California schools remain the most segregated, despite busing

By Vesta Kasayan, especially for CalMatters

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California has the most segregated school system in the continental United States. A UCLA Civil Rights Project report last fall found that share of “highly segregated” schools — those with more than 90% students of color — has quadrupled over the past three decades.

The gap shows up in college. Students at the most segregated high schools complete coursework required for UC or CSU at 25 percentage points lower than students in the least segregated schools.

I am a high school senior at Menlo-Atherton High and some of my classmates come from Atherton, the wealthiest zip code in California. Others came from East Palo Alto, where the only public high school posted some of the the lowest test scores in the state.

California is not blind to these divisions. It builds programs to deal with them. Most take the same form: move a few kids across school lines and leave the lines themselves untouched.

The problem is that the programs don’t work.

He is the oldest Tinsley Voluntary Transfer Programwhich resulted from a 1986 educational discrimination lawsuit settlement. It was the first interdistrict desegregation plan in California.

Each year, about 135 students of color from Ravenswood City School District in East Palo Alto win a lottery seat in an affluent neighborhood. Many of them graduate from my school. In four decades, the program has bused more than 5,200 children from Ravenswood. He brought two.

Lottery winners usually do well. But a 2011 Stanford dissertation compared winners to losers—families equally motivated—and found that all scored roughly the same in mathematics and English.

The area that lottery winners left behind paid the price. When the most engaged and well-off families leave an area, poverty is concentrated among the children who stay—and concentrated poverty is among the strongest predictors of academic performance.

Ravenswood has lost nearly half its student enrollment since 2008 and its share of students who are socioeconomic disadvantaged has jumped to 92%.

None of this is an accident. The limit on the number of school lottery winners is too small to require a change in district boundaries or how schools are funded. And the settlement’s other goals were vague enough quietly abandoned.

Margaret Tinsley, the East Palo Alto parent who sued to desegregate the districts and whose name is on the resulting program, recently ignored her.

“I can’t say I filed a lawsuit,” she said.

California put itself in that position. Courts once ordered racially segregated school districts to redraw boundary lines and bus children to achieve racial integration. But the backlash was fierce enough that in 1979 California voters amended the state constitution to ban mandatory busing.

Voluntarily transfer programs like Tinsley filled the gap. But they did not change the borders and asked almost nothing from the rich areas. Milwaukee and St. Louis also tried versions of the same fix. The racial lines between districts stubborn

Such optional desegregation tools didn’t just fail districts like Ravenswood; they favored wealthy areas that kept their tax base intact while taking on the appearance of integration.

The state knows there is danger. His election district law prohibits new ones transfers that “exacerbate racial segregation” or financially destabilize the neighborhoods students are leaving. But no agency measures existing desegregation programs against this standard. While voluntary transfers are the easy answer, redistricting — redrawing district lines — should never happen.

The District of Choice program expires in 2028 unless the Legislature renews it. Before doing so, lawmakers should order the Department of Education to audit every cross-district program against these two standards: Does it concentrate segregation? And does it bleed the rest of the area?

The answers should decide which programs remain. It is also likely to confirm what Gary Orfield, the UCLA report’s co-author, has spent years researching: integration only takes place when district lines, school funding and housing patterns change together.

Tinsley is a fix that failed. It let the state appear to be acting without changing anything.

This September, another round of East Palo Alto families will enter the lottery. Buses will still run one way and California will still call it the answer.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.