Diversity’s Death Rattle

Public schools in Los Angeles offer a glimpse of our ethnically homogenous future.

By Mark Cromer
December 2007

Global warming may be the marquee issue of the moment among progressives, but greenhouse gases don’t elevate body temperature to the fever that strikes many white liberals when the topic turns to racial and ethnic diversity.

Indeed, few issues spark the passion that’s evident as they praise the multiple benefits of racial diversity. Daring to question that politically correct orthodoxy in progressive circles is akin to administering a patellar reflex test—sure to prompt a knee-jerk reaction. That’s when the kicking starts.

So it was a little strange that a stunning set of ethnic statistics provided by the Los Angeles Unified School District that appeared in a news story about school sports earlier this month were greeted with hardly a whimper.

It’s surprising because the data demonstrates the virtual ethnic homogeny that has settled across a school district that loves to glory in its alleged diversity.

The death rattle of diversity can be heard wheezing from the schools across the failing LAUSD, even as it struggles to provide basic instruction amid basement-level test scores, exploding dropout rates and the violent chaos that has gripped many of its campuses.

In contrasting demographic snapshots of LAUSD schools in 1980 and again in 2006, the sheer magnitude of the human tidal wave of sustained illegal immigration is inescapable. Latinos aren’t just the dominant ethnic population on campus, they are now practically  the only ethnic group at many of these schools.

Schools that were marginally weighted between black, white and brown students a generation ago are now approaching ethnic exclusivity; boasting Latino student bodies that eclipse every other group. 

In 1980, Banning High had more than 1,100 black students, 1,200 Latinos and more than 400 whites on campus. Today the school has 135 black students, 59 whites and more than 3,000 Latinos.

Canoga Park High School had almost an equal black and Latino student body in 1980, with both populations close to 300 students each. White pupils on campus numbered approximately 1,300. Today, whites and blacks combined on campus don’t even total 300 students, while Latinos now number nearly 1,500 students.

At Fremont High the ethnic makeover is as stark as the growth of the student population is staggering. In 1980, the school had more than 2,300 black students, just over 100 Latinos and three white kids. By 2006, blacks numbered less than 500 students and the school was down to two white pupils. But Latinos had pushed well past 4,000 students on campus.

These three high schools reflect what has happened across not only LAUSD, but in school districts throughout Southern California, which have been forced to absorb such a massive wave of illegal immigration that it has effectively erased the tangible ethnic and racial diversity that had finally been achieved in public schools during the 1970s and 80s.

Even more intriguing is the ethnic composition of the public schools on LA’s Westside, which is predominately Anglo, upscale and viewed as politically progressive.

Yet neighborhood schools such as Walgrove Avenue Elementary and Mark Twain Middle School—which should be drawing significant numbers of white students from surrounding neighborhoods—instead are comprised almost entirely of Latino students.

According to the California Department of Education, during the 2006-07 school year Mark Twain had a student population that was 80-percent Latino and four percent white. Nearly half of the school’s students were “English language learners” and 97-percent of these students spoke Spanish at home. More than 80-percent of the students at Mark Twain were enrolled in the school’s free lunch program.

At Walgrove Avenue Elementary, the student population is 64-percent Latino and 13-percent white. More than a third of students are English language learners and 84-percent of these students spoke Spanish at home. Nearly 70-percent of the students at Walgrove were enrolled in the free lunch program.

The numbers betray a reality that all the sugary, feel-good rhetoric about diversity cannot conceal: white parents in liberal enclaves aren’t willing to sacrifice their own children’s education to schools that are overwhelmed with cultural and linguistic barriers that both drain resources and corrodes the focus of instruction.

But politically correct orthodoxy dies hard, even in the cold face of facts.

One Westside mother recently used a popular online message board to recount the visceral reaction that a handful of white parents drew from the Latino parents who had been bussed in for a meeting at Mark Twain Middle School this fall.

“It was such a horrendous scene,” the woman wrote. “They looked at us with such contempt and hatred.”

Yet even as she recounted being shouted down, she couldn’t help but praise the school’s “wonderful diversity.” White students at the school now number about four-percent.

In the comment lines that followed her post, fellow Westside parents were quick to empathize with her—while noting they’ll be sending their kids to private schools.

Mark Cromer is a Senior Writing Fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), www.capsweb.org . He can be reached at [email protected]