Guest
Contributor
Cook
FROM
PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION
Teaching
Berkeley Schools about Respect for Law and Equal Rights
A school
choice sham...
[Cynthia D. Cook] 9/8/03
If you like oxymorons—dry ice, jumbo shrimp, airplane food—the
bureaucrats at the Berkeley Unified School District have come
up with one to savor: “controlled choice.” That’s
their Orwellian name for their policy of assigning students to
schools based not on parents’ preferences but on children’s
skin color.
The “controlled choice” system requires
parents to tell the district the race of each of their elementary-school
children. Parents may designate three schools as their top choices,
but the decision on where their kids go is ultimately a formulaic
process that is much more about control than choice. An informational
form explains: “The computer system will assign students
based on space available and other criteria, which may include
socio-economics and ethnicity . . . .
”The mention of “ethnicity” sounds
like an afterthought, but race is actually at the core of the
program. The district categorizes each elementary student as “black,” “white,” or “other” and
then attempts to balance each school’s racial makeup to
within 5% of the overall district population. If parents refuse
to identify the race of a child, the school district will do
it for them. When assignments are made, a family’s “choice” goes
out the window if the student’s color doesn’t fit
the preferred racial mix for a particular school.
The policy
is obnoxious on so many levels. It wastes money, for one thing.
All the clerical and computer time required to pigeonhole students
by race comes with a price tag, although the bureaucrats haven’t
revealed the exact cost. One would think they would see higher
and better uses for funds, considering that the district is as
much as $9 million dollars in debt, and firing teachers, increasing
class sizes, eliminating the music program, cutting library services,
and gutting transportation services, athletics and security services
have all been discussed.
There is
also the inconvenient fact that the program is blatantly illegal.
Proposition
209, enacted by
voters in 1996, amended the California Constitution to outlaw
race-based discrimination or preferences in public education.
Telling a family that their kids can’t go to a certain
school because they’re the wrong color and would upset
the racial balance is the very definition of racial discrimination.
In fact, a program very much along these lines—race-based
restrictions on student transfers in a Huntington Beach high
school district—has already been struck
down by a California
appellate court as a violation of Proposition 209.
Yet Berkeley
blithely goes on treating students as color-coded pawns.
“Until
I’m told by a higher authority not to, I’m going
to continue to use race as a criteria,” one school-board
member huffed. “Right-wing Nazis are finally after us,” the
same official said last month, after Pacific Legal Foundation
filed a lawsuit against “controlled choice.” Welcome
to Berkeley, where defending color-blind equal rights is equated
with an evil ideology that stood for just the opposite: making
race the ultimate arbiter of people’s fate.
The plaintiff
in PLF’s lawsuit is Lorenzo Avila, father of two Berkeley
elementary students. He is concerned that the district’s
fanatical pursuit of racial balancing is having a detrimental
effect on his children. He believes that school officials teach
kids harmful lessons when they essentially tell them that their
skin color is what defines them. He wants the focus to shift
to improving the education of all children in the school district
regardless of their race or the school they attend.
Such a shift
is also mandated by the California Constitution—a lesson
that’s sure to be administered to Berkeley before long
by a California court.Cynthia D. Cook is an attorney with Pacific
Legal Foundation.
copyright
Pacific Legal Foundation
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