Dana Goldstein

But a recent proposal to restore some of that idealism by balancing the number of low-income children enrolled in schools across Howard County, including those in Columbia, has led to bitter divisions. Protesters in matching T-shirts have thronged school board meetings. Thousands of letters and emails opposing the redistricting plan, some of them overtly racist, have poured in to policymakers. One high school student made a death threat against the superintendent of schools, Michael J. Martirano.

The plan, announced by Martirano in August, would transfer 7,400 of the district’s 58,000 students to different schools in an effort to chip away at an uncomfortable truth: Some of the county’s campuses have become havens for rich students, while others serve large numbers of children whose families are struggling.

Martirano’s plan, which he called Equity in Action, would also alter the racial makeup of some schools, given that the majority of poor students in the county are black or Hispanic.

A growing body of research suggests that bringing students of disparate races and social classes together can boost children’s test scores and help them develop empathy. This year, all the leading Democratic presidential candidates have proposed desegregation strategies, a seismic shift after decades in which politicians from both parties played down the impact of the racial and class segregation that persists in American education.

Howard County is one of many school districts, from Dallas to New York City to San Francisco, now grappling with the challenges of integration. The virulent opposition in an area that its founder once declared to be “color blind” shows that the issue remains deeply divisive among liberals when it comes to their own children.

That there is a racial dynamic to the struggle in Columbia is undeniable. It is mostly white and Asian parents who are protesting the plan. Black and Hispanic children are more likely to be concentrated in schools with large numbers of poor students.

One piece of hate mail opposing the proposal said, “Blacks destroy school systems and schools.” Another said, “Certain families and communities do not have strong values in healthy family structure, high expectation on education, or firm beliefs in raising kids with good characters.”

But a group that has organized much of the opposition, Howard County Families for Education Improvement, said the racism and classism of those letters had nothing to do with its stance against the redistricting effort, which the Board of Education will vote on this month.

The protesters acknowledged that they did not want their own children bused to schools farther from home. But they preferred to talk about other people’s children — those with less advantage — who they believed would suffer under the plan.

Longer commutes to school, they argued, would mean less time for students to do homework and to sleep. Some children would be severed from friends they had made in earlier grades. Low-income parents with inflexible jobs would be hit the hardest, and would not be able to get involved in their children’s schools.

“I know for a fact that none of the folks I’ve met in opposition at all would be characterized as racist, and in fact, my motivation is the exact opposite,” said Hemant Sharma, a pediatrician, father and representative of the opposition group.

“The children who will be harmed most disproportionately are those in greatest need,” he added.

Fighting Stereotypes

Many of the protesters’ children are now assigned to attend River Hill High School, where fewer than 5% of current students are from low-income families, according to district data. Under the proposal, they would be bused, as soon as next August, to Wilde Lake High School, where 46% of current students’ families are low-income.

Poverty rates at more than half of the district’s 77 schools would be shifted closer to the districtwide rate of 22.5% under the plan, which would also alleviate overcrowding on some campuses. The average bus ride for students throughout the county would increase by 2 miles each way, said Brian Bassett, a district spokesman.

On a recent afternoon, six Wilde Lake students gathered in the parking lot of a shopping center near the school, outside an organic supermarket and a Starbucks.

Some of the students had seen parents from other neighborhoods marching nearby, demanding that their own children not attend Wilde Lake. They had heard about the racist letters.

“I feel sorry for the people who think like that,” said Alisa Drake, 16.

The theater at Wilde Lake was named after Jim Rouse, the developer who created the city of Columbia in the 1960s out of 14,000 acres of farmland. He intended it to be an ideally integrated community, and the first baby born to a Columbia family, in 1967, was biracial, with one black and one white parent. The child was a poignant symbol of the community’s professed values.

In more recent decades, development in Howard County expanded westward, and newer housing developments did not include many affordable homes. Central Columbia, which includes Wilde Lake, is denser and has different demographics than outlying areas of the county. At Wilde Lake High School, 45% of students are black and 13% are Hispanic, while at River Hill High School in nearby Clarksville, 7% of students are black and fewer than 5% are Hispanic.

Many of the Wilde Lake students agreed with Alisa: They had heard bad things said about their school, things that they, too, had sometimes believed before they enrolled.

Alisa rattled off the stereotypes: “It’s a ghetto school. The test scores are not good. They’re all good at sports because they are black.”

Wilde Lake offers 25 Advanced Placement classes, including multivariate calculus, French and studio art. Graduates land at a range of colleges, students said, from Howard Community College to the honors program at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University.

Average standardized test scores are indeed lower at Wilde Lake than at River Hill — not surprising for a school where nearly half the students come from low-income families. But Alisa said she would not want to go anywhere else. Wilde Lake teachers made her, a black student, feel comfortable in her gifted and talented and AP classes, she said.

