WHAT DOES YOUR SCHOOL LOOK LIKE?

The changing population of the Bay Area has changed its classrooms and its students. This has caused certain students populations to bear the brunt of self-segregation.

The landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 was designed to address segregation in the nation’s schools. But it was mostly directed toward the 17 states that had laws at the time mandating the segregation of African Americans. California and other states that were not required by the Supreme Court to take immediate action were left largely unaffected by the ruling.

Since then, many states have rolled back their integration plans which has led to the self-segregation of many school districts. In the Bay Area, the only district that continues to operate under an integration plan is Berkeley Unified School District which implemented it’s voluntary integration plan in 1964. San Francisco Unified was under a court order to desegregate its schools, but that order was lifted in 2005. Oakland Unified has never been under a court order nor has it ever tried to implement any sort of desegregation plan.

In the past few years, the composition of the three cities has changed. Overall, the population of Latinos and white people has grown, while the population of black communities has decreased. This gradual shift is reflected in the population of these three racial and ethnic groups in schools.

These three school districts also show disparities in discplining and in academic achievement. Overall, Black and Latino students tend to be over-discplined and under-performing in schools that are both majority white and majority Black or Latino. In OUSD, Black students are on average, 4.2 grades behind white students, while Latino students are 3.8 grades behind their white counterparts. In SFUSD, that number drops to 3.9 grades for Black students and 3.3 grades for Latino students. In BUSD, Black students are 4.7 grades behind and Latino students, 3.6 grades behind their white peers.

The California Assessment of Studenr Performance and Progress was implemented in 2014. The graph shows the percentage of students that did not meet the required achievement level for their grade compared to the amount of white students in the school. The takeaway is that schools with a higher percentage of white students will often do better in the state assessment than those schools with higher Black and Latino populations.

The final metric of the effects of school segregations is disciplining. In all three districts, Black and Latino students are suspended at higher rates than white studnets, with Black students being the majority. In Berkeley, Black students are 6.1 times more likely, while Latino students are 1.6 times more likely than white students. In SFUSD, Black students are 10 times more likely to be suspended, and Latino students are 1.9 times more lkely than white students. Finally, in Oakland, Black students are 11.9 times more likely to be suspended, and Latino students are 4 times more likely than white students.