School Beat: Building Integrated Schools

At the end of last year, the legal agreement (the “Consent Decree”) that was the formal impetus behind the development of the Diversity Index expired, despite the fact that by some measures we are further away from meeting the goals of racial integration and closing the achievement gap. While the legal imperative is gone for the moment, the Board of Education, San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) administrators and many in the general community recognize the need to create schools that mirror the makeup of our city.

Integrating schools is a goal our nation has been struggling with for decades. Our commitment to it has been uncertain, as with all of our societal efforts to address the outcomes of slavery and continued discrimination in all forms. Brown vs. the Board of Education is the landmark 1954 decision outlawing “separate but equal” schools that most of us associate with desegregation. But, it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s when several other Supreme Court decisions were handed down providing more specific requirements and oversight that desegregation began in earnest.

A concise history of those efforts was recently published by the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University, which has focused a significant amount of its research energy on analyzing issues of poverty and race in the realm of public education. In their 2005 publication geared towards lay community members, “Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration” (http://tinyurl.com/mgtoe), the authors examine not only the history of desegregation efforts, but the disturbing trend towards resegregation, all in the effort to aid communities in implementing voluntary integration programs.

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