CHRONOLOGY: THE FASHIONING OF A RACE-BLIND INTEGRATION PLAN IN BERKELEY UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT, 1999-2004
Compiled by Bruce Wicinas from the documents acquired by participation.

1996

In 1996 California voters pass proposition 209, which “prohibits discrimination or preferences based on race or sex in public education, employment and contracting.” Following its passage, lawsuits against several school districts prevail, terminating race-based integration plans. This proposition is not knocked down in court as some had hoped and it begins to have an impact around the state.

Superintendent Jack McLaughlin foresees an inevitable lawsuit against Berkeley Unified School District. He guesses that BUSD would lose such a suit. This would result in loss of control by BUSD over the integration of Berkeley schools. He contemplates a long term process for fashioning an alternate, lawsuit-proof integration plan acceptable to the community.

1999

June 16, 1999. First Committee Convened by Superintendent McLaughlin. (Board Policy 0100.5: "Citizens Advisory Committee on Diversity".) This series of community meetings is known as the “Controlled Choice Meetings.” The committee is intentionally large. In order to succeed, an outcome requires wide public buy-in. It seems logical to widely allocate public voice. No interested person is barred from attending. This mode of public decision-making, the "task force" is time-honored in Berkeley. It is not clear it has ever been effective an effective decision-making means or that peoples' time has been well-served by it.

The committee receives considerable background literature on the state of the art of school integration and of the current legal climate. To help the committee visualize the hoped-for type of mechanism the committee is shown tallies of current Berkeley school populations broken down by “Socio-economic bands”, the map developed in ‘98 (See map, 11/17/98) by Nancy Greenman, Cathy James and Bruce Wicinas. (see 10/31/99) The meetings kept growing larger. A subculture of Berkeley residents revels in planning "task forces." The meetings gather intensity, audience and press attention. As time goes on, rhetorical excesses increase. By October, occasional shouting is heard. Most tirades extoll the importance of integration and the effectiveness of the present scheme, points not disputed by any person attending. A faction loudly advocates raising millions of dollars to fund a challenge to any potential lawsuit "all the way to the supreme court."

Discipline is unobtainable. And lacking discipline the group can not be induced to weigh alternative proposals - arduous work. The agenda topics are broad rather than tightly focused. On a few occasions the group is shown some numbers derived from simulations. The numbers are scarcely discussed by the whole group. A few members show curiosity about the numbers and some Q&A occurrs via e-mail and after the meetings. This committee comes nowhere close to suggesting an alternate integration scheme. No schemes are proposed, tested or reviewed. By October it seemed evident this committee is not the right “tool for the job.”

Nov 23, 1999 Report to the Board by the Citizens Advisory Committee on Diversity. After accepting its report Superintendent McLaughlin dissolves the committee. He recognizes that the "task force" format will never yield a plan. Jack chooses a different method for citizen participation more conducive to discipline and product. The citizen participation structure will resemble that he had successfully deployed in the huge school construction program, concurrent during this era. The committee is small, consisting of members appointed or invited. Service includes a participation commitment, a heavy charge with a tight timeline and a substantial labor commitment. Agendas are distributed in advance and strictly respected. The citizen chair is elected by the committee. This degree of autonomy is a risk for the district. But it guarantees that the final product is authored and owned by Berkeleyans rather than by the district.

2000

Mar 15, 2000 The Board approves interim use for the 2000-2001 school year of the same race-based student assignment methodology as for the 1999-2000 school year. Of course no new plan was yet available so this was a formality. But the memo to the board recommends bringing to the board no later than 11/2000 two alternate new plans, including:

• a) a plan with multiple factors including the use of race, and
• b) a plan with factors excluding the use of race.

March 15, 2000 Board charges the new committee. This is the "Student Assignment Advisory Committee (SAAC,)" constituted to Superintendent McLaughlin's design. It is to develop two alternative kindergarten through 5th grade assignment plans: a plan with factors including the use of race and a plan with factors excluding the use of race. The membership is limited and by appointment, consisting of a parent representative from each school. The committee is to hold at least one community forum later in the year.

