Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
A court settlement ending the city's 16-year experiment in desegregation marks acceptance of California's new racial realities.
Feb 18, 1999 | Anyone trying to understand the ever-changing dynamics of race relations in California needed to look no further than a San Francisco courtroom Wednesday, where one of the nation's most ambitious, successful but ultimately disappointing experiments in school desegregation was scheduled to come to a dramatic end.
On one side, defending the embattled plan, was its architect, the NAACP, which had sued the San Francisco Unified School District on behalf of black students in 1983 and won a consent decree requiring a massive overhaul of the city's worst schools and a mandate that henceforth, no single racial group could make up more than 45 percent of any one school. On the other side were Chinese parents, several of them immigrants, who had sued the school district in 1994 after their children were turned away from popular public schools because they'd reached their "cap" on Chinese students. They had argued that such limits were a form of race discrimination.
On the bench sat William Orrick, a white judge from an old San Francisco family -- comparisons with Boston busing sponsor Judge Arthur Garrity were irresistible -- who had presided over the consent decree since its inception, regularly protecting it from legal challenges until finally allowing this one. Defending the agreement was a phalanx of lawyers and administrators from the school district, on behalf of Superintendent Waldemar Rojas, a combative New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent who had struggled energetically to protect a consent decree that was on a collision course with demography. Adopted when blacks and whites were San Francisco's two largest racial groups, for the last five years it has governed a district that was mainly Asian and Latino. But the decree brought $37 million in desegregation dollars into a fiscally strapped urban district, and Rojas had tried hard to keep it intact.
Until Tuesday, anyway, when lawyers for the Chinese plaintiffs revealed the district had agreed to a historic settlement that removed race as a criteria for admission to San Francisco schools. Wednesday the judge was supposed to make it official and announce the adoption of a new "race-neutral" enrollment plan that would mark the end of the district's two-decade experiment with desegregation.
I sat in the back of the courtroom, a white parent with an almost eccentric commitment to two goals: a good public education for my middle-class daughter and improved educational options for low-income children, especially African-Americans, who despite the consent decree still have the lowest achievement in the district. I had written about the consent decree and, most important, I had wrangled with it, jumping its many hurdles -- a grueling school search, a lottery and finally an appeals process, all governed by race -- to get my Irish-Jewish daughter into one of the best public schools in San Francisco, whose bustling multiethnic schoolyard looks like a postcard from the integrated future we all imagined in the 1960s. Having survived the school search with my social values and my daughter's educational future intact, I'd had the luxury of becoming a fan, if a reluctant and critical one, of the consent decree and the integration magic it worked on San Francisco schools, widely judged among the most racially mixed in the country. I had come to the courtroom to watch the controversial decree's demise. And although I understood that parents whose kids didn't get into that elite school, who weren't as fortunate or politically savvy as I, might not feel the same way, I was surprisingly saddened to see it go.
But the mood in the courtroom was anything but sad. It was, in fact, quietly jubilant. The Chinese parents who'd fought the decree for so long were barely able to contain their glee. Chinese was the dominant language in the back benches, and greetings of "Gung Hay Fat Choy" -- coincidentally, the agreement had been reached on the day the city celebrates Chinese New Year -- rang out over the whispers of lawyers. As we waited for Orrick to announce the settlement, I realized I was in the midst of a civil rights celebration I didn't feel a part of. We had moved into a new era of race relations, and I had been left behind.
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