I have become increasingly convinced that a good deal of the conflict over equality comes from confusion over what it means, over what it is we want when we want equality. As usual, this confusion is nicely revealed in California, in two otherwise unrelated events (actually, one case and one condition) at opposite ends of the state.
The California Supreme Court just invalidated the school transfer policy of the Huntington Beach school district, in Orange County. That policy was designed to maintain an appropriate racial balance. As the appellate court said in holding that this plan violated the California constitution (thanks to Proposition 209),
To prevent an “inappropriate” racial and ethnic balance, the District restricts transfers to and from Westminster High School. If you are white and you live inside the high school’s attendance area, you cannot transfer out unless another white student is willing to transfer in and take your place. If you are non-white and you live outside the high school’s attendance area, you cannot transfer in unless another non-white student is willing to transfer out and you take that student’s place. [The appellate opinion can be found here. The Calif. Supreme Court just upheld that judgment, but without issuing an opinion. An article discussing the Supreme Court’s decision, from which I quote below, can be found here.]
This opinion is not so noteworthy in itself (except for its demonstration of the teeth in Prop. 209); most other courts have reached the same conclusion. (See, for example, Eisenberg v. Montgomery County [Md.]) What I found revealingly noteworthy, however, was the comment of Joanne Lowe, one of the (losing) lawyers for the state dept. of education. “We don’t want [Westminster High School] to become any more racially isolated than it already is,” she said. “To allow that would be to violate the rights of kids to get an equal education” (My emphasis; quoted in Los Angeles Times article linked above.) At the time, according to the appellate court opinion, the school was 45% Asian American (of whom nearly all were Vietnamese), 30.5% Hispanic, and 16% white.
It is undisputed that the invalidated transfer policy was designed to prevent whites from leaving. But it is less than clear how their voluntarily leaving would violate anyone’s right to an equal education. A more symmetrical racial balance may be more desirable than racial imbalance, but the school district and state argued not that racial balance was desirable but that its absence was a violation of rights. Indeed, they even argued, unsuccessfully, that “the transfer policy is required under the equal protection clause of the Constitution of the United States.”
Undefined though it is, this is a most peculiar and unappealing view of equality. The highly controversial efforts to bus students in order to achieve racial balance have been abandoned for a good while now, but many devotees of ethnic micromanagement obviously think it is acceptable, even mandatory, to forbid student movement in order to achieve racial balance. In suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, for example (not the Eisenberg case cited above), the school district attempted “to prevent two Asian American kindergartners from transferring to a one-of-a-kind French immersion school in Rockville because of their race.” (Washington Post, 11/15/1995, p. D1) There were too few Asian Americans in their base school, the school board argued, and hence letting them go would deprive the other kindergartners of the degree of diversity they required. Why don’t more liberals object to this as the grossest form of using people, as turning them into racially essential objects to satisfy the (amorphous and possibly non-existent) desires of others?
From the other end of California comes a most depressing article about Berkeley High School: “Top-Notch School Fails to Close ‘Achievement Gap’: Berkeley High tried to lift urban black and Latino pupils to the level of high-performing Asians and whites. But a sizable divide persists.” (Actually, the article comes from the Los Angeles Times, but Berkeley High School is in, er, Berkeley, in northern California.)
Here in one of the best-educated corners of America, this city’s sole public high school suffers a split personality: One exhibits a steady stream of National Merit Scholars, the other an undercurrent of failure….
Berkeley was one of the first high schools in the country to implement a plan to voluntarily desegregate, and its hallways teem with the children of liberal intellectuals. Yet the school has struggled, without much success, to close the so-called achievement gap separating white and Asian students from less well-prepared blacks and Latinos.
Oddly, Berkeley High is described as “among the nation’s most diverse high schools” when the more apt term would seem not to be diverse but racially balanced: it is 37% white, 32% black, 11% Latino, 9% Asian, and 11% multiethnic. Residence requirements were waived for heavily black nearby Richmond and Oakland, which partially explains why the racial mix at Berkeley High does not at all reflect the composition of Berkeley’s population, which is 59.2% white, 13.6% black, 16.4% Asian, and 9.7% Hispanic. (Census data on Berkeley can be found here.)
Again, what I find distinctive here is not the “Tale of Two Cities”-like division at Berkeley High, which except perhaps for its extremes is not unusual, but rather the goal and the analysis of the problems that reigns in the school system. In 1996 the school entered a partnership with neighboring UC Berkeley to analyze its “culture of education.”
Researchers found a campus with polarized academic cultures; one in which many black transfer students felt lost in a competitive sink-or-swim atmosphere with few role models and little guidance; and another with ambitious white students whose parents and teachers made sure they got the advanced placement classes they needed to graduate to the finest colleges.
The resulting four-year Diversity Report, released in 2000, concluded that Berkeley’s 3,200 students suffered “apartheid-like segregation.” Though white Berkeley students scored in the top 15th percentile nationally, blacks scored in the bottom 40th.
Just 3% of black and Latino students are enrolled in advanced placement classes, compared with 33% of whites. Black students also experienced much higher dropout and discipline rates, the report found.
Only people who know nothing of either apartheid or segregation could describe Berkeley High as suffering from “apartheid-like segregation.” Or, for that matter, think the problems fall under the rubric of “diversity.” But then, everything does.
One of the few bright spots in this dreary picture, in my opinion, is that the school board has not been successful in implementing its vision. Listen to school board president Shirley Issel:
In desegregating schools in 1968, we thought all we had to do was mix everybody up to assure equality. We were so naive. To achieve the dream of public education as the great equalizer, we have to work a lot harder than we thought. [Emphasis added]
In a school characterized by an enormous gap between significant numbers of students performing at the very top and at the very bottom, equalizing their performance — which, if words mean anything, means raising the worst and lowering the best — should be the last thing on anybody’s mind. Not surprisingly, that does not appear to be what black parents want. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “some minority parents say the school fails to aggressively challenge students of color and hold them to the same academic standards as others.”
Schools can never help us achieve equality so long as they are run by people with such warped notions of what equality is.
