Educational Delusions?. Gary Orfield
13–15.
50. This goal was reported in 1966 in Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity, and in scores of subsequent studies, e.g., Schofield, “Review of Research on School Desegregation’s Impact on Elementary and Secondary School Students”; Rumberger and Palardy, “Does Resegregation Matter?: The Impact of Social Composition on Academic Achievement in Southern High Schools.”
51. Pettigrew and Tropp, When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact.
52. Frankenberg and Orfield, eds., Lessons in Integration: Realizing the Promise of Racial Diversity in American Schools.
53. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 eliminated the ESAA, which often funded Robert Slavin’s extensively documented Student Team Learning program. See G. Orfield, Congressional Power; Slavin, Student Team Learning: A Practical Guide to Cooperative Learning.
54. Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell; Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.
55. Parents Involved, at 788–89 (Justice Kennedy concurring). See also chapter 1.
56. Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity; Linn and Welner, eds., Race-Conscious Policies for Assigning Students to Schools: Social Science Research and the Supreme Court Cases; Brief Amicus Curiae of the 553 Social Scientists in Support of Respondents in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. and Crystal D. Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education et al.; Mickelson, “Twenty-First Century Social Science Research on School Diversity and Educational Outcomes.”
57. Rumberger and Palardy, “Does Segregation Still Matter? The Impact of Social Composition on Academic Achievement in High School.”
58. Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Education Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life.
59. Wells and Crain, “Perpetuation Theory and the Long-Term Effects of School Desegregation”; Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties.
60. The Supreme Court discussed these issues as the basis for upholding affirmative action in the context of higher education in its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger; see also G. Orfield and Kurlaender, eds., Diversity Challenged: Evidence on the Impact of Affirmative Action, 111–219.
61. Frankenberg, “America’s Diverse, Racially Changing Schools and Their Teachers.”
62. Yen, “Census Shows Whites Lose US Majority among Babies.”
63. Sunderman, Kim, and Orfield, NCLB Meets School Realities, 81–104.
64. Wells and Crain, “Perpetuation Theory and the Long-Term Effects of School Desegregation”; G. Orfield and Kurlaender, eds., Diversity Challenged; G. Orfield and Lee, Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality; G. Orfield and Reardon, “Race, Poverty, and Inequality.”
65. Coleman, Kelly, and Moore, Trends in School Segregation, 1968–1973. A number of scholars at a symposium that Coleman attended soon after this book’s publication challenged its claims. See Orfield, Symposium on School Desegregation and White Flight.
66. See, e.g., Orfield, G., “Segregated Housing and School Resegregation,” 314–18.
67. Frankenberg and Orfield, eds., The Resegregation of Suburban Schools: A Hidden Crisis in American Education; Clotfelter, After Brown.
68. Roberts, “Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds.”
69. Siegel-Hawley, “City Lines, County Lines, Color Lines: An Analysis of School and Housing Segregation in Four Southern Metropolitan Areas, 1990–2010.”
70. Orfield and Lee, Why Segregation Matters.
PART TWO
School Districts’ Use of Choice
to Further Diversity
3
The Promise of Choice
Berkeley’s Innovative Integration Plan
Erica Frankenberg
Since the 1960s, the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in Berkeley, California, has voluntarily committed to integrating its schools. It provided the first major test of a city struggling to find a successful integration strategy that would survive court challenges after the Supreme Court forbade many kinds of voluntary desegregation plans in 2007.1 In contrast to many other districts, which either let their desegregation standards in choice plans lapse or tried to substitute desegregation based only on socioeconomic status, which has typically not produced a high level of racial desegregation, Berkeley invented a method that used a sophisticated analysis of neighborhood characteristics, including race, for student assignment and successfully defended it in California’s courts. Berkeley’s experience suggests a possible route for combining choice and integration in many school districts.2
Now on its third major integration plan guiding student assignments, Berkeley has maintained a commitment to diverse schools, even as legal options and political considerations around school integration have shifted and the district’s population has changed. Its current student assignment plan is a controlled choice plan. It seeks to provide parental choice while allowing the district to manage the choices in a way that furthers its goal of diversity. Educational choice has proliferated as a way of giving parents more input into where their children attend school and, as a result, of generating support for public education.3 Proponents have suggested that an additional benefit of controlled choice plans is that they cause schools that are chosen by fewer families to seek to improve.4
Berkeley is well known for its liberal, multiracial population, yet it is home to neighborhoods that are deeply segregated by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Despite this, the city’s public schools each reflect the district’s multiracial student population, thanks to the district’s innovative integration plan, adopted in 2004, which centers on a unique, multifaceted conceptualization of neighborhood diversity. This plan sought to provide equitable schooling choices for families and to integrate the district’s eleven elementary schools by race, household income, and family educational background. As the district implemented the plan, it adopted procedures to ensure that its choice-based system did not advantage any group of families in the district while actively promoting school equity to make all schools attractive choices.
For four decades, BUSD has striven to integrate its schools in the absence of consent decrees or court orders requiring desegregation. Its success is particularly notable given its location in an area of Northern California that includes San Francisco and San Jose, two districts with expired consent decree desegregation plans, high segregation, and wavering commitments to furthering race-conscious desegregation.5 Unlike these and other districts across the nation that have struggled and resisted complying with state and federal court orders, Berkeley chose integration. Beginning in 1968, under the leadership of Superintendent Neil Sullivan, it began voluntarily pursuing mandated school integration to mitigate the city’s segregated housing patterns, which produced racially segregated schools: predominantly African American/nonwhite and low income on the west side of the city and white and affluent on the east side, patterns that continue to this day.
Berkeley is an important case study because of its multiracial diversity and the deep racial polarization of its neighborhoods, two conditions that pose unique challenges for school integration. Since the 1960s, diversity in BUSD has become more complex with the increase of nonblack students of color. As the country grows more racially diverse and both racial and economic segregation continue to deepen, understanding BUSD’s student assignment plan is important for communities whose districts may be transitioning from being primarily biracial to having three or more racial or ethnic groups of students.
THE BERKELEY UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT
The Berkeley Unified School District is coterminous with Berkeley’s city boundaries. It currently serves approximately nine thousand students in eleven elementary schools, three middle schools, one comprehensive high school, and one small continuation high school; there