WASHINGTON — As of this year, white students are no longer the majority in U.S. public schools for the first time ever. It’s a sign of things to come, to be sure. Families from all over the world are immigrating to the United States, and the white share of the population as a whole is declining.
It’s also a reminder of the past. For decades, a combination of discriminatory housing and zoning rules and underinvestment by government in certain schools and districts has meant that even where white children go to public schools, they still attend different schools than do children of color.
A fascinating new demographic analysis of San Francisco’s school system reveals these facts in detail. White children account for 29 percent of the city’s population age 19 or younger, but only 13 percent of students in public schools. Many of the rest are presumably attending private school.
There are more white children in elementary schools, but as they grow older, they leave the public schools. Their parents may be putting them in private high schools or moving into suburban school districts, writes Rosie Cima of Priceonomics, the data-gathering firm in San Francisco that conducted the analysis using Census estimates and records from the San Francisco Unified School District.
Not only that, but the district’s school “lottery,” intended partly to promote diversity in classrooms, has apparently had the effect of concentrating white students in the best elementary schools, as more educated and more affluent families navigate the system of rules for assigning students to schools with greater success.
“The story of our efforts at student assignment is the story of unintended consequences,” Rachel Norton, who sits on the district’s board, told Jeremy Adam Smith of San Francisco Public Press earlier this year. Segregation in the schools has increased under the district’s new system, which went into effect in 2011.
“In some ways, it’s a perfect mismatch of intent and results,” Norton said.
In fairness, some San Francisco families might prefer to send their kids to more segregated schools. Smith reports that many Chinese parents want their children to go to elementary schools where Mandarin is taught. Likewise, immigrants from Mexico might feel more comfortable sending their children to school where the other parents speak Spanish as well.
In other cases, though, parents might not realize that their choices are putting their children at a disadvantage by sending them to schools where test scores are lower. If they decide they want to try to get their kid into one of the sought-after classrooms at a school like Gratton Elementary, where most students are white, the district’s application process can be an obstacle. Some parents might not be familiar with the rules, and even if they are, figuring how to rank their choices on the application takes time for planning, research and visiting schools.
In San Francisco, it looks as though giving parents some measure of choice in where their children go to school has led to segregation in the schools, which in the long term can only result in gross educational inequities.
San Francisco’s famously restrictive zoning rules have raised housing prices, making truly diverse neighborhood schools unimaginable today. In short, promoting diverse classrooms while allowing students choices means addressing the national trends of rising inequality of income and residential segregation, which is a lot to ask of a school board.
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