Alisa supports the redistricting proposal, which she said could help “change the narrative” about Wilde Lake and the students who go there.

Talking Points

The opposition group, Howard County Families for Education Improvement, has an approach that appears carefully crafted to distinguish itself from decades of past resistance to school desegregation plans.

A page on the group’s website — a page that was later hidden after local news coverage — advised opponents of the plan to be mindful of their talking points and slogans.

“I love my school” was acceptable. “I don’t want to go to (fill in the blank) school” was not.

A reference to a long bus ride was acceptable. Any reference to “forced busing,” the coded language used by opponents of desegregation efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, was not.

Sharma said the group’s members were listening to and learning from criticism, especially from the African American community.

“What I think is important is that we all recognize the historical context,” he said.

The son of immigrants from Guyana of Indian origin, Sharma, 44, grew up in Howard County. He acknowledged the national research on the benefits of socioeconomic integration, but he suggested that the studies might not apply to the county’s schools, where concentrations of poverty are not as extreme as in some other areas. He cited several studies on policies that he said would help low-income students more than desegregation would: pre-K, meditation, tutoring, school choice.

He argued that Asian Americans, a growing group in Howard County, had not been represented on a committee that helped the superintendent develop the redistricting plan. Local chapters of the Chinese-American Parenting Association and the Indian Origin Network oppose the proposal.

After a protest last month outside the Board of Education headquarters, parents streamed into the meeting room and stepped up one after another to the microphone. There had already been half a dozen similar meetings, with over 500 speakers, the overwhelming majority of them in opposition.

They were Democrats, they said, consultants to social justice nonprofits, teachers, veterans’ advocates.

They compared the freedom to choose a public school to the freedom to choose an abortion. If the redistricting plan moved forward, they said, students might die in car crashes driving to campuses farther away. They might turn to suicide because of the increased stress of longer travel times.

One speaker said the plan reminded her of the Communism her parents had fled in Romania.

During a break in the proceedings, one of the opponents, Ron Brade, said he had donated a brick to be placed under the flagpole at River Hill High School, with his youngest daughter’s name and graduation year, 2025, already inscribed on it.

“We consider ourselves a River Hill family,” he said.

Brade, who is black, acknowledged “the divisiveness this whole process has created.” Unlike some of his neighbors, he said that if his child had to be bused away from River Hill, he could get used to her attending Wilde Lake.

Second Thoughts

The strength of the opposition has caused some Wilde Lake families to question whether redistricting is a good idea, recalling the skepticism that communities of color sometimes have toward integration as white resistance persists over decades.

Amaiya Sancho, a Wilde Lake junior, had the sense that “a majority” of her classmates did not want River Hill students bused to Wilde Lake.

She wrestled with the pros and cons of the plan. “Diversity is something that is important to me,” she said. “But I don’t want people in our school who feel like they don’t want to be around a group of kids because of the way they look or how much money they have.”

The superintendent’s plan would lower the poverty rate in Wilde Lake’s student body to 38% from 46%.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, an expert on school segregation and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a public policy research organization, said that with poverty becoming more concentrated in Howard County, “any prudent school official would know that now is the time to intervene.”

In meetings last week, the Board of Education essentially restarted the planning process, and proposed alternatives to Martirano’s proposal, which now seems unlikely to pass as written. The school district declined to make the superintendent available for comment during the board’s deliberations.

The board is scheduled to vote on redistricting Nov. 21. The fight leading up to the vote has been a profound challenge for a diverse county that prides itself on its history of getting along. The bumpers of many local cars display a magnet with a long-running countywide motto, one that is frequently cited by both sides in the debate: “Choose civility.”

This article originally appeared in

Integration Frays Community Founded on Equity

COLUMBIA, Md. — The planned community of Columbia, southwest of Baltimore, has prided itself on its ethos of inclusion ever since it was founded more than half a century ago. Racially integrated. Affordable apartments near big homes. “The Next America” was its optimistic, harmonious motto.

Even though she is the only counselor for 650 children at Avondale-Logandale Elementary School, which serves preschool through eighth grade, Vaccarezza-Isla might also have to fill in as a substitute teacher — which has happened a half-dozen times this school year, before she went on strike last week with the Chicago Teachers Union.

“Kids are looking for me because they are having some sort of social emotional breakdown,” said Vaccarezza-Isla, 53, a 30-year veteran of Chicago Public Schools. “It hurts me that I can’t be there for them when they need me.”

The school walkouts that have spread across the country since early last year have rallied the public behind teachers. But high on the list of priorities in more recent protests, especially in large urban districts like Chicago, are demands for support staff focused on students’ well-being — counselors like Vaccarezza-Isla, nurses and psychologists.

These demands have risen as activists promote a broader mission for educators: a vision of schools as community centers that offer an array of health and social services to children, especially those from low-income families.

