Neighborhood Based Racial Balancing

As the Supreme Court of the United State weighs their decision in the racial integration cases arising out of Louisville and Seattle, a new idea for racially balancing our schools has recieved its first and most certainly not its last, hearing in a California State Court. Vikram David Amar's column at Findlaw.com presents the case, American Civil Rights Foundation(ACLF) v. Berkeley Unified School District and its future legal implications quite well. However, aside from the legal problems, there still seems to be the issue of the fact that we are still looking to race as a short hand for providing a diverse educational experience.

The Seattle and Louisville cases each involves a student assignment system in which the school district considers the race of individual students in determining which school each student attends. Although the Seattle and Louisville plans are not identical, both take into account a student's race as one of the "tie-breakers" to be used when more students than can be accommodated seek to attend a given school.

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The Berkeley plan that was upheld by a state court judge last week also seeks to integrate schools so that each one looks, racially speaking, somewhat like the district as a whole. And again, the stated justification is that students at all schools should benefit from the diversity found within the district as a whole. (emphasis added).

But Berkeley officials had one problem that Seattle and Louisville school administrators did not: In California, a state constitutional amendment adopted by the voters in 1996 (Proposition 209) forbids, among other things, all "discriminat[ion] against, or preferential treatment to, any individual on the basis of race. . . in the operation of public education."

Seemingly because of this state constitutional provision, Berkeley officials devised a plan that looks, when school assignments are made, not to the race of each individual student, but instead to the racial makeup of the neighborhood from which that student comes. Under the plan, the City is broken up into 445 separate "planning areas," each one between 4 and 8 city blocks in size. Every planning area is assigned, based in part on the percentage of students of color who live there, a "diversity" score of 1 to 3. The diversity score of a student's neighborhood, among other things, is then used to decide where that student should be sent to school.

So instead of looking at the race of single child, the school district created smaller districts and now look at a collection of students and their race. The idea being that looking at the race of a group versus a single individual would avoid the problems providing a racially diverse student population. But the school district is still looking at race of children in determinging school assignments with the goal of having a school reflect the relative racial balance of the city.

One small problem is that many people, especially me, are not convinced that a racially diverse student population improves the educational experience of children, particuarly younger children in elementary school. Once can make a case that students in high school and/or college might benefit from a more diverse student body and generally, the larger the school, the more likely you will find such a diverse student body.

But elemetary school is about basic skills, or should be, reading, writing, basic math, basic science. These basic skills are not culturally dependent, they are not or rather should not be influenced by a student's racial heritage. So the Bereley integration plan is simply a means to enforce some sort of liberal racial policy rather than a sound educational policy.