California District Admits It Segregates Schools

Aug 19, 2019

The California Attorney General got the Sausalito Marin City school district near San Francisco to admit that it has been segregating schools.

One of the district’s two schools, Willow Creek Academy, is in Sausalito, a wealthy, mostly white suburb of San Francisco. The other, Bayside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, is in neighboring Marin City, which has a mostly working-class, and mostly Black and Latino population.

In 2012, the district gave Willow Creek to a charter school company to run, which meant that Willow Creek would receive extra money from the district. At the time, people in the community told the school board that this amounted to racial segregation, because parents in Sausalito would send their children to the better-funded charter school near their homes, leaving the neglected Bayside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School to Marin City’s mainly non-white and poorer community.

But the school board went ahead with the plan anyway.

Denied adequate funding, the Bayside school has since suffered cuts in music, art and physical education, and has ended up without a qualified math teacher, a full-time counselor or a pre-kindergarten program.

Today the Attorney General may be bragging about how he stood up to racial injustice, but in fact, Sausalito with its two schools is a tiny drop in the bucket. Schools across the state–and country–are obviously segregated just as much as in this district. If the California Attorney General were serious about fighting racism in education, he would go after segregated school districts across the state, starting with the biggest cities like Los Angeles. But he would rather pose as an anti-racist than actually do anything about it.