In Chicago, it has become clear that teacher pay is not the primary sticking point in the negotiations; after all, the city has already agreed to a raise. The Chicago Teachers Union is asking that the district enshrine in its contract a promise to hire more counselors, health workers and librarians, and to free them from tasks outside of their core duties. Those professionals are also members of the union.

Jackie Gilson, the sole school psychologist for 4,500 students at Lane Tech College Prep High School, a selective-admissions school in Chicago, said she did not expect her school to be fully staffed with mental health professionals anytime soon.

“But I am pleased that this time around, what’s front and center is the importance” of those supports for students, she said.

As Democratic presidential candidates like Sen. Elizabeth Warren join the picket line or publicly support the union’s demands, it is clear that powerful figures are paying attention too.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has promised to double the number of counselors, social workers, psychologists and nurses working inside schools. Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders have also proposed big staffing increases.

Those promises represent a political sea change. Ten or 15 years ago, it was not uncommon to hear in education reform circles — among both Republicans and Democrats — that educators were “making excuses” if they said children could not learn effectively when they were experiencing trouble at home, whether eviction, neighborhood violence or family mental illness.

Those sorts of attitudes are less common today. The get-tough education policies of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama eras, which held schools and teachers accountable for student test scores, did not always produce the soaring student achievement that reformers promised. And new research on “adverse childhood experiences” — which can range from parental divorce to sexual abuse to lack of food — has demonstrated the long-lasting impact of childhood trauma, in school and into adult life.

In this climate, teachers’ unions have renewed a century-old call for schools to provide health and social services on-site that can free classroom teachers to focus on academics.

That vision is sometimes called “common good bargaining,” in that it prioritizes benefits for students and their families alongside the bread-and-butter benefits that teachers’ unions still demand, like higher pay and bigger pensions.

The approach has shown some results. A teacher strike in Oakland, California, ended in March with a raise in addition to smaller caseloads for counselors and school psychologists. When Los Angeles teachers went on strike for a week in January, they walked away with a promise from the district to hire more nurses, counselors and librarians.

So far, the LA Unified School District has hired 45 of the 150 nurses required by the deal, according to a district spokeswoman. Pay remains a challenge. The starting salary for nurses in LA public schools is around $55,000, while hospitals can offer up to $100,000, with the opportunity to earn overtime.

Stephanie Yellin-Mednick, a nurse at the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies in LA, argued that it could still make financial sense for a nurse to work in a public school, given the benefits of summer recesses, pensions and health insurance without paycheck contributions.

She said that over the course of her 37-year career, she had seen growing numbers of students dealing with asthma, diabetes, obesity, allergies, depression and anxiety.

Only 39% of U.S. schools employ full-time nurses, according to a 2018 study. A benefit of the LA strike, Yellin-Mednick said, was that it got the word out that while there may be a nurse’s office at a school, it is not always staffed by a nurse. Some nurses in the district are responsible for multiple schools, traveling throughout the week. At any given time, a secretary may be sitting in a nurse’s office, unsure of how to handle health issues.

“They send more kids home; we get them back to class faster,” Yellin-Mednick said. “We’re able to do an assessment and figure out symptoms and what is going on, or get them to a doctor quicker. Also, they can’t fake with us.”

Walkouts may have won modest staffing increases, but they have done little to move the needle on the deep-seated budgetary constraints that make it difficult for school districts to attract health and counseling professionals. At the ballot box, voters often reject efforts to increase taxes to fund public education.

Daniel DiSalvo, a political scientist at the City College of New York and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said school districts and city officials had avoided making difficult financial choices.

“Helping poor kids with the social services they need is an important goal,” he said, but pension and retiree health care costs are “crowding out what we could do.”

“Lamentably, I don’t see why my point of view isn’t more bipartisan,” he added.

Fiscal priorities aside, the workloads for school professionals far exceed what health and social service groups recommend. Counselors, for example, had an average caseload of 464 students during the 2015-16 school year. The American School Counselor Association recommends 250.

Vaccarezza-Isla, the counselor in Chicago responsible for 650 students, said that with a smaller caseload she could focus more on issues such as bullying and disrespectful play — “learning to be a good citizen.”

“We’re responsible for so much more every single year,” she said. “They’re burning us out.”

It's More Than Pay: Striking Teachers Demand Counselors and Nurses

In a typical week, Adrienne Vaccarezza-Isla, a school counselor in Chicago, might help a dozen eighth graders apply to high schools across the city. Or try to convince a mother that her daughter, who had seen her get shot years earlier, should join a group for students dealing with trauma. Or work with sixth and seventh graders on time management.

To help pay for that research, billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick are set to announce Thursday the second-largest donation ever to a U.S. university: $750 million to the California Institute of Technology for environmental study, much of it focused on technological solutions to combat climate change.