March 21, 2000 – May 23, 2000. Forging a Mission Statement. Prior to the first meeting of the new committee Jack McLaughlin convenes a group of principals and administrators to draft a mission statement for the new Assignment System. This group meets several times in the Sup's conference room. Thelette Bennett, Louise Rosenkrantz, Roseanne Moore, Kevin Wooldridge, Cheryl Chinn, Bernadette Cormier, Cathy James, Irv Phillips, Alex Palau, Jack M., Francisco Martinez, Bruce Wicinas. This venue is unaccustomed terrain for a group of administrators and the going is slow at first. Everyone suffers shyness when sitting before a blank slate before the expectant eye of the leader. A lot was to ride on this. Typical "ed-speak" bureaucratic prose would not carry the day. Jack McLaughlin, whom no one regarded a rhetorician, has to take the first stab at the statement. Slowly and painfully the ball gets rolling.

After several sessions the mission statement was born. (Before concluding that Berkeley is ill-served by the talent of its school administrators, try this exercise amoung your staff!) "The mission of the BUSD Elementary School Assignment Plan is to place all students in an integrated environment reflecting Berkeley's diversity in order to ensure equal access to: a strong core curriculum; enriched learning experiences; and individual, community, social and educational resources that promote success in a rapidly changing multi-cultural society. ”

May 23, 2000. First meeting of Student Assignment Advisory Committee (SAAC). The Mission Statement is unveiled and the committee populated. The proposed schedule is ambitious but aimed at the district's target date for deployment of a new assignment plan, the 2001-2002 school year. The schedule calls for a public forum to unveil the new plan Oct 3; review rough draft of final report Oct. 24; final presentation to the Board Nov 1, 2000.

This schedule would prove two years too short!

(Nov 24, 2000) “Brief History Notes” from Nancy Riddle (value.net)

Nov 28, 2000 SAAC Public forum . No scheme has been proposed by this time nor has any been seriously discussed. The forum presents history, the current plan, the legal climate, and next steps. Comments by the public are like those heard at the meetings of the previous committee. The public extolls the virtues of the current plan. See e-mail 11/29/00 “Notes from the Public Forum” (value.net) The committee had obviously not completed its charge. In fact it really had barely started. A short hiatus occurred while Francisco Martinez, Parent Access manager, was tied up by the demands of executing student assignment for the upcoming school year.

End of 2000 Superintendent Jack McLaughlin leaves the district to accept a "promotion," a state-level position in another state.

2001

Feb 27, 2001 through June 5, 2001. Student Assignment Committee meet eight times. The committee has taken tiny first steps toward completing its charge. But it has impressed everyone by its commitment, competence and discipline. The District remains fully exposed to a lawsuit for lack of a new plan. This committee seems the best team ever assembled for this purpose. Both the committee and the district believes they will succeed. Nearly all the original members are intersted in continuing. So it was sustained. See (members) Roia Ferrazares (Co-Chair, MX), Nancy Riddle (King), Laila Ibrahim (MX,) Denise Lee( Oxford), Catherine Macklin (King), Matt Lipner (TO), Elaine Overstreet (Oxford,) Catherine James (Assoc Superintendent, Business,) Irving Phillips (Director, Magnet Schools,) Noreen Axelson (Cragmont), Sheila ORourke (Community Member), Bernadette Cormier (Transportation Supervisor,) Kathleen Lewis ( Principal, Oxford,) Rita Kimball (Principal, Washington,) Julie Guthman (Emerson), Francisco Martinez. Consultant and BHS parent: Bruce Wicinas.

The committee aims to base any proposals upon analysis and data. But the new census data is not available. The '90 data is considered far too old to be of use. Various analyses are attempted using current BUSD student data. These include a study of student transience by site and a trial Soc-ec classifying system based on a crude socio-ecnomic map of Berkeley created by Nancy Greenman, Cathy James and Bruce some years prior. The committee meets regularly. It discusses issues relevant to its mission such as school site equity. It adheres to an agenda with limited time allowed for "public comment." It never becames a popular public forum. The committee avoids engaging the mechanics of proposed plans as it awaits the release of census data.

June 20, 2001. SAAC presents a report to the Superintendent and Board . The report contains no proposed assignment scheme as yet. It contains a long discussion of school site equity and various proposed frameworks for measuring and monitoring it. To the Board and Superintendent it proposes:

• The SAAC requests that it be allowed to reconvene in the fall to continue to assess the data collected and further study the assignment process.
• Improved communication between this committee an the School Board needs to be established around issues of desegration in Berkeley schools so that the Committee might ensure that its process and direction is informed and productive.
• The SAAC would like to continue its identification of key measurable criteria with which to evaluate school site equity so that the Board has additional tools to monitor sites to help ensure that every child has eq ual access to a valuable educational experience.
• The SAAC would like to seek outside consultation and advice to aid us in the gathering and analyzing of data.

