Desegregation. Busing. Integration. School Choice. Court orders. Words that, to most people, summon thoughts of the American South and massive resistance to school desegregation in response to the 1954 Brown decision. Rarely does one think of San Francisco in association with desegregation. Yet, it was the first major city outside the South to deal with court-ordered school desegregation in the aftermath of the Brown decision. Rand Quinn's outstanding study on efforts to desegregate public schools outside the South and in an ever-changing and diverse city with overlapping stakeholder interests shows that the issue of race and schools knows no geographical bounds. It permeates the very fiber of American society and government.
Why San Francisco? The city was one of the first large urban areas outside the South to undergo court-ordered desegregation. An added layer to the significance of the Bay City is the nature of the tremendous demographic change that it experienced following World War 2. Where desegregation in the South by and large was an issue of black and white students, San Francisco's growing Asian and Hispanic populations added complexity to efforts to integrate schools as the city grappled with the intricacies of desegregating schools and using busing to make it so. But this student demographic remained in a state of flux, which changed the nature and difficulty of assigning students to schools in an effort to achieve integration or diversity on an almost year-by-year basis.
How does a school district with a diverse and dynamic student demographic determine the best and fairest method of achieving integration and diversity? That is the question at the center of this book. Writes Quinn, “the courts, the community stakeholders, and the school district contended with multiple competing and evolving conceptualizations of student assignment” (23). Oddly enough, the U.S. Supreme Court had the comparatively less difficult part of the process in declaring that “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional. Communities, courts, and school districts dealt with the aftermath and vastly more difficult task of actually making integration happen. The process remained in constant flux with regard to student assignment; from racial balance to racial unidentifiability; from busing to school choice; and from integration to desegregation.
If the method of student assignment changed constantly, so, too, did the alliances formed to advocate or oppose them. All too often, school desegregation is presented as a relatively basic linear path: citizens sue, courts rule, communities adapt, and integration happens. Among Quinn's outstanding contributions to the study of this topic is the way that he shows how desegregation and integration were far from linear. In fact, the process of integrating schools resembled several Venn diagrams stacked one upon the other. And in an everchanging multicultural city like San Francisco, one almost needed a playbill to understand who was aligned with whom in a given year.
While expressly focused on San Francisco proper, Quinn has provided a seminal work on the intricacies of school desegregation. It is not an easy task to come to terms with the myriad approaches, arguments, concepts, and competing stakeholder groups and present them in a readable and easily digested way. Class Action does this wonderfully. Quinn's work highlights certain universal truths about school integration that extend beyond the broad agreement that students of all colors, creeds, and national origins deserved to have the best and most equitable education possible: the courts were hesitant to set school assignment policy unless forced to do so, the parents from both sides resisted busing and preferred school choice and assignment closer to their homes, and the process of integration was just as slow and plodding in San Francisco as it was in the South. Quinn quotes Federal Judge William H. Alsup's remarks to a crowded courtroom in 2005 during a hearing on whether to extend a consent decree in the city. “Everybody in this room,” said Alsup, “wants to do what is best for the children of San Francisco—that's a given” (161). The devil, they say, resides in the details.
Quinn's seminal work provides a glimpse of just how complex, contested, frustrating, and, at times, byzantine the business of desegregating schools turned into the business of fostering diversity, and how community groups, parents groups, educational advocates, and the courts struggled to find a sound, workable solution to a problem that changed with the passing of each year.