The Resnicks own the Wonderful Co., whose brands include Fiji Water, Pom Wonderful, Wonderful Pistachios and Teleflora, the flower delivery service. Their businesses are large consumers of water and plastic, and have at times been criticized by environmentalists.

The donation comes less than a week after millions of young people took to the streets in climate strikes across the globe, demanding faster action to address the warming planet. Climate change is also a growing focus in the Democratic presidential primary.

But Stewart Resnick, who described himself as a moderate who currently leans Democratic, said he did not see the donation as political. He said he and his wife were committing money to protect future generations — including their own children and grandchildren — and because they had seen the devastating effect of climate change in their own business, growing fruits and nuts.

“No one likes to deal with something that is unpleasant if they can kick it down the road,” Stewart Resnick said. But “no experts are saying take your time. It’s happening now.”

The money will be used to build a research center and to support a broad range of projects. Among them are attempts to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the ocean; capture and reuse rainfall; make plants more resistant to drought; and create plastics that are easier to recycle, according to Thomas F. Rosenbaum, president of Caltech.

The Resnicks have been active philanthropists in California’s Central Valley, especially in providing aid to the families of their employees. They have founded a charter school and health clinics, distributed college scholarships and given to cultural institutions.

But the Resnicks’ business practices have sometimes come under fire from environmental activists.

The bottled water industry is not considered sustainable given the plastic waste it produces and the energy used to ship water long distances across the world, often to consumers who have access to free, safe water just by turning on a tap.

The Wonderful Co. also grows and sells pistachios and almonds, which are especially water-hungry crops. A Mother Jones investigation in 2016 found that the Resnicks’ businesses were California’s largest consumers of water during a time of drought.

Stewart Resnick responded to those critiques by saying large-scale farming was more efficient and less wasteful. “You can’t grow healthy food without water,” he said. “We use that water to create crops that create food and jobs for people.”

Research funded by the Caltech donation could make global agriculture more sustainable, he added. In a sense, the gift — the largest since Michael Bloomberg gave $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University in November — could go toward mitigating some of the very problems the Resnicks’ companies are accused of perpetuating.

“If we had an alternative to plastic we would use it,” Stewart Resnick said of his bottled water business — a problem Caltech researchers may try to solve. He said Fiji Water had committed to using 100% recycled plastic by 2025.

The Resnicks previously contributed nearly $38 million to Caltech, the university said. About $100 million of the new $750 million donation will go toward construction of a building called the Resnick Sustainability Resource Center. An additional $250 million will finance research immediately, while $400 million will be placed into the university’s endowment for future environmental research.

The scholars funded by the Resnicks will retain complete independence over their work, said Rosenbaum, the Caltech president.

The federal government spent about $9 billion on the research, development and use of clean energy technology in 2017, according to the Government Accountability Office.

David Hart, director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy at George Mason University, said private donations could be most helpful in finding real-world applications for new technologies — ones that can make daily activities, like farming or using air conditioning, less damaging to the climate.

Donors should “foster new ideas that could turn into companies,” Hart said. “Ultimately, we need clean energy to be really cheap and really easy to use, and help people live lives they want to live.”

Caltech Gets $750 Million Toward Climate Research

It will take huge efforts, according to experts, to avert disasters related to climate change. Commitments from reluctant leaders to reform the global economy. Shifts in the daily routines of citizens. And research from the world’s greatest minds — lots of it.

Those are some of the lesson plans suggested in a draft of California’s newly proposed ethnic studies curriculum for K-12 public schools. The documents have led to bitter debate in recent weeks over whether they veer into left-wing propaganda, and whether they are inclusive enough of Jews and other ethnic groups. Now, amid a growing outcry, even progressive policymakers in the state are promising significant revisions.

The materials are unapologetically activist — and jargony. They ask students to “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression.” A goal, the draft states, is to “connect ourselves to past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice.”

Many educators and policymakers across the country have been pushing for instructional materials that confront race in America, citing instances of racist violence and the divisive and inflammatory rhetoric ricocheting in politics, on social media and beyond. California is one of the first three states, alongside Oregon and Vermont, to forge ahead this year with creating K-12 materials in ethnic studies.

The debate in California highlights some of the difficult questions that educators will face: Which groups, and whose histories, should be included? Is the purpose to create young, left-leaning activists, or to give students access to a broad range of opinions? And are teachers, the majority of whom are white, ready to teach a discipline that is unfamiliar to many of them?

“We’re fighting for the history we don’t see,” said Jorge Pacheco Jr., a member of the committee that wrote the draft and an ethnic studies teacher in the Mountain View Whisman School District.

