It’s harder to spot racism in California but it’s rampant in schools. COVID made it worse

Growing up in the South comes with a masterclass in the two distinct forms of racism — covert and overt.

Overt is when the most popular Main Street shop in your hometown hangs a massive Confederate flag, displays Ku Klux Klan outfits and makes money off Jim Crow memorabilia. Covert is when white teachers typecast rambunctious Black students as troublemakers and routinely punish them, rather than make that extra effort to connect, mold and inspire.

Years later, I learned that two Black students who always got kicked out of my eighth-grade math class had met a tragic fate: one was in prison, the other was dead.

When I left Georgia for California after college, I imagined the West Coast was the promised land for those of us with melanin. I wasn’t prepared for the complex brand of racism here — pernicious, obscured and sometimes deployed by the most staunch proponents of social justice. Just look at the reaction to ending single-family zoning.

It’s most pervasive in the state’s public education system.

Sacramento City Unified School District has its hands full with overt racism right now, highlighted by multiple incidents of racist vandalism, and the fallout from a Kit Carson International Academy teacher who was fired for using racial slurs. The mother of a 15-year-old Black girl had to pull her daughter out of Folsom High School last month after administrators failed to address relentless racial bullying.

The covert racism in California schools is systemic. You can measure it.

Last year, Sac City Unified graduation rates among Black and Latino students declined; twice as many middle and high school students received failing grades compared to the prior year; and 18% more students dropped out. Covert is when unequal opportunity ends in unequal outcomes.

Issues around chronic absenteeism transformed into students flat out disappearing when classes moved online two years ago. A study by the Bellwether Education Partners suggested that 3 million students in the U.S. never participated in distance learning, the vast majority either students of color or under a socioeconomic category synonymous with a more difficult life.

The children who did show up still struggled. A January 2021 PACE study found “substantial” learning losses for California students in their English and math classes, with double-digit gaps behind the normal rates on standardized tests. In one of the more extreme examples, fifth-grade English learners were 30% behind. In Sacramento, white students consistently outperformed their Black and brown peers.

Faced with all of this, as schools visibly held the fabric of our communities together by offering free meals to every child, California struggled to reopen schools. Whether it was labor politics or the lack of leadership by Gov. Gavin Newsom, learning languished.

Despite California’s immense wealth and its notoriety as a hub for innovation, the Golden State remains woefully average both in achievement levels and in per pupil spending. Unsurprisingly, the states that invest the most in their students rank the highest in test scores.

Pandemic sped this up

None of this is new. Inequality and institutional racism was rampant in California schools well before the pandemic. COVID just sped it up.

In early 2020, many districts were roiled by policy changes to graduation requirements and how to get underachieving Black and Latino students into four-year universities after high school at similar rates as their white peers. The rollout in some districts lacked any sort of plans for how they could actually close the achievement gap. I once heard a Santa Rosa school board member say the “friction” from hastily imposing the change meant they were on the right path — the friction being scores of Black and Latino students failing their new classes. Rather than reforming math instruction or instituting a more practical curriculum that still satisfied the new grad requirements, a generation of students was sacrificed to appease social justice-minded trustees.

It’s that same shortsighted mentality that led to the ouster of three San Francisco school board members in a recall election last week. The board members had pursued changing supposedly racist school names while the district’s students — 86% nonwhite — were stuck in watered-down virtual classes without a plan to return. Another major factor was the resistance from white and Asian families who became the face of the recall because they opposed a new random lottery system at the elite Lowell High School. The admissions change would presumably increase the enrollment of Black and Latino students at the prestigious school, but the way it was handled — and some old tweets from a now-recalled board member — enraged local Chinese families.

The surfacing of these systemic issues and the lack of cohesion among diverse groups are why California conservatives squawk about school choice when, in fact, parents with means do have choice options they freely utilize. Liberal households game the open enrollment system, or go full-on white flight and place their kids in charter or parochial schools. Black and brown families often lack the resources to navigate those same channels.

California’s public schools are trapped in a self-fulfilling cycle, sinking under the pessimism from privileged parents that have the means to put their children in better schools. Rather than commit to an insecure public system, California families are increasingly opting for a safer bet in the private or nonprofit sector.

California’s inner-city districts are hurt most by this. New charter schools in Oakland proliferated after 2000, more than tripling over an 18-year span. Last week, the Oakland Unified school board voted to close seven schools and reduce the population to two others. Despite major protests, it almost felt inevitable.

That’s covert racism.

In a few years I’ll probably have kids of my own, and a few years after that, I’ll be enrolling them in a school. I’m a product of public schools. I went to a junior college then got my degree at state university. It’s a path I’m proud of — I’m just not sure whether my children can replicate it.

I, too, see the writing on the wall, but it’s not a racial epithet. It’s a slow drain of resources and public trust. It’s the public school system in California failing the students that need it most.

Given the forces at work in California, my future family could end up being part of the problem.

This story was originally published February 20, 2022 at 5:00 AM.