♪♪♪ male: Congress passes the most sweeping civil rights bill ever to be written into the law.
And thus reaffirms the conception of equality for all men that began with Lincoln in the Civil War 100 years ago.
The negro won his freedom then; he wins his dignity now.
Pablo Miralles: On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.
In other news, I was born in Los Angeles, California.
Lyndon Johnson: Its purpose is not to punish.
Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions, divisions which have lasted all too long.
♪♪♪ Pablo: For much of America, desegregation was a traumatic experience, but I went to school in Pasadena, California, where things worked out differently.
♪♪♪ Pablo: I went to John Muir High School on the Westside of Pasadena and, though it wasn't perfect, for the most part we all got along.
♪♪♪ Pablo: Every November, for over 70 years, Muir has played its homecoming football game against their cross-town rivals, Pasadena High School.
The game, known as the Turkey Tussle, is played in the Rose Bowl.
It's a big deal in Pasadena.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ [cheering] Shelley McDonald: It's great to go to games and to see generations.
That's very, very unique.
I don't think that we have the same story as most of the high schools.
♪♪♪ Cameron Turner: That kind of, you know, real, sort of, definitively, kind of, black Northwest Pasadena, kind of, group.
Our unique racial, socioeconomic integration of Pasadena schools was so basic to our lives that it was not something we gave a lot of thought to.
Pablo: At my 30th high school reunion, I couldn't help but notice there was more diversity amongst the alumni than the current students.
Cameron: I remember being at Turkey Tussle about five years ago and one of our class members watching the students on the nearside said, "I'm glad my kids aren't at Muir anymore."
male: When I became a father, I started to think a lot about where my son will go to school.
My high school years were filled with soccer, JV football, stage crew, student committees.
I had a good high school experience at Muir, but would I send my son there today?
I don't know.
♪♪♪ Pablo: Pasadena, California, has been a prosperous, cultured, and diverse city since its founding in 1886.
A few years later, they established their first high school.
Located near the city center, the aptly named Pasadena High School was as prestigious as any in the nation.
On New Year's Day 1890, Pasadena began its most renowned event, the Tournament of Roses.
Designed to promote the region's mild winters, the tournament featured a parade of elaborate floats decorated in local flora and sponsored by important commercial and civic groups.
Chuck Malouf: Glendale was the KKK capital of southern California.
A lot of people don't know that.
The predominantly African Americans that came into town to work came in on the old redcar.
You had the signs, "Coloreds have to be out of town by sundown," right there on the stop, okay?
This was the way it was.
Bob Barnes: All of the surrounding districts were segregated: Glendale, South Pasadena, San Marino, Arcadia, 100% white.
Pablo: As the city grew in both population and wealth, it attracted workers of Japanese, African, and Mexican descent.
Almost all of these new residents settled in the northwest section of the city.
It was there in 1926 that the city built its second high school.
Unlike the college prep focus of Pasadena High School, the new John Muir Technical High School would emphasize trade skills.
Both of the high schools in Pasadena were nominally integrated; in practice, almost all of the minority population attended Muir.
The school student bodies are well represented by their most famous alumni: George S. Patton attended Pasadena High School; Jackie Robinson who famously broke the color barrier in baseball, graduated from Muir.
John Muir High School's Alumni Hall of Fame highlights its unique diversity, pioneers and leaders in their field: a nine-time Academy Award winner; a Fortune 500 CEO; a MacArthur Genius Award-winning author; winners of Pulitzer Prizes, Peabodys, Emmys; fashion designers; artists; military leaders; a Medal of Honor recipient; politicians; world-class musicians; also a jazz great; and a rock legend.
John Muir is also famous for producing professional athletes and Olympic medalists.
One often-overlooked Olympic athlete was Jackie Robinson's older brother, Mack.
In 1936, just a year after graduating from Muir, Mack Robinson participated in the Berlin Olympics.
He finished four-tenths of a second behind Jesse Owens in the 200 meters.
When he returned to Pasadena with his silver medal, only his family was there to welcome him.
