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San Francisco

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

John Kaplan
John Kaplan*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

San Francisco's ethnic minorities tend to be clumped in relatively small areas, with the Negro population being concentrated in three main districts. This concentration of ethnic groups leads, of course, to racial imbalance in the schools, a problem which is most serious in the elementary schools. If one considers the four main groups of the city to be Negro, Oriental (which includes the city's small Japanese and Filipino population as well as the Chinese), Spanish white, and non-Spanish white, in 1964, 36 of the 96 elementary schools contained 90% or more of one group. Of these, nine were Negro, five Oriental, nineteen Spanish white, and three non-Spanish white. In the junior high schools there is less racial imbalance, but still some: in 1964 two schools were 80% and 61% Oriental; two were 86 and 83% Negro; and two were 85 and 72% white.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , November 1967 , pp. 64 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

Editors' Note: Condensed by the staff of the Law & Society Review from a report to the United States Commissioner of Education (“Race and Education in San Francisco,” 107 pp.).

References

1. In 1965 the percentage of nonwhite in the school population was 43% (44% of the K-9 students and 40% of the 10–12 grade). It is estimated that in 1971, 53% of the school population will be nonwhite (54% of K-9 and 51% of 10–12). Population Projection to 1971, prepared for San Francisco Unified School District by Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, March 31, 1967, p. 23.

2. Superintendent Spears said:

In my own experience in the schools—and this has been true of principals and other people working in the schools—if you go out into one of our schools and ask the teacher or principal approximately what percentage of the children, say, are Chinese or Negro, that teacher would immediately stand back and show surprise and say, “I never thought of it before in those terms.” In other words, when a teacher is teaching children in the situation that we have where our classes are of comparable size all over the city, she is not conscious of racial distribution. I'm sure of that because she is too busy teaching school to be thinking about something else.

3. Superintendent Spears said: “If we were preparing to ship these children to various schools, in predetermined racial allotments, then such brands would serve the purpose they have been put to in handling livestock.”

4. Dr. Spears said: “You are asking me to do exactly what I have recommended to the Board of Education against doing. If we deliberately set up a school district according to race, I will have to have direction from the Board to do it.”

5. The story is told of a former Assistant Superintendent who looked at his watch one morning and said proudly, “It's 9:35 in the morning. In every fourth grade in the city—fractions.”