Summer, 2001. First of Census 2000 data becomes available .

October, 2001: SAAC re-convenes . The new superintendent, Michelle Lawrence, permits the committee to continue unaltered. The membership changed somewhat, growing smaller. Roia Ferrazares, Derick Miller, Noreen Axelson, Lee Berry, Julie Guthman, Catherine Macklin, Nancy Riddle, Bernadette Cormier, Francisco Martinez. Consultant: Bruce Wicinas.

The committee begins to embrace the shape of a new scheme. The new scheme will be based upon a map by which each address in the city is assigned a category of one, two or three. This mechanism shares elements with the racial integration scheme which had been in place since 1995 so it is partially familiar territory. The school district has a substantial lot of custom software developed since 1995 by the author. It performs many functions relevant to planning, geo-coding, mapping, categorization and school assignment. The software containes the Berkeley map, the means for drawing boundaries and analyzing their contents, means to locate addresses on the map, and the controlled choice apparatus which balances assigned populations over categories of 1, 2 and 3 at each school. But since 1993 the category subject to balance was based entirely upon the student's race.

The committee seeks a potent means of assigning everyone a socioeconomic category of 1, 2 or 3. The principal socio-economic measures are assumed to be household income and parent education but the committee wishs to explore more factors. To determine such a category based upon voluntarily supplied family information is out of the question because it would intrude upon privacy and because self-description is completely unreliable. But strong residential stratificaiton of Berkeley according to socio-economic level suggests that a classification can be based upon a map. A beauty of such a scheme is that the categorization of individuals is blind to individual families' attributes. It may be determined wholly by where one lived.

The committee began to seek such a map.

2002

Spring, 2002 onward SAAC meets frequently. While the author acquires data and evolves software, much time is spent on revising the “statement of beliefs.” Much time is also spent on defining "factors of school site equity." But the committee begins proposing schemes and studying the data yielded by simulating them. The release of U.S Census “Data Set 3” of the U.S. 2000 census, the installment which tallies a wide range of characteristics of populations, greatly expands the list of demographic characteristics. From this point the committe engages vigorously in the testing of potential "socio-economic factors", most of them extracted from the census data.

2/27/02 The committee released a "Four-point" statement of beliefs. This was the product of many meetings.

August, 2002 The author devises the “piescape” graphic for comparing the relative performance of the schemes. The committee's growing curiosity becomes difficult to serve. Once run, the schemes have to be compared by "eye-balling" pages of population assignment matrixes. Numbers are not everyone's friend. Seeing trends in large tables of numbers is intuitive for no one. Sophisticated statistical methods would only decrease peoples' faith in the process. Technocratic elites find no respect in Berkeley. The software had to be further evolved to turn around the trials more rapidly. These factors yielded the piescape graphic. It expedited the judging of a scheme's relative performance. The committee is able to iterate more rapidly while consuming less "consultant" time. The committee jams the pedal to the floor.

Sept/Oct, 2002 Many potential socio-economic factors were tested by simulated student assignment. The number of schemes tested is at least 30 but probably many more. Factors included test scores, house sale values, “Income 1999 below Poverty Level, children under 5 years”, “Female householder w/children under 18 no husband present;” “Age 5-17 speak Spanish, speak English not well;” “Owner-occupied, move in 1970-1979;” “House price asked average (1999).” Etc. The committee envisioned a formula based upon three or four potent socio-economic factors. But formulas derived from seven factors were tested were evaluated.

By October the committee has seen schemes which promised to perform satisfactorily. The committee believes it has solved the problem. It begins to plan the concluding public forum.

Dec 4, 2002 Public Forum Complying with its original (May, 2000) charge, the Student Assignment Committee holds a public forum at Malcolm X school to present the proposal by the committee and to hear public comment. This is the public unveiling of the new plan. In retrospect, the earth should have shaken. But press and public take little note. A committee of Berkeley citizens, with aid of school district staff, via a long but disciplined process authored a rigorous and innovative mechanism for applying socio-economic balance to all the K-5 classrooms of the school district and school district. The plan fulfills the mission statement and the goals authored by Jack McLaughlin's cabinet and subsequently enhanced by the committee. The plan exploits the prior era's public discussion, techniques and lessons learned. It is informed by recent census data and proven by countless simulation iterations using the full data sets of student attendance and choice data of the prior five years. Rarely has a Berkeley committee, operating under a "consensus" idiom, authored a solution with such a logically rigorous skeleton.