The city gave him a job as a street sweeper.
Years later, he was the head of security while I was a student at Muir.
My friends and I had no idea he was an Olympic medalist.
On the surface, the city of Pasadena seemed to tolerate the non-white community Muir served but a 1941 survey exposed the city's true feelings about its black neighbors.
Almost 80% of the residents felt that black people in Pasadena made the city less desirable.
Almost 90% preferred segregated housing.
And finally, almost 60% of Pasadena's residents would prefer if their children attended a school with no black children.
Renee Tajima-Peña: And so I looked at the directory.
I said, "Oh, Mom, this is so great that everybody would want to live together as a community.
They're all living in the same blocks."
And she looked at me, like, "Are you an idiot?"
You know, when we moved in here, we were redlined.
This is where the realtors directed us to.
This is the only place we can buy a house.
George Van Alstine: We bought a house across from Pasadena High School.
Our nextdoor neighbor who had a Swedish accent told me the ground rules of the neighborhood and the final sentence was, "'Course, we don't sell to no blacks."
Cameron: For a long time, Lake has sort of been the traditional dividing line, racially, in this city.
My dad, to this day, talks about how for years real estate agents wouldn't even show black families homes on the east side of Lake.
♪♪♪ Doug Werk: You know, it was really a great time in life in the '50s and--when we were there, and yes, we thought it was a special place.
Shirley Werk: Just the whole attitude, I think, of the young people was very different than it is now.
Loren Shirar: Muir has the favorable prestige in the class of '52 of electing a black as ASP president.
And that told me, right then and there, this person was a friend of everybody's.
I mean, how would he win in a ratio of 10:1?
Ladawn Law: My English class was predominantly black and Hispanic.
I don't think there were any white kids, but across the hall in English class, there was one black girl and what I noticed is the work I had already done at Washington, so I went to the teacher and I said, "You know, is this a class for the dumb kids 'cause I've done all this work before."
And then one day, he pulled me aside and he said, "You're going to be leaving this classroom and you're going to be going across the hall."
That made two black kids.
Christian Clausen: Then I had a part-time job down in Alhambra, Touie's Drive-In Restaurant.
One night we were closing the restaurant at 2 o'clock, I couldn't get my car started, so Charlie Green offered me a ride home.
As we got closer to my neighborhood, I could see him getting nervous and he said, "Chris, don't ask me to do this again because I don't think I'm gonna get out of here without getting pulled over."
And that was just a real shock to me.
I mean, I'd--it never occurred to me and so that kind of brought me into a real-life situation there and took some of my naiveté away.
Pablo: Both of my parents were immigrants from Argentina.
They settled in Southern California in large part because of the excellent public schools.
They had seven children.
For my family, the tumultuous events of the 1960s never affected our pleasant suburban life.
But even in Pasadena, things were changing rapidly.
In 1961, Pasadena tore down the old Pasadena High School and built a state-of-the-art campus on the eastern edge of the city.
As luck would have it, the school board decided to redistrict the neighborhood of East Altadena, moving hundreds of white kids from Muir to the new PHS.
The following year, the neighboring town of La Canada created its own school district.
By 1964, nearly 800 white students left Muir.
Like most of California, Pasadena funded its public schools well.
It was also home to some of the wealthiest families in the nation.
Historically, 20% of school-aged children attended the growing number of small elite private schools around the district, over twice the national average.
Molly Munger: I went from the private school to the public school.
My first reaction was, "Oh my God, look at all the great things these public school kids have."
Art, music, physical education, clubs, student government, debate.
I mean, whatever it was, it was richer and better in the public schools than it had been in the private schools.
And I just feel certain that the gap, the funding gap, was either not very big or, you know, non-existent.
[emergency siren] Pablo: In the summer of 1965, only 20 miles from Pasadena, the Watts riots broke out.
male: What bugs you the most?
male: White men.
male: All white men?
male: Not all, just the ones that's pushing the negro.
male: Do you think you're gonna continue to be pushed around by white men?
male: No, I don't.
male: Why not?
male: Because the negroes are stepping up, they're waking up, and they're gonna do something about what the white man did to them.
