Sacrificing safety and education for diversity

How the Diversity Index is affecting San Francisco schoolchildren

By Michael Klein
From the May 2006 Print Edition

No longer are neighborhood public K-12 schools to be taken for granted. Within the San Francisco Unified School District, the Diversity Index is proving to be a highly controversial issue as a tool assigning students to various schools in the SFUSD.

As the Consent Decree regarding student school assignment in the SFUSD, instituted in 1983, is set to expire immediately following the 2005-2006 school year, officials and community members are deliberating about a new system that will ensure diversity and equity in education. In the midst of these deliberations, parents, students, and community members are voicing their approval of certain aspects of the program while expressing confusion and frustration over several other factors, particularly the Diversity Index and the loss of neighborhood schools.

Adopted 1983 by the SFUSD, the desegregation Consent Decree was the result of a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People suit brought to the federal courts regarding perceived segregation in San Francisco public schools.

The Consent Decree originally resulted in a student-assignment process that utilized a heavily race-based selection process, which was banned in a February 1999 federal court settlement to a lawsuit filed by several families from the heavily impacted Chinese-American community in 1994. Under that system, quotas were imposed on the number of seats allocated to any particular race per individual school; the maximum allowable ratio of one race/ethnicity at any given SFUSD school was set at 45 percent.

Today, the SFUSD utilizes the Diversity Index, initiated in 2001, along with student placement and outreach and recruitment programs to assign students to schools. Parents fill out an application containing their top seven choices of schools for their children to attend. The SFUSD maintains that parental choice and school capacity remain the foremost priorities, yet if demand exceeds supply of seats at a particular school the Diversity Index is used to assign student applicants to the school based on six socioeconomic factors: socioeconomic status, student’s prior academic achievement, mother’s educational background, student’s language status, quality of student’s prior school, and student’s home language.

In what has been called a confusing process by many, a computer program performs a randomized lottery drawing of student applicants and assigns the most diverse group of students to the school. If after a number of assignments the applicant pool for the school’s attendance area is depleted of what the program considers “diverse,” the computer will then pull students from outside the attendance area to complete the assignment process.

This system is in sharp contrast with the pre-2001 system, in which parents had the option of applying to their choices of alternative schools and other areas’ neighborhood schools, but every student was guaranteed a spot in his or her own neighborhood school. In its plans for this system, the school district “quietly stopped assigning students to neighborhood schools as it had always done,” according to a report in the November 4, 1999, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Previously, applying to a school was an option but not a requirement.”

Policy-makers within the school district and throughout the community are not without an impassioned perspective regarding the topics of education, academic performance, and school assignment. Lance Izumi, the Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco, feels that the Diversity Index model is the wrong answer for San Francisco public schools. “The only way to improve all poor performing schools is to improve teacher and curriculum quality,” says Izumi. “Not all kids can go to the highest performing schools.” Izumi mentions that parents are not only frustrated by the long distances their children have to travel to go to school in some instances, but also by the higher-cost private schools that certain parents reluctantly choose to send their children to in order to avoid the long-distance transportation.

Because of the controversial nature of the Diversity Index, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman in 2003 assembled a Community Advisory Board that would consult the community over a year’s time and suggest three policy solutions. Composed of a panel of community experts, the board met for 80 hours throughout 2004 and 2005 and came up with three viable options. The options, largely reflective of parent demands, reveal parents’ desires to have their children attend schools closer to home.

In a discussion with Commissioner Jill Wynns, one of the seven sitting SFUSD School Board members, the Patriot learned that a new student-assignment plan for the 2007-2008 school year remains in the concept stage and that race is indeed a consideration. Commissioner Wynns explained that two experts were hired by the board to propose a new student-assignment program. Deliberations on the options are currently taking place behind closed doors because, as Commissioner Wynns claimed, “we have already had threats to be sued for considering the use of race in the new student-assignment program.”

Wynns’ declaration that race is indeed a factor in ideas for the next plan comes despite the fact that recent court decisions have come down against the consideration of race, from the February 1999 settlement that banned the old quota system to a November 1999 rejection by U.S. District Judge William Orrick of an early draft of the Diversity Index on the basis that it relied partly on race. According to the Chronicle article, the draft Diversity Index had socioeconomic status, academic achievement, fluency in English, and race as its four criteria, and Orrick — whom the parties had settled before in February 1999 and who had issued the Consent Decree more than 20 years ago — rejected the plan because it used “unconstitutional racial classification.”

Wynns referred to the Community Advisory Board’s suggestions as “variations on the same” and said that the School Board’s discussion was “much more far-reaching” than that of the advisory board. Ultimately, remarked Wynns, the SFUSD will postpone implementing a new student-assignment policy if no decision is made by the end of the school year. In that case, the current system would simply continue into the next year.

Parents are not taking the SFUSD student-assignment policies lightly. Following Ackerman’s resignation last year, many Chinese-American parents from the Sunset and Richmond Districts who opposed the Diversity Index rejoiced after years of elevating protest. Many Chinese-American and white families in these two neighborhoods on the western side of the city oppose the current school-assignment system because it denies some of their children access to neighborhood schools, including the Sunset’s Lincoln High School and the Richmond’s Washington High School.

A resident of the Sunset District and parent of three children, LaPriel Rossi has experienced the effects of the Diversity Index firsthand. The SFUSD is assigning her son Rick to Mission High School, which is several miles from the neighborhood Lincoln High School. Lincoln is Rossi’s second choice school for Rick, behind Lowell High, an alternative school that requires an additional application. Rossi’s two older children had been automatically assigned to Lincoln, before the current system had been implemented.

Not only is Rossi concerned that in an emergency the distance to Mission would be a serious problem, she is also frustrated at having to apply to a private Catholic high school in order to avoid having to send Rick all the way to Mission in the fall. Thus, Rossi would have to pay taxes funding public schools while sending her child to private school to avoid the student-assignment process. “The district is crazy to send Rick to Mission,” says Rossi. “The school system is a mess.” Other parents are just as frustrated at the confusion of the school policy, explains Rossi: “No one is really happy.”

According to the records of the Community Advisory Board meetings, parents favor sending their children to neighborhood schools with certainty. Despite these findings, the School Board would rather deliberate its own research and implement a policy that legally considers race. As the SFUSD develops the new student-assignment policy, parents, students, and community members continue to plead for a “common-sense” solution that improves all schools and keeps students close to their homes.

Alisa Farenzena contributed to this report.

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