By TaRessa Stovall

Due to an innovative diversity effort that emphasizes where students come from rather than the color of their skin, most Berkeley, California, elementary schools are so well-integrated they may serve as a model for other schools around the nation.

That’s the conclusion of a new report released September 1 by researchers at the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses of the University of California.

A 2007 U.S. Supreme Court 5-4 decision that endorsed more diverse schools, but restricted assignments based on student race/ethnicity, has proven challenging for the nation’s public school districts’ integration efforts. The Supreme Court ruling grew from Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. I in Seattle; and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education in Louisville, Kentucky, in which parents sued the school districts, charging that diversity efforts were too heavily reliant upon race.

Fourth graders at John Muir Elementary School in Berkeley, California, connecting after a long summer, with parents and students milling around on the first day of school on September 2, 2009. Photo: Mark Coplan, Berkeley Unified School District.

Berkeley’s plan seeks to promote diversity in its schools by taking account of the demographics of the neighborhoods where students live, including parental education level; family income; and race and/or ethnicity. The plan was challenged by Ward Connerly’s on the grounds that its stated factors were simply a subtefuge for a race-based plan.  The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), along with a coalition of civil rights groups including the ACLU of Northern California, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and the ACLU of Southern California, supported a group of parents who intervened to protect the student assignment plan.  The Berkeley plan was subsequently upheld by the California Supreme court and the California Court of Appeals.

John Payton, LDF President and Director-Counsel, said the rulings were ”an important victory for those who understand the importance of a diverse learning environment and believe that opportunity should be equally afforded to all.”

LDF has worked to dismantle racial segregation and ensure equal educational opportunity in our nation’s schools for over six decades, representing African-American students in Brown v. Board of Education and numerous subsequent landmark school desegregation cases. Information about LDF’s school diversity work can be accessed on this website, including a manual for parents, educators and advocates entitled “Still Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration.” (PDF 3.35 MB).

The UC-Berkeley/UCLA study, “Integration Defended: Berkeley’s Unified’s Strategy to Maintain School Diversity,” declared, “Following the Supreme Court’s prohibition of popular forms of voluntary desegregation practices in the 2007 Parents Involved case, one possible option was that which Berkeley leaders devised as a remarkably original response to California’s Proposition 209 that prohibited racial preferences in government decision-making.”

“At a time when school districts across the country, as well as the Obama Administration, are wondering how they can achieve integrated schools while facing the obstacle course the Court has established, the successful experience in Berkeley deserves national attention,” the report stated.

The Berkeley Unified School District first began efforts to desegregate in the mid-1960s, and since then, Berkeley’s racial and ethnic population has become increasingly diverse, according to a district news release. By 2008, 30.5 percent of the students enrolled in Berkeley’s public schools were white, 25.8 percent were African American, 16.6 percent were Latino, 7.1 percent were Asian, and 18.7 percent either identified themselves in multiple categories or did not respond. To integrate the schools, officials had to overcome residential segregation that had become entrenched, the report’s authors said.

Key findings of the report include:

• The current student assignment plan produces substantial racial-ethnic diversity across the district’s elementary schools, but is not as effective as integrating schools by socioeconomic status.
• The district proactively engages in … practices to counteract the stratifying effect that educational choice policies often have … These practices include offering a simplified application process and ample opportunities to learn about the schools, and conducting outreach to the city’s low-income residents. In addition, the district monitors each school’s applicant pool diversity distribution to ensure enrollments will reflect the projected zone-wide diversity distribution and manages the wait lists in an equitable manner by applying the priority categories and considering diversity goals when offering students new assignments.
• The plan is successful I matching families with their choices: 76 percent of families received their first choice school or dual-immersion language program for 2008-2009 kindergarten placement.

“We believe that assigning students using a multi-factor approach enriches the educational experiences of all students, advances educational aspirations, enhances critical thinking skills, facilitates the equitable distribution of resources and encourages positive relationships across racial lines,”  reads a statement from the Berkeley Unified School District describing their integration goals, which were adopted in 2004.

The District factors in the parent educational level in the student assignment process, while seeking “to distribute educational ‘capital’ amongst the elementary schools and maximize the educational opportunities for all students,” the statement said.

Also considered: household income, recognizing that differing financial resources can contribute to unequal conditions and opportunities.

“Berkeley has had a succession of plans for four decades, showing a continuing commitment to avoiding the resegregation which has been so severe in the country, and particularly intense in California, during recent decades,” said Dr. Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor of education and co-director of the Civil Rights Project, which produced the Integration Defended report with the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at the University of California, Berkeley Law School, in the article, “Report Lauds ‘Model’ of School Diversity,” on DiverseEducation.com

The “critical distinction” in Berkeley’s approach is that it assigns “a diversity code to a planning area rather than ton an individual student, [which] sets Berkeley’s plan apart from the ones…struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court,” report co-author Erica Frankenberg, research and policy director for the Initiative on School Integration at the UCLA Civil Rights project said in the DiverseEducation.com article.

Berkeley created their plan in the late 1990s to promote diversity despite the limitations of Proposition 209, the state law which prohibited race, ethnicity or gender to be the sole determinant driving enrollment in public schools. Prop 9, led by University of California Regent Ward Connerly and opposed by affirmative action advocates, was voted into law on November 5, 1996, and amended the state constitution to forbid a focus on race, gender or ethnicity.

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline.