Author: Rand Quinn, Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools

Quinn discusses the contentious racial politics that emerged from school desegregation and why the school district gradually resegregated despite a court mandate.

San Francisco’s school board is once again rethinking its student assignment system. Debates over student assignment trace back over a half century and map the long struggle to desegregate the city’s schools. In Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools, Rand Quinn explains the contentious racial politics that emerged from school desegregation and why the school district gradually resegregated despite a court mandate. Student assignment — once the remedy for government discrimination through busing and other desegregative mechanisms — soon became a tool intended to create diversity.

Rand Quinn is associate professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the origins and political consequences of private sector engagement in public education, the politics of race and ethnicity in urban school reform and the impact of community-based institutions, organizations and action in education.