I appreciate your reply, and you obviously do know a lot about the system and the way it worked. I must add that my parents were both products of Washington state public schools, and my maternal grandparents were both public high school teachers in a culturally diverse community in Eastern Washington for over thirty years. My family cares deeply about public education in Washington state, and they were devastated when in the 1980s my parents had to send me to private school in Seattle.

I realize the tie-breaker only applied to high schools, but the selection process you describe was born out of system that was broken 20-30 years ago and which once impacted all grades. It has to be understood in light of the voluntary desegretion policy and how that policy "gutted" the Seattle Public Schools. According to a Seattle Times article in 2004, there were 86,000 students in the SSD in 1970 and in 2004 there were only 47,000. People were not happy with the district. You really can't argue otherwise.

I think my real point was that intergrating based on numbers will NEVER be enough. And I know this is a difficult proposition to digest. I want to understand what is means to have a diverse society, and what real integration looks like. In my mind it is not enough to throw a bunch of different looking students together in a building. That doesn't cut it anymore. From the outside it looks good, but getting to the heart of segregation is much more complex. Public school policy CAN'T address this, and it shouldn't be asked to. The story about the birthday party was meant to illustrate this. We can send our kids to racially mixed schools, but if they end up only associating with the other rich white kids have we accomplished anything?

And you talk to parents whose children are now in private schools in the city (or who attended private schools in the past 10-25 years) and many of them will tell you about how the Seattle Public Schools pushed them in to it. The district's policies were "ossified" and they needed to be corrected. Wealthy parents (and yes, most of them are white--the city is 70% white after all) do have alternatives and they have chosen them over the years. If these children had never left the system in the first place, the district would look a lot different. That was really my point. And it isn't necessarily a bad thing for end game diversity to go to a school that is 95% white, or black, or hispanic, or whatever. My private high school was 95% white, and yet I have three high school friends in bi-racial marriages. Did their schooling have anything to do with their relationships? Ummm....no.

When I was entering middle school I was assigned to South Shore in the south end of Seattle. On a bus from my house in Magnolia to the school and back was over three hours a day. School buses make stops and take winding routes. Maybe now this isn't a problem, but I can tell you this was the primary reason I was taken out of the public schools in 1987.

I talk about this subject from personal experience. When I was at Leschi Elementary I made very few friends. I didn't participate in after school activies and my parents felt like outsiders. When I transferred to my local neighborhood Catholic school all of this changed, despite the fact my family is not Catholic.

I applaud the school district for putting rigorous academic programs in less desirable neighborhoods to encourage diversity. I think this is a great idea. I also think focusing resources on failing schools instead of costly litigation is a solution. All schools should be good, not just those with magnets, and not just those in the northern part of the city.

And people have already voted with their feet. Private schools have wait lists, and the suburbs are growing like crazy. The Seattle School District can implement policies as much as it wants, but it doesn't change the fact that it failed a generation of kids who now are loyal to their private schools and not interested in improving the public system. My parents, along with thousands of others, paid huge property taxes to support a district they didn't believe in. It's time to give up the bureaucratic policy ghost. Now we can spend our energy on the most important thing of all--the learning.