Pablo: After the riots, the Westside experienced a wave of white flight.
As the 1960s drew to a close, Muir was becoming the black high school in Pasadena.
Bob: When I would be out in the community and I would be visiting with a shopkeeper or a clerk and they would say, "Oh, what do you do?"
"I'm a teacher."
"Oh really?
Where do you teach?"
"I teach at John Muir."
"[gasping] Oh my goodness, do you really?
Isn't it just horrible?"
Chuck: When I taught at Pasadena High, Muir was known then as "that" school on "that" side of town.
A racial attitude, we knew that.
Bob: "Poor Muir.
Poor Muir."
That was a chant that caught on at all the schools Muir played.
Nancy Spangler: We did not have equipment that they had at PHS, and that we had microscopes in our--and our science labs were not equipped and that they were not able to do the experiments that we were supposed to be able to do.
Gary Stellern: And on the desks you had a gas jet, electrical outlet, and a sink--water.
Most of the units didn't work.
Michele Zack: School Board kept claiming that they didn't have money and that there was a financial crisis when, in fact, there wasn't one and there was really no reason to be misdistributing the resources the way they were being done.
So, three high school families decided to sue the Pasadena Board of Education.
James Spangler: We saw a excellent high school that was arbitrarily being turned into a minority high school.
And we felt that was very wrong because we felt, and I think we were right, is that it was the best high school in Pasadena at the time.
We had more merit scholars, national merit scholars, than all the other two high schools put together.
Bob: And three very, very conservative board members, Enghome, Lemont, and Lowe, all Republicans, all who were proud to be Conservatives, came up with a plan, an integration plan.
Al Lowe: Muir was gonna lose all the students from La Canada High School.
We made a recommendation to district the schools a certain way.
East Altadena, for instance, was to go back to Muir where it used to be.
We had a big uproar by the community.
James: If the board had been more flexible, the lawsuit would never have gone forward and the federal government would not have come in.
Pablo: The Spangler lawsuit focused solely on the racial balance at the high school level.
But overwhelming evidence proved decades of system-wide discrimination leading the judge to order desegregation of every school in the district, kindergarten through 12th grade.
Nancy: We were coming down the steps 'cause he had just--they had just announced the decision.
We were happy.
♪♪♪ Nancy: Yeah.
male: The most expensive bussing program ever undertaken in a city outside the South began in Pasadena, California.
Here, the court had ordered integration.
Fifteen thousand students were moved by bus, half of the youngsters who live in the district commuting to school today for the first time.
Most parents seemed to go along with the plan.
A few did not.
James: And the people that came in were totally against integration.
They tried to cover it up, but they didn't do too good.
male: Governor Ronald Reagan set the stage today for another court test in California of bussing to achieve school integration.
He signed a bill to outlaw bussing without the consent of the parents of each student.
male: I am for it.
I think it's the answer to Pasadena's problems.
female: I don't like it, not with the taxes and we're within walking distance of three schools right here that we have to bus our children.
We're strictly against it right now.
Robin Johnson: My dad, he and a couple of other fathers from the neighborhood, got on the bus with us, first day of school, and I thought it was because they just wanted to be, you know, to be with their children, but it turned out that they were concerned about our safety.
Pablo: Unlike the conflict that scarred other cities with court-ordered desegregation, Pasadena's buses were met with no violence.
The year before bussing, my local elementary school was almost entirely black.
I would attend a year later.
This was my class.
James: Cortines, who was the superintendent and has got all sorts of accolades, well, we integrated the schools, was, "Just throw 'em together and see what happens."
Ramón Cortines: You can't lead by avoidance.
And so many now and in the nation and in the state, "Tell me what you want and I'll do it," rather than, "Do what you think is right, and take the consequence."
Cameron: That was the beginning of the bussing for integration.
I think I was in the 1st grade the first year that that began.
And so, for us, again, that was the norm from the very beginning.
