated again. I know this will not good for mour choices.

If the court rules that such criteria based on race are unconstitutional, the SF will continue on the track it is going. I could only hope that enough parents _choose_ schools because of diversity and what it means for the education of their kids (interestingly, some of the best schools.. not all.. are also the most diverse in SF including the ones I mentioned above) and such schools will remain.

If they rule otherwise, I’m not sure how SF will change their system as they are considering doing now.

Either way, the Supreme court ruled over 50 years ago and it changed my educational experience. They’ll be ruling again, possibly changing our daughter’s educational experience.

It comes full circle doesn’t it?

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This entry was posted by Trey on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.