The Berkeley Unified School District’s
(BUSD’s) Reparations Task Force (RTF) began meeting last April. The RTF has
been tasked with determining how the BUSD could fund reparations, what form of
reparations it would recommend to the BUSD Board and formulating a
recommendation on how the Board could implement that program. No other school
district in the US has taken it upon itself to cure the ravages of slavery. Berkeleyside,
a local news periodical, recently published a story
written by two RTF members, “Now is the time for reparations in Berkeley
schools” attempting to justify their mission. I was not convinced.
Most school districts find it
challenging enough just to keep their K-12 students educated in these
challenging times of teacher and budget shortages. Nonetheless, other school
districts are not located in Berkeley, California, a long-time nucleus for progressivism.
It is utterly unclear how the
BUSD, or any local school district, is suitably equipped to remedy the damages
caused by historical slavery. Most folks correctly understand people
possibly affected by the ravages of past slavery are far more numerous than one
community’s Black K-12 students.
From its outset, the RTF believed
the BUSD has caused direct harms to some of its students from segregation,
discriminatory policies and other legacies of chattel[1]
slavery. Thus, it supports the district paying these students financial
reparations for these harms.
Last year the State of California’s
own pioneering reparations task force presented its assessment of the issue
from a more apt, state-wide perspective. Its report recommended to the
legislature that eligible, long-standing Black California residents each could be
owed up to $1.2 million for repairing the damages of slavery and racism. Given
the controversary surrounding reparations, this report seems to have been
subsequently swept under Sacramento’s political rug. Neither the Legislature or
the Governor have provided any meaningful public responses regarding paying for
reparations.
The BUSD RTF has postponed until
this summer making their recommendations about how to fund, plan and implement
a reparations program in Berkeley’s schools. The RTF states that a majority of
its members are descendants of individuals enslaved in the US. The RTF has undertaken
one “community engagement survey” to solicit input on the types of reparations
it should recommend. This survey seems to have been sent to 3 groups of people –
descendants of enslaved Californians, students at BUSD schools and students’
caregivers. The reported RTF survey results published in Berkeleyside appear to
be erratic, as shown in the chart below.
This chart states there were
1,386 total respondents (All Respondents) for this question. But the sum of
survey responses from the 3 groups – Descendant Families, Current/Former BUSD
Students and Caregivers of Current/Former BUSD Students – adds up to 1,649
respondents, 263 more people than the total respondents. This makes no sense
unless All Respondents includes none of the other groups. Or the RTF made a
straightforward addition error. Or was there another group of 263 people who
received the survey, but was not reported. If the All Respondents are a
distinctly separate group, who are they? This inconsistency is a mystery.
The RTF has never stated that
their survey was sent to people who were representative of Berkeley’s citizenry.
It is thus unsurprising that an astounding 85% of all survey respondents said
they were “in support of financial payments to students for educational
purposes.” The surprise is that it was only 85%.
These BUSD RTF results are very
different from other reparations surveys. Past surveys have focused on possible
remedies provided by the federal government, state governments or local
governments. A 2021 Pew survey
found that 75% of reparations supporters say the US federal government, not other
government organizations like cash-strapped school districts, has all or most
of the responsibility to repay descendants of enslaved people. Like other surveys,
this Pew survey found that a large majority of Black adults (77%) think the
descendants of people enslaved in the US should be repaid in some way and that
only a slight minority (18%) of White adults agreed that reparation payments
are appropriate. A 2023 poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies
showed California voters opposing reparations payments by a 2-to-1 margin.
The RTF will likely advocate to
the BUSD that fiscal reparations are wholly justified for every Black student who
attends K-12 schools. Using the most recent available data, there are 1,134 Black
students in the district’s 17 schools. They probably
also will promote reparation payments be made to former qualified BUSD students
as well. The bigger the proposed total reparations payments are for the BUSD,
the more satisfied the RTF will likely feel. The RTF may have a larger target
in mind for the reparations amount per qualified Black student to out-progressive
the efforts of both the ill-fated San Francisco Reparations Advisory Committee (that
recommended $5 million per qualified person) and the aforementioned California Task
Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans’ $1.2
million per qualified person.
So far, the RTF’s mandate
apparently excludes addressing common-sense questions about why a local school
district should even provide such reparations, or how the district could afford
to pay such reparations, given its educational mandate. The latest Berkeleyside
RTF story
(March 27) mentions that they may recommend adopting a new Berkeley tax to
provide funding.