The California course materials focus on people of color, such as African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, Central American immigrants and Pacific Islanders. Much of the material is uncontroversial, including lessons that ask students to examine a 1943 real estate deed restricting occupancy to white tenants, or to learn about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

But after California released the draft of the materials for public comment in June, some Jewish legislators and organizations complained that anti-Semitism was not an area of emphasis, while the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel came up repeatedly. Armenian, Greek, Hindu and Korean organizations later joined the Jewish groups in calling for revisions.

Shereen Bhalla, director of education for the Hindu American Foundation, said the curriculum should include information on the contributions Indian Americans have made to the United States, and on the discrimination they have faced through immigration restrictions and hate crimes.

It did not help that some of the terms used throughout the more than 300 pages of documents — “hxrstory, “cisheteropatriarchy,” “accompliceship” — were inscrutable to many in Sacramento and beyond.

The documents are “progressive to the point of self-parody,” Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, a Republican, said. “Ethnic studies is a serious topic and should be treated as such, not as an opportunity to infuse classrooms with ideology.”

About a fifth of the state’s high schools currently offer an ethnic studies class, according to the California Department of Education.

Faith Palileo, 18, said that before she took ethnic studies at Balboa High School in San Francisco, she would often cut class. She considered school a chore, filled with textbook-driven lessons that were irrelevant to her life.

That changed, she said, when she enrolled in American history and ethnic studies classes taught by Nikhil Laud, one of the leaders of San Francisco’s program, which is seen as a model by many across the state.

She and her classmates made posters, featuring their own photographs, on which they wrote down and countered the racial and ethnic stereotypes they had faced. They watched “13th,” a documentary by Ava DuVernay about the links between mass incarceration and slavery, and read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”

“What was so mind-blowing to me was all throughout my education, especially in history classes, it was very Eurocentric,” said Palileo, who is Filipino American. “Folks of color were included but were always oppressed.”

The 2016 law that led to the California course materials, which will be optional for schools to use, did not precisely define ethnic studies, leaving much of the work to a committee of teachers and professors appointed by a state curriculum board. Members of that committee said they had taken their cues from the way ethnic studies is taught at the college level, where the discipline has traditionally encompassed the study of four groups: African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans.

The draft falls short, said Assemblyman Jose Medina, a Democrat and former ethnic studies teacher. He has introduced a bill to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement but said he now supported slowing down the process, in part to make the materials more inclusive.

“The assumption that ethnic studies is only about people of color is a mistake,” he said.

The ethnic studies laws in Oregon and Vermont include the study of ethnic minorities, but also other marginalized “social” groups. The Vermont law mentions “groups that have been historically subject to persecution or genocide,” and both states specifically include people of “Middle Eastern descent.”

A July draft of the Oregon standards provided to The New York Times by the state’s Department of Education mentioned anti-Semitism but not Islamophobia. Amit Kobrowski, a state social sciences specialist, said the document would be revised after public feedback, and would not be fully implemented until the 2026-27 school year.

Ethnic studies was born of protests and activism at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s. Students of color demanded that universities update their course offerings to include the histories and perspectives of nonwhite groups.

The goal of the California model curriculum was to “honor ethnic studies as the academic field it is and honor students as young intellectuals” able to grasp complex concepts and language, said R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, a chair of the committee that wrote the draft and an ethnic studies teacher in the Los Angeles public school system.

The curriculum goes beyond ethnicity to talk about gender, class and many other forms of identity.

According to a glossary included with the documents, “hxrstory,” pronounced “herstory,” is history written from a gender-inclusive perspective. “Cisheteropatriarchy” is a system of power based on the dominance of straight men who are not transgender. “Accompliceship” is the process of building relationships grounded in trust and accountability with marginalized people and groups.

The public school student body of California is much more diverse than the teacher corps that would be tasked with adapting college-level concepts for the K-12 classroom. More than three-quarters of California students are nonwhite, but 62% of their teachers are white.

But the area of the draft curriculum that proved most divisive is how it treats Palestinians and Jews. Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center in San Francisco, said that for too long, Arab American issues had received short shrift in the curriculum.

Ethnic studies highlights activism against oppression, which is one reason the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement should be included, she said.

“You can’t talk about the Palestinian people without talking about the struggle against apartheid,” she said.

The California Legislative Jewish Caucus wrote a letter saying the draft lacks “meaningful discussion of anti-Semitism,” “singles out Israel for condemnation” and “denigrates Jews” using a narrative that “echoes the propaganda of the Nazi regime.”

The letter cites translated song lyrics included in one of the model lesson plans, in which a hip-hop artist raps, in Arabic, “For every free political prisoner, an Israeli colony is expanded. For each greeting, a thousand houses were demolished. They use the press so they can manufacture.”

The reference to the press, the letter says, is “a classic antisemitic trope about Jewish control of the media.”

Committee members, some of whom have received hate mail since the documents were posted online, said they were committed to fighting anti-Semitism, and were shocked by the responses from some Jewish organizations. They pointed out that Jewish studies is not usually included under the ethnic studies umbrella, and that California law already requires instruction on the Holocaust and genocide.

