The profound challenges of coming to terms with the underlying problems of race raised by the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown were on full brandish at a Berkeley Unified Schoolhouse District forum I attended just earlier the winter holidays.

The fact that a "Black Lives Thing" forum was necessary at all in a place known as 1 of the almost progressive communities in the world was depressing. Nonetheless information technology was as well energizing that a frank conversation forth those lines was being held in a place too ofttimes, and perhaps unfairly, known for its political definiteness.

Check out a Berkeleyside video of the "Black Lives Affair" forum here.

It is not every bit if this is a community that has cached its head in the sand on racial problems. The urban center currently is implementing a multi-agency, multi-twelvemonth initiative called "2020 Vision for Berkeley'south Children and Youth," which began six years agone with the goal of "closing the achievement gap in Berkeley'south public schools by the year 2020."

Last twelvemonth ended very differently than how it began – with a joint coming together final January of the school lath and city council to consider the 2022 Vision plan along with one on violence prevention. In December, the metropolis became the epicenter of street protests in the San Francisco Bay Area for several days when protestors took over freeways and stormed downtown Berkeley in solidarity with boyfriend protestors in Ferguson, where Brown was shot.

Berkeley'southward efforts to achieve equity in its schools began decades before, when many other communities elsewhere in the nation took an contrary path.

In 1968, Berkeley introduced a school integration plan that established school attendance boundaries for its elementary schools that ran from the flatlands abutting the San Francisco Bay to the more affluent Berkeley hills. To make the program work, the city established the starting time voluntary busing program in the nation.

During the last decade, the schoolhouse district fended off a legal challenge to its integration plan that was upheld as ramble by the California Supreme Court.

Todaythe approximately ten,000-student district is ane of the few racially counterbalanced districts in the San Francisco Bay Expanse, with no 1 racial or ethnic group in the majority. Thirty-v percent of its students are white, 24 percent are Latino, 20 percentage are blackness, seven percent are Asian and 12 percent put themselves in the "two or more races" category.

The schools are far more than diverse than the city itself, with a population that is 55 percent white, 19 percent Asian, xi percentage Latino and x per centum African-American, according to the 2022 demography.  That suggests that at least some black and Latino parents from neighboring school districts seek out the Berkeley schools.

These are generally first-class schools that my own children attend. Having attended all-white schools segregated by law in my native South Africa, the diversity of the Berkeley schools is ane reason I am proud to ship my children there.

Yet the sentiments that poured out during the forum – moderated by Superintendent Don Evans, who is African-American – underscore how far Berkeley even so has to go to achieve equity in its schools and in the larger community.

"It is easier to respond to the macro-manifestations of racism and oppression, but responding to the daily micro-aggressions that black people face in the city of Berkeley, in our school districts and our schools requires a lot more courage," said Pastor Michael McBride, the founder of The Style Christian Heart, just blocks from the school board meeting room where the forum was held.

McBride has spent a good deal of fourth dimension in recent months in Ferguson working with youth there as office of his duties heading the Lifelines to Healing Campaign of PICO, a national network of organized religion-based community organizations.

Sheila Quintana, the principal of the Berkeley Technology Academy, the district's continuation school that serves near 100 students, a majority of whom are African-American, described what she called the "resegregation" of the Berkeley schools.

"Yous have classrooms that are all one race, and not some other," she said.  "How can that be in a system where yous spend more money than most districts because yous desire a quality education for all students?"

Jamaica Moon, who was born and raised in Berkeley, is herself a graduate of Berkeley High and is a leader of the Black Parents Affinity group, at present has 3 children in the Berkeley schools, all under the historic period of eight. "They have never known a white president (of the United States)," she said, to adulation from the 200 people who showed up for the forum. "All they know is a black president."

Even so when speaking to her vii-year-old son, she says, "I want to make certain he knows how to answer when he is pulled over past the police."

Kadijah Ways, the president of Berkeley High's Blackness Student Union, helped organize a peaceful walkout of some of her fellow students the previous week in support of the Ferguson protesters.

"I feel unequal, and I am," she said. "In the Berkeley bubble, people feel there is no racism, and that is ridiculous. I don't know if it will end in my lifetime. My trivial blood brother asks me 'why why why'? I tin can talk virtually 'why this is' a lot, but what is going to be more than constructive in the long run is how we are going to fix it."

Berkeley voters have for years demonstrated their support for their schools, including many who accept no school-historic period children. In 2006 80 percent approved a parcel tax that generates nigh $30 1000000 for its schools each yr – an average of nigh $three,500 per student. The extra funds have immune the schoolhouse district to survive the upkeep cuts of recent years improve than most districts in the country, and to offer a range of services to students from all racial and ethnic groups.

But the racial and ethnic gap in bookish outcomes remains vast. In 2013, African-American students in the commune had an average Academic Operation Index score of 674, compared to a score of 923 for whites – a 249 betoken divergence. Latino students had an API score of 764, and Asian-American students 834. Until last year, the API was the primary style the state measured school and student performance

Likewise in 2013, only half of African-American and Latino students scored at a expert level on the California Standards Tests in 3rd grade reading, compared to xc percent of whites. About three times as many African-Americans and twice as many Latinos were "chronically absent" from school – meaning they missed at to the lowest degree 10 percent of the school year – compared to white students.

The schools and the community notwithstanding grapple with racial inequities that Berkeley has striven to overcome for many decades.

"I see Trayvon Martin, I run across Michael Chocolate-brown, I run into Eric Garner on my campus every day," said principal Quintana of the students at her school who are at risk of dying through gun violence.

She recalled a contempo graduate who was shot to decease in neighboring Oakland final year. At the student's June graduation "I shook her easily and gave her a hug, and in July she was murdered while waiting for her beau," she said.

"What do you say to teenagers who are looking at y'all as the authorisation, about these questions about their existence? What do you tell them?" Quintana asked.

"Yous tell them the truth," she said. She stepped beyond the cynicism that pervaded the evening event and pointed to some contempo improvements in African-American teaching outcomes in the commune, including higher graduation rates.

"You tell them it is a prevarication that considering you lot have black pare you are not every bit intelligent equally someone else. It is a lie yous have no innate potential. It is a lie you cannot achieve your every dream and every goal."

Louis Freedberg is executive manager of EdSource.

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