We were always in classrooms that were multi-racial, multi-ethnic.
So there was never anything unusual about that.
We all grew up in an environment where integration was our norm.
So we didn't have a lot of--I don't have the consciousness of significant racial strife.
You could go out on campus and you could sort of say, "Okay, this particular part of the pergola, you're gonna find a lot of the white surfers congregate here.
A lot of the black athletes, football and basketball players, kind of hang here.
Okay, a lot of the white baseball players might be kind of over there.
So we could, in a sense, kind of map out the campus, but the interesting thing was, that did not really mean, like, balkanization.
These were not groups that were opposed to one another.
♪♪♪ Cameron: And we were just a laidback, you know, having a good time, group of kids.
There was no traumatic experience that thrust us all together and forced us to have to respond.
That's the advantage that we had over maybe some of the older students who had perhaps been in high school when bussing was put in place.
We have the advantage of growing up with it from kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, and just flowing through.
Ramón: See, that was the good point in the desegregation because the children that were coming then had been in a desegregated elementary and middle school.
♪♪♪ Ramón: There were some good things about that hasty decision that we weren't prepared for.
Pablo: At my 30th reunion, I reconnected with many of my old classmates.
male: Say, can you believe 30 years?
all: No.
male: You're getting old.
Chuck: And you see the kids that went through this whole process, you know, that started with the bussing and that.
You've got your four ethnic groups.
They're all hugging and kissing each other.
They're all still friends, you know, 10, 20, 30 years later.
I think that makes it all worthwhile.
Pablo: I wondered why integration is no longer a priority in public schools when this is the result.
Timothy Harris: Because my experience was that we all basically got along.
See, I was kind of under the impression that racism, as it was, was not quite as intense or was mostly okay, it mostly going away.
It was gonna disappear soon.
Eddie Newman: I think bussing was healthy.
Even though bussing caused some people to leave, we still had a critical mass of students and we had really all races who really truly believed in the importance of diversity, so that caused us to maintain a strong school.
But with Prop 13, it was more than just-- it was about resources.
Pablo: Proposition 13 was a ballot initiative that changed the state's constitution in 1978.
Property taxes were slashed, which led to a drastic reduction in school funding.
Bill Bogaard: The question is whether the negative impacts of Proposition 13 on funding available to public schools were greater than the challenges created by the integration plan.
They hadn't thought about that particular dilemma earlier.
I do first react that the integration plan was the more permanent impact.
Howard Jarvis: We have a new revelation against the arrogant politicians and insensitive bureaucrats whose philosophy of tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend, elect and elect and elect, is bankrupting we the American people and the time has come to put a stop.
Pablo: Howard Jarvis, the man who spearheaded Proposition 13, started his political career fighting bussing in Los Angeles.
male: I voted for Proposition 13 because I believe the taxpayers have just got to tell the government a message that we're mad as hell and we're not gonna take anymore.
Pablo: In 1978, California's per pupil spending was 14th in the nation; 40 years later, it was around 46th.
The Prop 13 tax revolt did not end in California.
Within a few years, similar legislation would spread across the country.
Eddie: We could no longer provide for the students and so we lost a lot of middle-class students of all races and that's when we really began to pretty much serve a lower socioeconomic level of student and we never gained back the funds from Prop 13, as you know, and so we still live with those challenges today.
male: How catastrophic was Prop 13?
Ramón: I'm gonna be a heretic.
I saw it as an opportunity.
Rather than wringing my hands and standing in the corner like Pontius Pilate, I said, "Okay, this is what we're dealt with, how are we going to keep the schools running?"
Cameron: Nothing has been more devastating to public education than budget cuts.
Ramón: We don't spend our money wisely.
Cameron: I have never understood the philosophy of some in politics who say we can't improve education by throwing money at the problem.
First of all, that's a very insulting way of talking about public school funding.
Throwing money sounds like some random, reckless, irresponsible expenditure, but that is not what school funding is about.
Ramón: Many times, we do things in education, and this district was no different, "Well, we've done it for 20 years."
