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California has the most segregated school system in the continental United States. A UCLA Civil Rights Project report last fall found the share of “intensely segregated” schools — those with more than 90% students of color — has quadrupled in the last three decades.
The gap shows up in college. Students in the most segregated high schools complete the coursework required for a UC or CSU at rates 25 percentage points lower than students in the least segregated schools.
I’m a senior at Menlo-Atherton High, and some of my classmates come from Atherton, the wealthiest zip code in California. Others come from East Palo Alto, where the only public middle school posts some of the lowest test scores in the state.
California isn’t blind to these divides. It builds programs to address them. Most take the same shape: move a few kids across school lines and leave the lines themselves untouched.
The problem is the programs aren’t working.
The oldest is the Tinsley Voluntary Transfer Program, which stems from an education discrimination lawsuit settlement in 1986. It was California’s first interdistrict desegregation plan.
Each year, about 135 students of color from East Palo Alto’s Ravenswood City School District win a lottery seat in a wealthy neighboring district. Many of them end up at my school. In four decades, the program has bused more than 5,200 children out of Ravenswood. It has brought in two.
Lottery winners tend to do well. But a Stanford dissertation in 2011 compared the winners with applicants who lost — families just as motivated — and found they all scored about the same in math and English.
The district that the lottery winners left behind paid the price. When the most engaged and well-resourced families leave a district, poverty concentrates among the children who remain — and concentrated poverty is among the strongest predictors of academic performance.
Ravenswood has lost nearly half its enrollment since 2008, and its share of students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged has jumped to 92%.
None of this is an accident. The cap on the number of school lottery winners is far too small to require any change to district boundaries or how schools are funded. And the settlement’s other goals were vague enough that they were quietly abandoned.
Margaret Tinsley, the East Palo Alto parent who sued to desegregate the districts and whose name is on the resulting program, recently disparaged it.
“I can’t say that’s what I sued for,” she said.
California put itself in this position. Courts once ordered racially segregated school districts to redraw boundary lines and bus children to achieve racial integration. But the backlash was fierce enough that in 1979 California voters amended the state constitution to bar mandatory busing.
Voluntary transfer programs like Tinsley filled the gap. But they changed no boundaries and asked almost nothing of wealthy districts. Milwaukee and St. Louis also tried versions of the same fix. The racial lines between districts persisted.
Such optional desegregation tools didn’t just fail districts like Ravenswood; they benefitted the wealthy districts, which kept their tax base intact while gaining the appearance of integration.
The state knows there’s a danger. Its District of Choice law bars new transfers that “exacerbate racial segregation” or financially destabilize the districts students leave. But no agency measures existing desegregation programs against that standard. As long as voluntary transfers are the easy answer, redistricting — redrawing district lines — never has to happen.
The District of Choice program expires in 2028 unless the Legislature renews it. Before it does, legislators should direct the Department of Education to audit every interdistrict program against these two standards: Does it concentrate segregation? And does it bleed the district left behind?
The answers should decide which programs stay. It also likely would confirm what Gary Orfield, the UCLA report’s co-author, has spent years researching: integration only holds when district lines, school funding and housing patterns change together.
Tinsley is a fix that fell short. It let the state look like it was acting while changing nothing.
This September, another round of East Palo Alto families will enter the lottery. The buses will still run one way, and California will still call that an answer.
