Is Resegregation Inevitable?

Superintendent Alan Bersin can foresee the day when the San Diego Unified School District is, in his word, “resegregated.” Ironically, the situation that could cause the return to racial imbalance is one designed to give communities what they’ve been asking for: quality schools in their own neighborhoods.

It’s the fallout from Proposition MM that could again trigger school segregation by race and ethnicity, the superintendent says. The local bond measure, passed in 1998, provides $1.51 billion over 10 years to repair existing schools and to build 15 new ones. Thirteen of the new facilities are slated for south of Interstate 8, a demarcation line used disparagingly in the past to indicate where the lowest-achieving schools were located. Nearly a quarter-century ago, when the school district was facing court-ordered desegregation under the Carlin decision, the best public schools were deemed to lie north of Interstate 8. Local newspapers at the time headlined terms like “white flight” and “forced busing” in chronicling the case.

Bersin doesn’t like to talk about “north of 8, south of 8,” primarily because it doesn’t accurately reflect today’s academic picture. “But,” he says, “for the purposes of discussion of race and education in the future, ‘north of 8, south of 8’ is the line we’ve got to understand if we’re to deal with the issue in an informed way.”

In the 23 years since Carlin, San Diego schools have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on programs and strategies to desegregate and to boost academic performance. The linchpins were the magnet schools and so-called mirror magnets that offered a special subject or career concentration at a particular school—with whites or nonwhites receiving free transportation to attend that campus if their attendance improved the racial mix. Busing was through the Voluntary Ethnic Enrollment Program (VEEP). Even as the magnet program became entrenched, the busing was pretty much one-sided, with nonwhite students doing most of the traveling.

“The magnet program has not produced the kind of integration we want, save for a handful of schools,” Bersin says, adding that the city board of education reviews the ongoing program this spring. He says San Diego in the 21st century must confront the fact that “contrary to popular perceptions, the burdens of busing have been visited on children of color.”

The community must also understand, he says, “that it is children of color who have kept open many of our schools north of 8, because you would not have had sufficient [neighborhood] enrollment in those schools to keep them open.”

San Diego’s rapid population growth over the last decade has brought severe overcrowding to schools south of I-8, an area that has seen sharp growth spikes for Latinos and other immigrants, as well as for lower-income groups. Nonwhite students busing north through VEEP, Bersin says, also have helped to alleviate the overcrowded schools in south and southeastern San Diego.

The new Proposition MM schools will provide sufficient classroom capacity south of I-8, Bersin says, meaning “we will have no movement north of 8 to integrate our classrooms—because VEEP has been the primary tool of integration.”

In tandem with population growth, laws and public policies have changed since desegregation was court-ordered. Race is no longer the sole criterion for school enrollment, and Bersin describes a community climate that views integration as “a secondary goal, compared with the right to give our children a quality education in neighborhood schools.”

With a major capital investment in new schools south of I-8, existing laws, rising and shifting population and a reenergized community voice for neighborhood schools, “over the next generation we will end up with a resegregated school system,” Bersin says.

“As a community,” the superintendent concludes, “there are those who will see this as a plus, there are those who will see it as a negative, and there are those who will be indifferent. Our responsibility as a school district is to provide the perspectives and information so that people can begin to discuss this.”

—Margie Craig Farnsworth

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