The mechanism supposed by the plan was the culmination of nearly ten years of software and engineering development, an evolution begun in 1992.

The new plan was not warmly embraced but neither did it arouse alarm and suspicion. The public seemed to acknowledge the work and the earnestness reflected in the proposal. An evening public forum was probably not the fair venue for communicating something which embodied years of thought and analysis.

12/17/2002 The Student Assignment Committee's work is presented to the BUSD School Board. The socio-economic "formula" included two factors. The report contains a few pages of the committee's crafted prose, the charts illustrating the proposed assignment method, and many charts describing the demographic properties of the Berkeley population. This marks the conclusion of the work of the Student Assignment Committee. It has completely fulfilled its charge of March, 2000, though the time required had been longer than specified.

The board is a little ambivalent. Neither the board nor Superintendent Lawrence move to apply the plan, allowing the spring school assignment to proceed under the old race-balancing plan which the board had labeled "interim" on March 15, 2000. The committee dissolves. We all restore our attention to other matters. No action follows.

2003

August, 2003 First lawsuit filed by Pacific Legal Foundation. (8/12/03 Daily Planet) The BUSD administration quietly mobilizes to respond.

Aug. 2003 - John Streeter from law firm Keker & Van Nest agrees to represent the district pro bono. (Planet “Legal Champion Enrolls in School Board Lawsuit” 12/19/03) He examines the plan presented to the board by SAAC in 12/2002 and judges that it would withstand the lawsuit. At last the plan begins to receive its due attention.

8/19/03 The author receives the call from the District to resume the work of the previous fall. Wicinas, Francisco Martinez and Bernadette Cormier meet with Superintendent Lawrence to look ahead at tactics.

8/26/03 The author prepares a “to do” matrix of actions for resuming the evolution of the assignment plan from where it was left at the end of 2002. ( “Modeling and Software “To Do” List, Proposed New Student Assignment System, Fall 2003” 8/26/03)

Aug. 2003 - A small group is convened to iterate some more and refine the scheme. The group consists of Francisco Martinez and Bernadette Cormier of BUSD and author Bruce Wicinas.

Throughout the fall the little working group of Francisco, Bernadette and Bruce meet regularly at a cafe in downtown Berkeley. To each session Bruce brings computer simulations. These cycles aim to tighten the socio-economic formula to apply to the census data. The board had requested a criterion consisting of three constitutents: household income, parent education, and something about racial diversity. Devising an overlay about racial diversity which could be incorporated as a term in a composite formula was a task not formerly commissioned by the SAAC. That overlay required many iterations of refinement.

Near the end of this era the meetings concern the design of the exhibits themselves. Care is taken concerning what appears on each sheet of computer output. Omitted are the annotations and software id routinely applied to the research drafts. After weeks of tweaking the formula and the graphics, Francisco, Bernadette, Bruce and John Streeter are at last sastified.

Shortly before her court appearance the group met a couple of times with Superintendent Lawrence to rehearse and to simplify the rhetoric with which the plan should be explained.

Mid-January Attorney John Streeter asks the judge to dismiss the lawsuit. (Planet 1/16/04 “BUSD Asks for Lawsuit Dismissal”)

2004

Jan 21, 2004 District submits to the Board the final draft of the new student assignment plan. The relatively brief document consists of a few pages of background information, a brief rationale, the new “Administrative Regulations” and nine graphic maps and charts demonstrating the plan's apparatus, demographic basis and measures. It was very similar to the plan submitted by the SAAC in 12/2002, but vetted, tuned and unaccompanied by background information. Without hoopla the new plan was passed by the Board.

March 5, 2004 Observing its usual calendar the district assigns students to K-8 schools using the new plan in place of the previous race-based integration plan. The apparatus of applying the socio-economic criterion had been authored a couple of years prior to execute the study simulations. Applying the scheme to reality was a breeze. It did not demand of the staff any unfamiliar new skill. Balancing three populations had been the core of the BUSD assignment scheme since 1995. The only fresh challenge was a rhetorical one, explaining the new classification to families.

4/7/2004 Lawsuit dismissed.

2007

4/13/2007 Second lawsuit dismissed. Planet, “BUSD Rules Don't Violate Prop. 209” 4/13/07

2009