How Sacramento CA should integrate its segregated schools | The Sacramento Bee
California’s schools are among the most segregated in U.S. What can be done about it?
Before Brown v. Board of Education, there was Mendez v. Westminster.
In 1943, Orange County’s Westminster School District told Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez their children couldn’t attend their neighborhood school, but had to go further away to a segregated “Mexican school.”
“It was a terrible little shack,” the couple’s daughter Sylvia Mendez said in a 2002 PBS segment.
“A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage,” wrote presiding judge Paul J. McCormick.
The 1947 ruling prompted other districts to integrate Latino children, said legal scholar Philippa Strum, who wrote a book on the case. Soon after, state lawmakers repealed a law that allowed segregation of Asian and Native American children.
Flash forward to the present, and California schools are among the most segregated in the nation, according to a recent report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project research program. They’re more segregated than schools in the deep South, said Gary Orfield, co-director of the program.
Sacramento schools are no exception. Part of the blame lies with open enrollment policies.
In 1993, California passed what the New York Times at the time called “the most sweeping choice plan in the country.” Proponents said it would expand access to high-performing schools, and push other schools to become better.
Encina’s attendance zone contains most of the low-income neighborhoods in San Juan Unified School District, and some wealthier neighborhoods. Yet 96 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch because of their family’s income.
“That suggests an overwhelming majority of wealthy families living in the school’s attendance zone choose to send their kids elsewhere,” reports The Sacramento Bee’s Sawsan Morrar.
Under the district’s open enrollment policy, families in neighborhoods zoned for Title 1 schools, which have higher proportions of poor students, get priority to switch schools. If they do, they must supply their own transportation. Other districts have similar policies.
One can see the intent: Your neighborhood shouldn’t restrict your child’s academic opportunities. In practice, it plays out differently. Wealthier families, able to supply daily transportation to faraway schools, have an advantage over poorer families.
“The result is a campus confronting socioeconomic segregation and, despite what students describe as a nurturing environment and supportive teaching staff, struggling to serve a student body of refugees and children living in poverty,” writes Morrar.
Sacramento area schools are less integrated than their neighborhoods, according to an Urban Institute assessment of Census and national Department of Education Data.
Encina is an example of what that disparity looks like, and it’s not alone. Few families in Sacramento’s Curtis Park neighborhood send their kids to their neighborhood school, Bret Harte Elementary, part of Sacramento City Unified School District, according to The Bee.
Segregated schools lose “the ability to teach kids to live and work across those racial and class lines, which they have to do as adults,” Orfield told The Bee.
So, how can Sacramento solve the problem?
