Separate and Unequal

Biegel found something more disturbing beneath this very visible trend -- the insidious hidden segregation within schools. A segregation that has been documented in San Francisco since the 1960s.

Take Dyer's classroom, where about seven out of her 12 students are black or Latino. AP Giannini, a high-performing middle school in the Sunset District, is made up of mostly Chinese-American students, at 52 percent. Only five percent of the student body is African-American, yet 37 percent of all special ed students are African-American. ("Special ed" can mean that they are in special day class or receive special ed services in a regular classroom as well.)

This happens to match, almost exactly, the districtwide racial composition of special ed programs in San Francisco, and is common in resegregating schools with high populations of Chinese-American students. Biegel says he has found the pattern of stark, within-school segregation -- linked to special ed placement -- to be more prevalent at certain high-performing schools on the westside of the city, than anywhere else.

Biegel and his team of monitors have repeatedly called on SFUSD to address this problem of "within-school" segregation. The school district, repeatedly, has failed.

"We have never found them [SFUSD] to be in compliance with either the program-by-program or the classroom-by-classroom components of the [consent] decree," wrote Biegel in his April 2005 report. "Indeed, we have consistently found that large percentages of SFUSD students are separated out from each other within individual schools, and that this separation too often results in students of certain races being segregated from students of other races at the program and classroom level -- a separation that reflects academic performance."

Indeed, only within the last few years have the parameters of an astounding achievement gap -- between African-American students and those of other races and ethnicities in San Francisco -- become apparent. San Francisco's African-Americans are the lowest scoring on California state achievement tests, in comparison with African-Americans in every other major urban school district.

Most significantly, the gap between San Francisco's overall score and the score for its African-American students remains far and away the widest achievement gap of California's seven major urban districts. (The Academic Performance Index, or API, measures a range from 200 to a possible high of 1,000.) This gap in San Francisco is 85 points higher than the gap in Sacramento, 96 points higher than the gap in San Diego, and a full 118 points higher than the gap in Los Angeles.

It should be noted that SFUSD's test scores have gone up every year during Superintendent Arlene Ackerman's administration. In fact, during the entire tenure of the past three district administrations (dating back to 1992), test scores have gone up each year. And San Francisco continues to be the highest-performing district when compared with other major urban districts in California, which reflects remarkable work being done by educators.

Even so, Biegel and his team have presented a direct relationship between segregation and the disparities in academic achievement. Yet the in-school segregation has not been directly addressed.

According to Biegel's recent report, "The effect is corrosive and widespread, impacting not only the quality of the education at individual school sites, but also the culture of the community."

Every child's situation, from what he eats for breakfast to how much attention he gets from his parents, affects his day in the classroom. Equally, a child's experience at school, and with any combination of special services that he might receive, affects life at home.

Wesley, a single dad, has a daughter in Dyer's eighth-grade special day class. He is raising her and a son in the Ashbury District, where right now he works at the corner grocery store and does his best to navigate the daily ups and downs of his teenagers' lives. Only lately, there have been a lot more downs. His children's teachers have been calling, reporting behavior problems at school. To top it off, the children's mother, homeless and out of contact for six years, has come back around.

"They've been suspended almost once a week or sent home. Miss Dyer has been a witness this year," says Wesley, who doesn't want his last name used. "I'm to the point where my landlord wants to evict us now because the kids are vandalizing. They came from honor-roll students to this type of behavior."

Wesley's daughter is a bright, pretty, and outspoken African-American girl of 14 who plays clarinet in the band. She's a walking contradiction, slight and small but bursting with spirit. During lunch she floats through the halls at breakneck speed, wagging a finger here or a hand there.

Wesley thinks that some of the change he's seen in his daughter came about when she was put in special ed three years ago.

"I thought that she was able to be in a regular class; whatever they saw [in her evaluation], they read the report a different way," says Wesley. He recalls that she was included in some regular education classes for a period of time but then the school said her problems, which were mainly behavioral, needed special attention.

Wesley is reluctant to sound like he's blaming anyone, but he definitely felt that the classroom change contributed to the decline in her behavior. "If you keep calling a kid a failure, then they are going to start acting that way and thinking that way. So it could have been a hazard to her."