The Consent Decree

With an increasement of students attending public schools, there tends to be a shortage of space and resources. Schools begin to limit open seats for new comers. They also increase the difficulty on academic standards. The Consent Decree was created in order for equality between different ethnicities in public schools. Some administers created control target race numbers for their faculties. The article Desegregation in a Diverse and competitive Environment: Admissions at Lowell High School by Racy Ming describes how Lowell high school changed its admissions policy to have an equal number of each ethnicity in the school and the result of that change.
Lowell high school was known as the best public high school in Mississippi. Lowell prepared its students for college level work. It was known as a very academic competitive school that is hard to get into. For admission the school asked to see students’ standardized test scores as well as their middle school GPA. They took both the standardized test scores and middle school GPA and they made a point system which created a student average. If the students received 69 points, then the school would accept that student right away if the student received anything lower than 69 points, then that student would have to wait until all students with 69 points were

accepted. In 1990’s the admissions office began to evaluate applicants’ ethnicity part of the admissions process. This new regulation was created because of the Consent Decree, “the Consent Decree specified that no one ethnicity could exceed 40% of the student population within an alternative school such as Lowell” (Ming, 178).
The Consent Decree is a desegregation plan which was created in order to help all races and ethnicities have an equal opportunity in receiving public education.

To follow the guidelines contained in the Consent Decree, Lowell changed its admission applications to cutoff applicants based on their race. This caused many issues for instance; many Chinese Americans felt that they were being targeted because there was such a high percentage of Chinese Americans in Lowell high school. This caused the case Ho v. SFUSD to be created. The Ho v. SFUSD case was created by Chinese American parents who felt that that the Consent Decree was harming Chinese American

students.
The outcome of the case Ho v. SFUSD was to end race based assignments within the school district. There was a new enrollment plan was proposed which would have looked at race, family income, reading and math scores and language proficiency the information was going to be used to create a diversity index. The court rejected the new proposal due to race not being used as constitutionally. The board decided to give “preference to students who live near the school, have siblings attending the school, those who need special programs, who live in certain zip codes in the city or who live in public housing” (Ming, 189).
Lowell changed its admissions for the class of 2000, they kept that 80% of student applicants would be based of the cutoffs and 20 % would be from the “value added” group. Value added group was constructed based on the following requirements socioeconomic, public benefits status, residence in public housing, homeliness and living below national and state poverty levels. The value added applicants also had to meet certain criteria in the middle school course work and extra-curricular activities and residence zip code. Applicants that were admitted with lower scores had to attend a summer session and had to take a class during the year known as “Strategies for Success” which helps the student prepare and adjust to the academic environment.

In conclusion, when schools start to limit the amount of ethnicities in their population, many times parents’ will fight for their children’s right to attend to a great school. This kind action was shown in the case of Ho v. SFUSD, parents’ of Chinese American students were fighting with the school district about the Consent Decree with created a limit on number of ethnicities attending each school. The result of Ho v. SFUSD is that schools will not base race for the student’s admission to the school.