At least one Jewish organization, the Bay Area chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, has released a statement in support of the curriculum materials.

The state Board of Education has distanced itself from the documents and promised revisions. On Wednesday, the elected state superintendent, Tony Thurmond, a Democrat, said the curriculum should go beyond the four groups traditionally included in college ethnic studies departments, to include Jews and others.

The backlash has some proponents of ethnic studies worried about losing momentum. They cite research showing that ethnic studies classes in San Francisco public schools helped students improve their attendance and grades.

But Medina, the Democratic assemblyman, said, “It is more important to me that we get it right than we do it quickly.”

When he taught ethnic studies classes in Riverside, east of Los Angeles, his goal was not to create activists, he added. “My goal as a teacher was to leave students who could think for themselves.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/us/california-ethnic-studies.html" id="9d2eef00-3aab-35df-a337-bf4b07f6347c">The New York Times</a>.

Push for Ethnic Studies in Schools Faces a Quandary: Whose Stories to Tell

Discuss a recent instance of police brutality in your community. Read op-eds arguing for and against legal status for unauthorized immigrants. Compare and contrast border conditions in the Palestinian territories and Mexico.

A new report from UCLA and Penn State outlines the changes in school segregation since the landmark Supreme Court ruling named after Oliver Brown, a black father who sued to enroll his daughter, Linda, in an all-white elementary school blocks from their home in Topeka, Kansas.

The court’s unanimous 1954 ruling declared separate educational facilities “inherently unequal.” But the case is one of several major civil rights rulings, alongside those on voting rights and housing discrimination, that have been substantially weakened by more recent decisions.

Today, the decreasing white share of the public school population across the country may lead some to believe that schools are becoming more integrated. But the reverse is true, according to the report. The percentage of intensely segregated schools, defined as those where less than 10% of the student body is white, tripled between 1988 and 2016, from 6 to 18%.

In “a heightened period of racial conflict in our public life,” the report warns, deepening school segregation by race and class “are very high-stakes trends threatening the future.”

Liberal States Fight Severe Segregation

White students now account for less than half the nation’s public school students, and Latinos are the most deeply segregated racial group in schools, according to the researchers.

While segregation was once most severe in the former states of the Confederacy, in 2016 it was in four liberal states — New York, California, Maryland and Illinois — that black children were most likely to attend intensely segregated schools. Latinos were most likely to attend intensely segregated schools in California, New York, Texas and New Jersey.

Nationwide, 42% of Latino students and 40% of black students attended schools where less than 10% of their peers were white in 2016. Those numbers have been rising since 1988.

Statistics like these are no surprise after decades of court rulings that released school districts from desegregation orders, and there is no consensus among education advocates about how to respond. Some are urging broad new public policy efforts to integrate schools, while others call that goal unrealistic and even a distraction from improving the schools that currently enroll large numbers of nonwhite and low-income children.

There were some bright spots, the researchers noted. In the Midwest, the share of black children attending intensely segregated schools has steadily decreased since 2001.

‘ Not a Black and White District Anymore.’

With a growing population of Latino and Asian schoolchildren, segregation looks a lot different today than it did in the 1950s. Some superintendents and policymakers may believe, “We’re not a black and white district anymore, so we need to move beyond desegregation,” said Erica Frankenberg, a professor of education at Penn State and an author of the report.

Instead, she added, they should ask, “What does it mean to desegregate when we have four racial groups, and some of these racial groups also have tremendous variety within them? What does that look like?”

High-poverty, racially segregated schools typically have fewer experienced teachers, advanced courses and extracurricular opportunities. A large body of research shows that nonwhite and low-income students who attend integrated schools perform better academically, and also see long-term benefits such as higher incomes and lower rates of incarceration.

White students who attend more integrated schools are not hurt academically, and may benefit from exposure to classmates who better represent the nation’s diversity. In 2016, 48% of public school students were white, 26% were Latino, 15% were black and 6% were Asian.

According to the new report, the average white student in 2016 attended a school that was 69% white; the average Latino student attended a school that was 55% Latino; the average black student attended a school that was 47% black; and the average Asian student attended a school that was 24% Asian.

Persistent Segregation in the Suburbs

Of particular concern to the researchers were the suburbs of large cities, because demographic change there has been so rapid. Between 2006 and 2016, the proportion of white public school enrollment in those suburbs fell by 10 percentage points, to 47%. That diversity was not reflected in schools.

The typical suburban black or Latino child attended a school in 2016 that was three-quarters nonwhite, while the typical suburban white child attended a school that was two-thirds white.

Because so few suburbs, especially outside the South, have a history of purposeful policymaking around school integration, “Doing nothing means accepting resegregation,” the report notes.

