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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 are no charter schools. The district enjoys extensive financial support from the citizens of Berkeley. For several decades, BUSD has had relatively stable enrollment, educating between eight and ten thousand students per year. The district has considerable economic, linguistic, and academic diversity; more than 40% of students receive free or reduced-price lunch, and one-eighth are classified as Limited English Proficient. The district has long-standing racial/ethnic gaps in achievement and dropout rates.

Berkeley is a midsize city with just over one hundred thousand residents. It is relatively compact, only 10.5 square miles, which allows for the easy transport of students from anywhere within the district for desegregation purposes, and is home to the University of California’s Berkeley campus, one of the leading public universities in the country. The university enrolls nearly thirty-five thousand undergraduate and graduate students and has a major influence on the city. The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the nation’s most expensive housing markets, and housing prices in Berkeley reflect this, but as in many university cities, more than half of its available housing units are renter occupied, and the vast majority of rental units are subject to the city’s rent stabilization ordinance.⁶

City Demographics

Berkeley has grown increasingly diverse since its first desegregation efforts in the late 1960s. In particular, there has been an increase in the percentage of Asian, Hispanic, and multiracial residents. A majority of Berkeley residents remain non-Hispanic white, and the percentage of white residents has slightly increased since 2000. Asians constitute the second-largest group, at nearly 18%, likely due to the large Asian population at UC Berkeley. Latinos are another 10% of the population. The Asian and Latino populations have steadily grown in size and proportion since 1970, while the number of non-Hispanic blacks has fallen precipitously since 1990 as affluent blacks have moved out to diverse suburbs and increasing housing costs have squeezed out working-class blacks. African Americans were nearly one-quarter of all residents in 1970 but constituted just over 10% of the population in 2007.

As one would expect in a city with a highly selective and prestigious university, Berkeley’s residents, on the whole, are highly educated and wealthy, but vast differences exist among racial/ethnic groups. Nearly two-thirds of adults have college degrees or higher, and only 8% lack a high school diploma. However, just 40% of Latino and 20% of African American residents have at least bachelor’s degree, and 4 in 10 black and Latino residents have a high school diploma or less. One-third of all Berkeley families have incomes of $100,000 or more, including nearly half of all white families (compared to just 8% of African American and 15% of Latino families). Only 12% of families with children live below the poverty line, though this figure is disproportionately higher for black and Latino families.

Residential Segregation

The residential segregation of Berkeley—and its relationship to racially isolated schools—is one of the reasons BUSD adopted its school desegregation plan during the 1960s. Although racial residential segregation in Berkeley declined between 1980 and 2000, for some groups it still remains high. In general, whites and Asians have become more integrated with one another, while blacks and Hispanics are largely separate from these groups.

In 2000, clear separation existed in Berkeley. White and Asian youth are concentrated on the east side (north and south of the university campus), and the northeast Berkeley Hills section is heavily white and affluent. African Americans and Latinos are largely concentrated on the west side and to the south, adjacent to Oakland. There is remarkably little overlap between block groups that have the highest concentrations of white/Asian and African American / Latino school-age residents.⁷ Latinos and Asians are not as highly concentrated as blacks and whites. Neighborhoods with higher concentrations of high-income families are in northeast and, to a lesser extent, southeast Berkeley, both areas with concentrations of white students. Areas with lower median income include those immediately adjacent to the university, which may house students with little to no current income and few children, and the southwestern part of Berkeley bordering Oakland.

In other words, BUSD and the city of Berkeley are highly diverse and have maintained an unusual stability of diversity for four decades. But alongside this considerable racial/ethnic diversity is persistent and substantial residential segregation. The inequality in household income and educational attainment among different racial/ethnic groups necessitates a school integration plan to prevent schools from being segregated by race and class.

BERKELEY SCHOOL DESEGREGATION EFFORTS IN A CHANGING CLIMATE

The current desegregation plan is the latest in a series of innovative efforts. In the 1960s, Berkeley became one of the first urban school districts to voluntarily desegregate its schools. While BUSD’s first major desegregation effort involved mandatory student assignment, as did many plans of that era, its current plan incorporates a substantial use of family choice as well as important features to ensure that choice does not lead to segregation by race or socioeconomic status. The community’s commitment to maintaining integrated schools despite neighborhood segregation has remained constant as the legal, demographic, and educational context have shifted.

In the mid-1960s, following complaints by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a district report documenting de facto segregation, BUSD implemented a voluntary transfer program between paired elementary schools and redistricted its middle schools to promote racial integration. Then-superintendent Neil Sullivan and the school board led this effort, prompting a recall campaign targeting those who supported integration, but a sizable majority of voters sided with them, which further strengthened the district’s resolve.⁸ Over the next two years, 250 black elementary school students voluntarily bused to schools in East Berkeley. A subsequent task force noted that among the limitations of the plan was the fact that nonwhite students overwhelmingly bore the burden of busing.⁹ After 1968, when the board implemented a new plan that had four attendance zones and paired predominantly white and predominantly black elementary schools, more than one-third of elementary students bused to schools.¹⁰

Controlled Choice

The district’s commitment to school desegregation and mandatory assignment to elementary schools remained in place for decades. But by the early 1980s the racial imbalance had grown and many white families were opting out of the district because the grade configuration of the schools meant students had to transition to a new school four times between kindergarten and twelfth grade.¹¹ Finally, a 1992 bond measure that supported upgrading school facilities forced the district to reevaluate the capacities of all of its schools and who they were serving.¹²

Educational choice was growing in popularity across the country—as were magnet schools—as a possible avenue for “natural” desegregation through parental choice. Many Berkeley community members expressed concern over introducing a choice system to BUSD, noting the inequalities among residents in time and resources for making informed choices.¹³ In late 1993, however, the school board voted to phase out the two-way mandatory busing plan and implement a controlled choice integration plan. The district recognized that schools needed to be strengthened to encourage families to choose outside their neighborhood.¹⁴ The new plan divided the district into three elementary school zones (Northwest, Central, Southeast), each of which incorporated part of both the hills and the flats. The zones were created by mapping the entire city into 445 planning areas that are four to eight city blocks in size and geolocating student residential patterns by race/ethnicity. The goal of the plan was to give each elementary school a distribution of race/ethnicity (defined as white, black, and other) that reflected its zone’s racial/ethnic distribution within plus or minus 5 percentage points. Families ranked up to three elementary schools within their zone, but the final decision resided with the district, which considered choice, sibling, and zone priorities as well as the race/ethnicity of individual students. In the first round of assignments, for the 1995–96 academic year, nearly 90% of families received their first choice.¹⁵

The Current BUSD Student Assignment Plan

In 2000, the school district explored revising its student assignment policy to go beyond race/ethnicity and include measures of socioeconomic status. Noting that residential segregation within Berkeley remained entrenched, the district convened a Student Assignment Advisory Committee (SAAC) to explore diversifying schools through the use of neighborhood demographics including family income, home sale values, and the percentage of households headed by single females. Committee member, parent, and computer mapping specialist Bruce Wicinas, who had developed a customized software program to create the zones for the prior plan, facilitated the SAAC’s new simulations, but the board did not act on its proposals. After a lawsuit challenging the controlled choice plan was filed, three former members of the SAAC resumed their efforts to refine the integration plan based on neighborhood demographics.