But nobody's evaluated it.
So you did it for 20 years.
Is it producing any result?
Is it really beneficial?
How does it weigh compared to something else?"
Cameron: When we attended public school, growing up in Pasadena when we did, there was funding for a whole range of educational programs, whether it was remedial education, whether it was enrichment for gifted students.
The fact that we had as many opportunities for extracurricular activities was a direct result of funding because the money was there for the faculty to support those student organizations.
Ramón: Poverty does not stop kids from learning.
You have to have high expectation for teachers, for students, and for their families.
Chuck: Seventy percent of the district's budget goes for staff, so if you've got a big chunk of your budget and you have to cut, you go cut people.
When you cut people, you cut programs, you increase class size.
It's been happening for my whole career.
Alonzo Wilkins: There needs to be more in the schools.
I mean, when you cut programs in the schools, all you're doing is putting the kids that were--would have been in those programs into the streets.
Pablo: Ten years after graduating from Muir, I was working in Los Angeles when the city erupted.
male: Another citywide curfew is about to go into effect.
Earlier today, Rodney King spoke publicly for the first time since four policemen were acquitted in his beating.
He appealed for an end to the violence that has left at least 35 people dead.
Pablo: I was confused.
Growing up in Pasadena and attending Muir had given me a false sense of hope that things were getting better.
Rodney King: Wanna say, you know, can we--can we all get along?
Can we--can we get along?
Can we stop making it--making it horrible for the older people and the kids.
Pablo: It came as a shock to learn that the man at the center of the riot, Rodney King, had grown up in my neighborhood.
We had attended Muir at the same time.
♪♪♪ male: We'll get our justice.
They've won the battle, but they haven't won the war.
We will have our day in court and that's all we want.
Pablo: Remember how people got along at my high school?
I ignorantly thought that that was the norm.
Turns out, I was wrong.
♪♪♪ male: The trial was in the spring.
Lawton Gray: Mm-hm.
male: And the riots.
Can you just go over what it was like to be a young African American male and anything that you think might be, like, looking back, and think, wow.
Lawton: You know, it's funny 'cause I got goosebumps thinking about that.
That experience, at the time, was difficult for me.
I remember Mr. Barnes.
He was a US history teacher, right up the stairs and it was just a really difficult moment for him.
He was very emotional and, you know, he let us share out our feelings in class.
And we had a walkout.
We left school, we had white students, Asian students, black students, Mexican students.
We all marched out to City Hall.
Every student felt a certain way about what occurred.
And it wasn't like, "Oh, hey, I'm walking out of class.
I'm good."
It was more of, like, you know, "That was really jacked up," and not because it was just a John Muir alumnus who that occurred to, because a lot of students didn't know Rodney King was John Muir.
It wasn't like, "Oh yeah, Rodney King, he's like a famous athlete or a musician or a poet, like we have on our Hall of Fame.
He wasn't a Hall of Fame member.
But it was just the fact that that happened to someone and people felt it wasn't right.
I've gotten pulled over.
You've had those experiences.
But it was like, this is on a national level, like, "God, this is what they really think of you?"
So it was tough.
Pablo: Lawton graduated from Muir in 1993.
By that time, bussing in Pasadena had ended.
Muir and the community it served were becoming increasingly Latinx.
Politicians capitalized on the racist backlash to this demographic trend.
male: They keep coming, 2 million illegal immigrants in California.
The federal government won't stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them.
Governor Pete Wilson sent the National Guard to help the border patrol, but that's not all.
Pete Wilson: For Californians who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws, I'm suing to force the federal government to control the border, and I'm working to deny state services to illegal immigrants.
Enough is enough.
male: Governor Pete Wilson.
Pablo: Pete Wilson championed Proposition 187, a measure that would bar undocumented immigrants from receiving Social Services or sending their kids to public schools.
female: Foreigners, they go down and they can get all the services they want.
You go down there and ask for services, and you can't.
Pablo: The measure was controversial, but Proposition 187 passed.
Ultimately, it was found to be unconstitutional.