White children who lived in large cities experienced more diversity, attending schools that were, on average, 55% nonwhite. But even there, white parents were clustering their children in a subset of schools; overall, white students made up only 20% of the students in those districts.

Is Integration the Best Solution?

The authors of the report, Frankenberg, Jongyeon Ee, Jennifer Ayscue and Gary Orfield, suggest several policy remedies, such as using magnet programs and busing to draw students voluntarily to schools outside their neighborhoods and districts. They urge more federal and philanthropic investment in local experiments to increase integration, and they ask schools, particularly those in formerly white-majority suburbs, to diversify their staffs and add programming meant to serve students of color.

Still, given the long history of white resistance to desegregation efforts, and the sense of exclusion some students of color feel in majority-white schools, some education advocates remain skeptical of relying too heavily on integration as a strategy for improving educational outcomes.

“There are two ways to experience school integration policy in America: On paper and in real life,” said Derrell Bradford, executive vice president of 50CAN, an organization that supports charter schools and school choice. The goal, he said, should be to “build schools that people are attracted to, regardless of who goes to them.”

He continued, “I think schools are an important place to bring us together. But they are not the only place where the work of integrating society must happen, and in many respects, schools are not equipped to deal with the history of this nation which has separated us in the first place.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/us/threatening-the-future-the-high-stakes-of-deepening-school-segregation.html" id="37b272b5-1b09-3466-a7d5-905ccb66dea6">The New York Times</a>.

The Persistent Threat of School Segregation

The 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education approaches on May 17, but fights over school segregation, rather than decreasing, are becoming more common. Cities like New York and San Francisco are debating how to assign students to schools in ways that foster classroom diversity, and school secession movements — in which parents seek to form their own, majority-white districts — are accelerating.

Liberal States Suffer Some of the Most Severe Segregation

White students now account for less than half of the nation’s public school students, and Latinos are the most deeply segregated racial group in schools, according to the researchers.

‘We’re Not a Black and White District Anymore.’

'Threatening the Future': The High Stakes of Deepening School Segregation

San Francisco allows parents to apply to any elementary school in the district, having done away with traditional school zoning 18 years ago in an effort to desegregate its classrooms. Give parents more choices, the thinking was, and low-income and working-class students of color like Cinthya would fill more seats at the city’s most coveted schools.

But last month, Cinthya’s parents, who are Hispanic, found out she had been admitted to their second-to-last choice, a school where less than a third of students met standards on state reading and math tests last year. Only 3% were white.

Results like these have soured many on the city’s school enrollment plan, which is known here as “the lottery” and was once considered a national model.

“Our current system is broken,” said Stevon Cook, president of the district Board of Education, which, late last year, passed a resolution to overhaul the process. “We’ve inadvertently made the schools more segregated.”

For decades, the education mantra from presidential campaign trails to local school board elections has been the same: Your ZIP code should not determine the quality of your school. Few cities have gone further in trying to make that ideal a reality than San Francisco.

But as education leaders from New York to Dallas to San Antonio vow to integrate schools, and as presidential candidates like Joe Biden are being asked to answer for their records on school segregation, San Francisco’s ambitious plan offers a cautionary tale.

Parental choice has not been the leveler of educational opportunity it was made out to be. Affluent parents are able to take advantage of the system in ways low-income parents cannot, or they opt out of public schools altogether. What happened in San Francisco suggests that without remedies like wide-scale busing, or school zones drawn deliberately to integrate, school desegregation will remain out of reach.

After families submit their kindergarten applications, ranking as many school choices as they like across the city, a computer algorithm makes assignments. Those from neighborhoods where students have scored low on state tests get first dibs at their top-ranked programs. Each child gets an address-based priority at one school, but it is considered only after those with test-score priority are offered seats.

The district had previously used busing to try to desegregate schools, under a 1983 agreement with the NAACP. But a group of Chinese-American families sued in the 1990s, saying their children were being denied seats at elite campuses. The city settled the case by devising a choice-based enrollment process meant to be race-neutral but still achieve integration.

Research shows that desegregation can drive learning gains for students of all races. And on paper, San Francisco’s system showed promise. In recent years, it succeeded in breaking up racial concentrations at a handful of schools.

But overall, many parents and city leaders consider it a disappointment. The district’s schools were more racially segregated in 2015 than they were in 1990, even though the city’s neighborhoods have become more integrated, research shows. That pattern holds true in many of the nation’s largest cities, according to an analysis by Ryan W. Coughlan, an assistant professor of sociology at Guttman Community College in New York.

Segregation looks different in San Francisco than in other parts of the country. The district is one of the most diverse in the nation: 35% of students are Asian, 27% are Hispanic, 15% are white and 7% are African-American. Schools here are not racially monolithic. But over the past several decades, white, Asian and Hispanic students, on average, have been clustered in schools with more children of their own races.

