Is desegregation dead?

San Francisco gives parents a say in where their children go to school — and that is leading to less diversity

Tables representing each of San Francisco’s public schools stretched throughout John O’Connell High School in the Mission one morning last fall. Thousands of parents quizzed principals and teachers to determine where their children should go to school.

This was the school district’s annual Public School Enrollment Fair, and despite the heaving crowds, Mark Sanchez was downright lonely.

About the project These days, parents’ wishes count for more than the racial mixing of schools. The Chronicle examined six decades of school enrollment and census data to find that once San Francisco’s race-based school assignment system ended in 2001, schools are more segregated than in the 1970s. This series examines what our public schools look like now and how that affects the education of our children, and asks the question: Is this good enough?

Every year, the tables for the city’s 106 public schools are arranged alphabetically. And every year, Sanchez, principal of the mostly Latino Cleveland Elementary, sits for hours with hardly anybody approaching him. To his left, white and Asian parents swarm the table for the coveted Clarendon Elementary, a school that is harder to get into than Harvard.

“Every year, it’s the same thing. Every year,” Sanchez said. “Our teachers are just as good as Clarendon’s. ... I call it the un-fair.”

The two schools’ tables demonstrate an alarming fact about the district as a whole: Now that parents have more say in their children’s education than they have in decades, San Francisco’s public schools are increasingly segregated. A months-long Chronicle review found that the district, which for decades has tried to ensure that homogeneous neighborhoods don’t lead to homogeneous schools, is failing to create schools that are racially mixed.

Like most public school districts around the country, San Francisco Unified has shifted away from a student assignment system that tries to ensure racially mixed schools and toward one that lets parents choose where to send their children.

Diversity in San Francisco schools, 2013-14 Data from schools-687390.silk.co

But in one of the nation’s most liberal cities, where people say they prize diversity, parents mostly choose schools where the other children look like their own. That has led to one-third of the district’s elementary schools becoming racially isolated, composed of at least 60 percent of students of one race.

But perhaps the biggest surprise is that most people in this progressive bastion — district officials, principals and parents — seem resigned to resegregation as the new reality.

The public schools and the nerve-racking lottery system — in which parents list their preferred schools in order and computer-generated assignments are mailed two months later — are often blamed for helping to drive families out of San Francisco. Just 13.4 percent of the city’s residents are younger than 18, the smallest percentage of any major city in the country. And San Francisco’s wealth and longtime Catholic tradition mean that about 30 percent of children who do live in the city attend private and parochial schools.

Diversity and integration are rarely cited as top factors in choosing a public school. Instead, district surveys of parents show the safety of a school’s neighborhood, the quality of its staff and its reputation are paramount.

The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education outlawed segregated public schools, saying separate was inherently unequal. But many children in San Francisco’s public schools are once again being educated separately — though not because of any official decree. The question is whether they’re being educated equally.

A look inside Cleveland and Clarendon — 4 miles, yet a world apart — shows the schools have some important qualities in common: mostly happy parents and children, good teachers, strong principals and a focus on academic achievement.

But there are also many stark differences.

Poverty and language Cleveland’s students are almost entirely poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, Latino and learning English. They mostly live in the school’s Excelsior neighborhood. Few of their parents went to college, and they mostly work in blue-collar jobs or stay home to raise their children. They are unable to contribute much money to their children’s education. Clarendon’s students are far more likely to be white or Asian, and far less likely to be poor or learning English. They come from around the city, and many of their parents drive them miles to the school on the west side of Twin Peaks. The parents are mostly professionals, and they raise $400,000 a year to supplement their children’s already premier education. The Academic Performance Index is no longer used by the state to signify school achievement, but many parents still use it to determine which schools are best. In 2013, Clarendon scored 956 on a scale of 1 to 1,000, with 800 considered excellent. Cleveland reached 708. School board member Rachel Norton said this kind of division makes her “incredibly sad,” but that it’s the natural result of parental choice. “I don’t know how as a policymaker to encourage people to make different choices,” she said. “That is what is going to have to happen.” Satisfied parents Sanchez doesn’t bother scheduling tours of Cleveland Elementary anymore. Like his table at the annual enrollment fair, nobody ever comes. But with 360 students, his school is full of families who want to be there. Eighty-three percent of those students are Latino, and there is a smattering of Asian and black students, and two white children. Ninety-five percent of Cleveland’s students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Seventy-three percent of Cleveland’s students are learning English. Almost every Cleveland parent The Chronicle asked said he or she requested Cleveland because it’s close to home. Many said they didn’t bother touring other schools, attending the enrollment fair or giving much thought to the annual lottery.

“I don’t know how as a policymaker to encourage people to make different choices. That is what is going to have to happen.” Rachel Norton, San Francisco

school board member

Sanchez said the lack of diversity at Cleveland actually makes his job easier.

“The more homogeneous your population is, the easier it is to run it — the expectations of the families are very similar,” he said, noting there aren’t many discipline problems at his school.

That’s a far different attitude than the one Sanchez had 10 years ago as a lefty firebrand on the school board. At the time, the seven members were grappling with how to remake the student assignment system, and Sanchez wanted to use race as a tiebreaker when two students were vying for the same spot and to give public housing residents priority.

He didn’t succeed — and he’s long abandoned that fight.

“I’ve raised the white flag, so to speak,” he said. “There’s a patina of people wanting diversity, but when the rubber hits the road, they’re going to make the best decisions for their family. I don’t think most families actually want it.”

Families flee

Sanchez’s thinking is now fairly common among San Francisco school officials, who know the district began hemorrhaging students when it required them to mix with children of other races.

In the late 1960s, there were more than 90,000 students in San Francisco public schools. In 1969, a black father named David Johnson sued the district for creating a racially segregated system in which black students totaled more than 65 percent at 20 elementary schools and nearly the entire enrollment at 10 of those. Back then, 24.4 percent of city residents were younger than 18 — nearly twice the percentage now.

A federal judge ordered desegregation, and in 1971 San Francisco put children on buses that crisscrossed the city so they could be in multiracial schools.

The plan almost immediately ended racial isolation — but it also helped drive families out of the district and into the suburbs or into private schools. Many Chinese families resisted integration, boycotting district public schools and creating their own private “freedom schools” for their children instead.

From the 1960s to 1983, the school district enrollment plunged by 32,000 students.

Vying factions of parents filed lawsuits, and the district tried several different school assignment methods. A federal judge oversaw those efforts from 1983 to 2005, but eventually gave up and called the district’s attempts at diversification a failure. This handed control of the assignment system back to the school district.

The current system, which gives some priority to students if they live near a school, started in 2011. The result: 61 percent got their top choice for this fall’s enrollment, and 85 percent got one of the choices on their list. Last year, those figures were 59 and 82 percent, respectively.

In 2014, there were 57,620 students — the figure has held fairly steady for the past few years after decades of dropping enrollment.

But the schools are — once again — segregating.