However, the debate surrounding Prop 187 gave fuel to the impression that California's public schools were failing, overrun with immigrant children.
Alfredo Recendiz: So when I graduated in 1994 to when I came back in the early 2000s which was under 10 year, the biggest difference was the difference racially.
I left in 1994, the school was pretty diverse.
When I came back in 2002, it was much less so.
And it was a lot more Latino students than there were in the '90s when I went to school.
The perception was, when I went to school, that it was a black school and the perception in the city, it was a black school.
The perception still is that it's a black school and I don't think people are really quite aware of how much change has occurred here.
Pablo: Soon, the idea that public schools needed drastic reform would take hold nationally.
George W. Bush: It's time to come together to get it done so that we can truthfully say in America, "No child will be left behind."
Cameron: The idea that government is going to use funding as a sort of negative incentive, "Okay, if your test scores drop below this level, we're gonna withdraw funding," what sense does that make?
How do you improve a school by taking money away?
Lawton: There was some good that came from "No child left behind," but then there was also a lot of bad, a lot of thinking that every school was created equal when they're not actually equitable schools.
But they're being penalized for taking money that they actually need.
Manuel Rustin: So, no child left behind basically stripped the teacher and schools and districts of the ability to really be flexible with the students that they have, meet them where they're at, and take them where they need to be.
His name was Abraham Rodriguez.
At the start of the school year, I always ask the students, "What do you hope to gain from this class?"
In his letter to me, he wrote that he wanted to learn more about Mexican Revolution, he wanted to learn about Emilio Zapata and all these Mexican heroes.
I was thinking, you know, I wish I could really do that, but in order for the test scores to show that we're a successful school and that we're performing, I had to make sure that I had--that I covered all these other things.
When you're dealing with struggling students, just hooking them in is the most important part, and then make these connections.
He ended up, basically, dropping out of school.
He wasn't at Muir for very long.
I think he went to some charter school and that wasn't successful and then I see, you know, a newspaper headline about a year later that he'd been shot and killed in Pasadena.
Pablo: No child left behind's over-reliance on standardized tests created a new way to separate so-called good schools from bad schools.
Studies show that standardized tests measure a school's socioeconomic make-up and not the quality of the education being provided.
Websites like greatschools.org rate schools from one to ten and about half of a school's rating is based on standardized test scores.
Muir is a three.
Online real estate listings then link to sites like greatschools.org.
Because of the misleading ratings, wealthier families avoid schools with low scores, which reinforces segregation.
Instead, their kids disproportionately attend private or charter schools.
Since the end of bussing, Muir has served primarily lower-income students so, unsurprisingly, its rating is low.
In my experience, quality of a school's instruction has nothing to do with the numbers assigned by sites like greatschools.org.
It's worth noting that greatschools.org is funded in large part by the Walton Family Foundation, a big proponent of school choice and privatization.
♪♪♪ Alfredo: It makes me feel awful that people who live in our community choose not to send their child to our school.
And in Pasadena, you have a lot of people on the Westside of town who have been told over the years "the schools in your side of town aren't any good."
Pablo: This prejudice doesn't just affect Muir.
Remember my segregated local elementary school, the one my class helped to integrate?
This is how it looked in 2019 when it was closed due to poor enrollment.
Combination of lower birthrates and a growing number of families choosing to avoid the school meant that more than 50 years after the start of bussing, even as the neighborhood was becoming more diverse, the school was more segregated than ever.
Muir had always been integrated, but it is important to note that for decades the school was primarily white.
At the same time, it was extraordinarily rare for schools to have any diversity prior to the Civil Rights movement.
In the early '50s when Muir was electing a black student body president, practically no black children in the United States attended white majority schools.
In 1970, the year bussing started in Pasadena, a third of the nation's black students attended integrated schools.
By 1990, at the height of desegregation nationally, bussing was being phased out in Pasadena.
From this point on, Muir has followed the national trend and become increasingly segregated.
Alfredo: We don't get as many of the students as we're supposed to get.
We have about 900 students.
