Before I came to work at High Country News, I lived
in San Francisco, a beautiful city of sometimes ugly contrasts, one
involving education. In wealthy, cosmopolitan San Francisco, public
schools are a horror.
There are many reasons why S.F.
schools have largely stunk for three decades, but one of them
involves settlement of a 1978 federal discrimination lawsuit. Under
the settlement, S.F. schools — which had been egregiously
segregated, with black students receiving abysmal educations
— were integrated, which is a good thing. But under the
settlement (or consent decree), kids were bused across the city,
willy-nilly, so schools met racial caps.
Improvements in
education, meanwhile, became an afterthought. A 1997 article I
edited explained the judicial involvement this way: “(W)hile
the court continued to monitor the situation and as children
continued to do poorly in school, the consent decree was tinkered
with time and again. Eventually, the decree specified what programs
would go in which schools, who would be hired to run the programs,
where those employees would be put, and what would be done if and
when the programs and associated people didn’t work.”
By the time my son was ready to attend school a few years
later, a lawsuit by Chinese-American parents — who alleged
racial caps discriminated against their high-performing children
— had technically ended the court-micromanaged strewing of
kids across the city. Still, a computer formula assigned your kid
to a school, which might or might not be anywhere near your home,
and the assignments still seemed to correlate to someone’s
notion of diversity nirvana. And, by and large, the schools still
stunk, particularly for the African-American kids the lawsuit was
meant to help.
If you wonder what San Francisco schools
have to do with High Country News, take a look
at “Salmon Justice,” Ken Olsen’s in-depth look at
U.S. District Judge Jim Redden and a long-running lawsuit that
deals with salmon restoration in the Snake/Columbia River Basin.
Clearly, the federal government has pushed the legal envelope for
years, refusing to offer up anything close to a legitimate plan for
saving endangered and threatened salmon and steelhead. As a result,
Redden has given clear and justified warning: If the Bush
administration doesn’t put forward a viable salmon
restoration plan, he may take “more dramatic actions.”
The administration’s behavior in this case —
including, especially, its absurd contention that man-made dams are
part of the natural environment — has been reprehensible. On
the emotional level, it would be satisfying to see Redden slap the
feds down, take control of the Columbia/Snake hydroelectric system,
and require the breaching of a few fish-killing dams, to boot.
Just the same, I hope Redden’s measured warning
alerts the relevant federal agencies (and the interest groups suing
them) to a hard reality: Salmon may not thrive any better in
courtrooms than schoolchildren, and judicial control can be onerous
for both sides of a lawsuit. Yes, if the Bush administration
continues to drag its administrative feet, Redden must take control
of the river. I suspect it would be a lot better for the fish,
though, if the federal government decided — at long last
— to follow good science and established law, so he
doesn’t have to.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Schooling, fish.
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