The simple fact is neither
Berkeley or the BUSD can afford direct financial reparations or other
reparations-related expenditures. If the city and/or BUSD somehow decided to
pay reparations, it would need to raise the needed substantial funding either
through a new city tax or a public, general obligation (G.O.) bond. A new tax
might only require a simple majority of voters to pass, the bond would likely
require approval by at least two-thirds of voters.
No matter where funding would come
from, getting Berkeley’s voters to pay for BUSD reparations would be a
singularly fraught and divisive campaign. Currently, less than 8% of Berkeley’s
population is Black/African-American, 12.5% of BUSD students are Black. Another
possible, more politically-expedient option for the BUSD is to accept the RTF’s
findings in June, then offer an honest, sincere apology for the harms to Black
students it directly or indirectly created in the past, and say nothing with
respect to financial reparations.
So far, this strategy seems to be
what the California Legislature and Governor Newsom have adopted after the
California Task Force submitted its 1,000 page report last May. Subsequently, public
talk about state-funded reparations largely disappeared into Sacramento’s
political ether. Also, San Francisco Mayor London Breed indirectly but publicly
disagreed with her Committee’s direct reparations recommendations. Her office
stated, “The Mayor does not believe that addressing the needs of the African
American community requires adding more bureaucracy,” referring to the
establishment of a proposed SF Office of Reparations.
Like many school districts, the
BUSD is now facing mounting financial challenges because of continuing reduced
student enrollment
in Berkeley’s public schools. The BUSD’s fiscal future is cloudy, at best. In
2017, 10,340 students were enrolled in BUSD schools. In 2022, it was 9,073
students. That’s a 12% drop over the last 5 school-years. Making a similar
calculation of the BUSD average student enrollment change during the last 3
school years, it’s a 7.8% drop. BUSD personnel have said that yes average
student enrollment has fallen, but the rate of the drop is lessening. That’s
true, but immaterial.
Reductions in student attendance presages
diminished BUSD funding from the state because California expenditures for K-12
education are based on average daily student attendance in each district. Like
other California school districts, it’s virtually certain that state education
funding for BUSD will decline. In 2023 overall California state education
funding shrank by $2.1 billion.
Last year the BUSD’s director of
fiscal services cautioned that the coming 2024-25 school year could be a “reality
check” for the district if the state’s funding formula for schools does not
change. It’s California dreamin’ to believe this formula will change to benefit
BUSD and other school districts. Why? Because last month California’s projected
2024-25 tax revenue deficit increased to a sizeable $73
billion. More state money going to school districts is an unlikely prospect,
no matter how worthy.
Fortunately for the BUSD, last
month Berkeley voters once again strongly supported the city’s Berkeley Schools
Excellence Program (BSEP), a local property tax increase now responsible for
17% of the district’s budget. The district budget needs to continue rising. A
growing proportion of the BUSD’s costs has been focused on providing support
for “high-need” students. Evermore districts, like the BUSD, will be facing
daunting “fiscal cliffs” due to 4 factors: no additional temporary
Covid-related education funds are available now to school districts, shrinking
K-12 student enrollments due to changing demographic trends, continuing
inflation and appropriately-increased teacher/staff salaries. Because 83% of the
BUSD’s budget are employee-related expenses, the impending fiscal cliff will result
ultimately in school personnel reductions.
The RTF survey purposefully was not
sent to a statistically-representative sample of Berkeley citizenry. It’s thus
no wonder that an astonishing 85% of respondents said they were “in support of
financial payments to students for educational purposes.” Do you think 85% of
Berkeley voters will be willing to pay for cash reparations to the 12.5% of BUSD
students who are Black? I doubt it.
The survey-based percentages
presented by the RFT, as shown above, have nothing to do with whether all
Berkeley residents believe it’s appropriate for the BUSD to pay reparations to K-12
students who have suffered from the impacts of chattel slavery and its legacy. Not
being representative, the RTF survey results cannot characterize anything definitively
beyond the survey subgroups’ respondents themselves.
Berkeley has been justifiably recognized
as an honest-to-goodness mecca of progressive thought, but I question whether a
majority of voters would say yes if asked to actually pay reparations to
qualified Black BUSD students. After all, when the Berkeley City Council placed
its biggest-ever bond measure (Measure L) on the ballot 2 years ago with hopes
of funding a very broad array of activities, it went down in ignominious
defeat.
The RTF’s public statements about
school-based reparations payments confirms both their strong advocacy and that they
hold an atypical worldview where providing sizeable direct reparations payments
only to their small number of Black K-12 students will meet little resistance. Depending
on the specifics, I can support indirect reparation remedies to qualified Black
citizens. I cannot support the Berkeley school district providing direct
reparation payments to its Black K-12 students.
No comments:
Post a Comment