While black children were slightly less racially isolated in 2015 than in 1990, that was largely a result of their lower enrollment in the district, Coughlan said — a change driven by astronomical housing costs.

Even the school district has acknowledged that a system of geographically zoned schools would most likely create more racial integration than the current, choice-driven approach.

There are several reasons the system has not worked as intended. One is a lack of transportation. Fewer than 4,000 of the district’s 54,000 students ride a bus to school. The city’s busing program was reduced in 2010, during the last recession, and has not been restored.

Shurrin Zeng, vice chairwoman of the district’s English Learners Advisory Committee, said location had been the No. 1 factor in her decision to enroll her 10-year-old daughter in the school closest to their home, which is overwhelmingly Hispanic and Asian, and largely low-income. She is not completely happy with the school, but choice, she said, was not meaningful without “more convenient transportation” to ensure access.

And some parents may not have heard about better, far-flung schools. Not everyone has the time to navigate the complex process of researching, touring and ranking campuses. Families who want a different school from the one they are given can try their luck in three more lottery rounds, filing paperwork and managing waiting lists even past the start of the school year, in some cases.

School tours typically take place between 8 and 10 a.m. — prime commuting and work hours — and some of the most desired schools require parents to sign up weeks in advance.

At Rooftop Elementary in the Twin Peaks neighborhood — Canas and Ramirez’s first choice for Cinthya — a tour in December was dominated by professional-class parents with flexible schedules. They took in breathtaking views of the San Francisco Bay and strolled past a climbing wall and gardening plots. Jonathan and Sofia Perel, an IT director and a consultant to nonprofits, said they had visited 18 schools.

In contrast, Kenika Eison, a medical assistant, had to show up at schools unannounced during off hours, hoping a principal would come out to talk to her. She ended up enrolling her son Aaden in a charter school close to the clinic where she works, partly because of the school’s good reputation, but also because she would not need to arrange child care in the mornings.

Since the district uses neighborhood test scores to determine admissions preferences, some students from low-income and working-class families in San Francisco, like Cinthya, do not get an advantage, while a handful of wealthier students, whose parents happen to live in areas with historically lower test scores, do.

The system benefits gentrifiers, in a city where public housing can be tucked beneath hills studded with multimillion-dollar Victorians.

Anne Zimmerman, a stay-at-home parent and writer, had what others call, sometimes derisively, the “golden ticket.” She and her husband, who works in advertising, moved into their two-bedroom rental in the Potrero Hill neighborhood a decade ago, without realizing their address granted them priority in the school lottery.

This year, their daughter, Vera, was offered admission to their first-choice kindergarten, one of the most requested in the city. The school is 37% white and 21% low-income. Districtwide, 15% of students are white and 55% are low-income.

“I feel so very conflicted” about getting an advantage, Zimmerman said. Both she and her husband are white. “The system was developed to equalize the playing field, and I don’t think it really has done it.”

Those who defend the current system point out that 79% of black parents, 79% of Filipino parents and 61% of Hispanic parents received their first-choice kindergarten for next fall, compared with 48% of white parents.

Rionda Batiste is a member of the district’s African-American Parent Advisory Council and a resident of the Bayview, a neighborhood with test-score priority in the lottery. She has been thrilled with the system, which allowed her to enroll two of her children in a school of her choice outside the neighborhood.

SAN FRANCISCO — Like many parents in San Francisco, Melvin Canas and Delfina Ramirez described applying to public kindergarten as a part-time job. They researched schools all over the city for their daughter, Cinthya; took unpaid hours off their jobs as cooks to tour more than a dozen; and ultimately ranked 15 of them on her application.

Dana Goldstein

Articles written by the author

Integration Frays Community Founded on Equity

It's More Than Pay: Striking Teachers Demand Counselors and Nurses

Caltech Gets $750 Million Toward Climate Research

Push for Ethnic Studies in Schools Faces a Quandary: Whose Stories to Tell

The Persistent Threat of School Segregation

'Threatening the Future': The High Stakes of Deepening School Segregation

San Francisco Had an Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation. It Made It Worse.

Schools Are Safer, Even if They Feel Less So

Unified Behind Teachers, Democrats Are Split on Charters

Democrats Are United on Teacher Strikes. But They're in a 'Gladiator Fight' Over Education.

The Fight to Keep Teachers in Tech Hubs From Being Priced Out

The Fight to Keep Teachers in Tech Hubs From Being Priced Out

Student debt facts: The average college senior owes $29,000

Is the U.S. a democracy? A social studies battle turns on the nation's values

Is the U.S. a democracy? A social studies battle turns on the nation's values

As college consulting expands, are high school counselors advocates or adversaries?

Why teacher strikes keep happening (and why there's no end in sight)

West Virginia teachers walk out (again) and score a win in hours