The Promise of Choice
The Promise of Choice
Berkeley’s Innovative Integration Plan
Now on its third major integration plan guiding student assignments, Berkeley, California, has maintained a commitment to diverse schools, even as legal options and political considerations around school integration have shifted and as the district’s population has changed to a multiracial one in which there is deep racial polarization of its neighborhoods, conditions that pose unique challenges for integration. Many other districts 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. By contrast, Berkeley invented a method that used a sophisticated analysis of neighborhood characteristics (including race) for student assignment, and they successfully defended this method in California’s courts. Berkeley’s experience suggests a possible route for combining choice and integration in many school districts. As the country grows more racially diverse and both racial and economic segregation continue to deepen, understanding Berkeley Unified School District’s student assignment plan will help communities that are transitioning from being primarily biracial to having three or more racial or ethnic groups.
Keywords: Berkeley, integration policy, multiracial enrollment, residential segregation, Proposition 209, geography—based choice policy, planning area, controlled choice
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