Posted on 10/05/2006 12:38:14 PM PDT by SmithL
Berkeley High School is considered one of the most diverse in the country, but for students reared in the city's public schools, a campus boasting ethnic richness is nothing new.
Unlike any other Bay Area school district, Berkeley considers a student's race when assigning children to schools. The idea is that even though a given neighborhood may not be ethnically and economically diverse, the city's campuses will reflect Berkeley's population as a whole.
But the integration plan came under attack Wednesday when a public-interest legal foundation sued the district for the second time in less than four years. Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation says Berkeley's school assignment policy violates Proposition 209, a 1996 California law prohibiting racial preferences in government, employment, contracting and public education.
Alameda County Superior Court Judge James Richman dismissed the foundation's first lawsuitagainst Berkeley in April 2004, but the plaintiff's attorneys have not been deterred.
"When you look at the demographics throughout the country and the census, it shows that we are becoming much more multiracial," said Sharon Browne, a principal attorney for Pacific Legal Foundation. "You have to stop categorizing people on the basis of race. It makes no sense in the 21st century."
The question of whether a school district can consider a student's ethnicity when doling out school assignments is gaining national attention this year. The U.S. Advertisement Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in two cases in December challenging school assignment plans in Jefferson County, Ky., and Seattle.
But the court's decision won't impact the Berkeley suit, said Rachel Moran, a law professor at University of California, Berkeley's Boalt Hall. She speculated that since Proposition 209 already has decided that race cannot be used for preferential treatment, Berkeley is likely to argue that using race in all school assignments does not give preference to any student over another.
"You can imagine systems that lead to integration that are not necessarily racially preferential," she said.
Berkeley Superintendent Michele Lawrence would not comment on the lawsuit since she had not yet seen it, but defended her district's enrollment plan, which also considers parent preference, family income, parent education levels, a student's address and the schools attended by a student's siblings when making campus assignments.
"Students who are struggling at our high school, many of them didn't come through our system, and therefore did not have an opportunity from early grades to develop that cultural awareness and sensitivity," Lawrence said. "I am troubled (by) a country that has its schools more segregated now than before Brown v. Board (of Education)."
In 1968, Berkeley became the first school district in the nation to voluntarily integrate its schools. In 1995, it adopted a plan to preserve integration, which it updated most recently in 2004.
San Francisco also had a desegregation policy in place for 30 years, but a lawsuit settlement in 1999 demanded officials cease using race as a criteria when assigning students to schools. School district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe said the number of San Francisco schools with a high concentration of a single race or ethnicity has increased over the past seven years.
But that could change. Several San Francisco school board members have said at recent meetings they are interested in bringing race back as a school assignment criteria.
Yvette Felarca, West Coast coordinator for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary, supports efforts to integrate public schools and called the recent suit against Berkeley "a direct attack on the best ideals and the greatest progress this nation's ever made, which is Brown v. Board (of Education)."
Felarca organized parents, students, teachers and other community members when Berkeley schools were sued by the Pacific Legal Foundation for the first time in 2003.
"Everything since Brown v. Board has pointed to the correctness of the decision," she said. "Separate can never be equal."
You all may have a hard time believing this, but Berkeley does not require residency for enrollment in public schools. A student does not even have provide a home address when enrolling. So an awful lot of students in Berkeley schools, particularly on the South Side, are from Oakland and other districts where the schools are in terrible shape.
These students are dragging the whole system down. Meanwhile, elementary school slots are being distributed through a lottery system, so parents can find themselves having to drive past three or four schools to drop off their children in a school that is much worse than the one just around the corner from their house.
The result, of course, is that any parent with any options at all is pulling their kids out of the Berkeley public schools. Private schools are springing up all over the place, and the vacancies in the local public schools are being backfilled with students from out of town.
And the Berkeley taxpayer, of course, gets screwed.
From each, according to his abilities.
To each, according to his needs.
Don't the Berkeley taxpayers have a right to vote about residency for enrollment in their public schools?
Not directly. They vote for Council, and the Council decides the policies. But everybody is terrified of being called a racist, so nobody challenges the policy.
It's Berkeley. It doesn't have to make sense!
I live right nextdoor to Berkeley and have followed that city's antics for the past 35 years. The public school system here used to be one of the country's best, but ever since the BCA got in back in the 70s, it has gone steadily downhill. I talk to some of these graduates of Berkeley High School and can't believe the extent of their ignorance and the degree to which they've been brainwashed. The homosexual mafia that's infiltrated city government has been pushing their extreme agenda in these public schools for years, "recruiting" these kids into the homsexual lifestyle. The rot goes all the way to the bone in this town.
Let them get screwed. These idiotic policies come from within themselves. Their plan is about the dumbest thing I have ever heard!
Okay, I'm with you now. David Horowitz does a nice job of describing the Berkeley City Council in his book, "Destructive Generation". The Council meetings sound like a combination of old-style Stalinists, Trotskyites, and generic anarchists, all in the same building trying to outdo each other for the "most perfect revolutionary" medal.:)
Of course, they have the right to get the hell of dodge too. That area will become a war zone people who produce and businesses are all gone. People need to tell the commietraitorscum: "If capitalism is bad, I'm leaving."
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