However, if we had the amount of students who are supposed to go to here, we would have 2500 students, only because they have decades and decades of perceptions of brown and black schools, or brown and black communities, as being substandard.
Betsy DeVos: Parents no longer believe that a one-size-fits-all model of learning meets the needs of--need of every child, and they know other options exist, whether magnet, virtual, charter, home, faith-based, or any other combination.
Pablo: I believe that Secretary DeVos is sugarcoating what she really wants, which is to take tax dollars earmarked for public schools and let parents spend it on private tuition instead.
She's talking about vouchers.
Lawton: The whole idea of vouchers just is, to me, it's--there's no equity, there's no equality in a system.
Is it fair?
It could be fair, but is it equitable?
Absolutely not equitable.
Are they taking my special education students?
I don't think so.
Are they taking my students who have multiple Ds and Fs from middle school?
I don't think so.
So, who are they really taking?
So that's my kind of bone to pick with school vouchers is that you're taking the cream of the crop, to a certain extent, that qualify for your school, but the thing is, we're still up to the same levels as those private schools.
And that's what really upsets me is that even though you try to take--skim the top, we're still at the same level as your school.
Pablo: Now, the demographics are changing in the neighborhoods surrounding Muir.
White families are moving back.
Lawton: It's definitely a strange phenomenon that you have such a diverse changing community but the school isn't diverse and changing like the community is.
When I went to school here, we had every nationality here.
We had white, we had a lot of Japanese students, we had Korean students, African American, Latino.
Destiny Iwuoma: Muir was something different than when I went here.
Like, there were actually other people than just black and Latinos that came to the school and, like, I see--used to see the pictures of, like, the marching band, the football team, the cheerleaders, the dance team.
I used to see, like, there's other people that went to the school and it just seemed really rich and full of, like, school spirit.
It made me wanna be a part of that.
It made me feel like I was missing something in my Muir experience.
Lawton: But now, it's strictly pretty much African American and Latino, which is not a bad thing, but it doesn't represent the community that's around this campus, which is interesting.
Alfredo: I don't think in my lifetime whites will ever return to PUSD nor John Muir High School in the number that represents their population in Pasadena at 61%.
The perception in Pasadena that Muir is a black school, that Muir is a minority school, is so embedded in the psyche of our city, I don't think we're gonna get to that number.
And, as a teacher, I don't care.
Whoever walks through my door is who I'm teaching.
I don't need to have white students in my classroom to have a dynamic classroom, to have an educated classroom.
Would I like them there?
For sure.
But do I need them in my classroom?
No, not at all.
Shelley: 'Cause people are gonna take their kids to wherever.
I have talked myself blue in the face, all right, to people trying to say what's Muir, I teach there, it is okay.
People that live right up the street, you know, "Well, I'm not gonna send my child there," you know, because people will believe what they need to believe.
Lawton: The biggest component for us is making sure that we're creating that right atmosphere, and we're changing the perception, 'cause it's all about perception.
And I would say probably about 10 years ago, would I send my kid to John Muir?
Yes, 'cause I went here, but I was, "Eugh, it would be a little tight."
But I would still do it.
But now, it's like, it's an absolute I would bring 'em to John Muir.
Brian McDonald: Yeah, so when I came to Pasadena, I, you know, one of the first people I talked to was a realtor and I explained to her, you know, I was looking for a home and that I was here to be the chief academic officer of the school system.
And she asked me, you know, "Do you have any kids?"
So I said, "Yes, five school-aged kids."
And then she proceeded to tell me--recommend for me, some school options.
And I was really surprised that none of the options she presented was a PUSD school.
That's when I realized there is something different here in Pasadena.
Ella Urlu: Nationwide, there's like, 94% of students go to their public school high schools and in Pasadena which is such a diverse and rich city, only 54% of students go to their public high schools.
And so, I think that was a really shocking, like, realization for me and something that has definitely pushed me to become more knowledgeable about my community, yeah.
female: Okay, that's the end of our session for today.
Talk to me.
You wanna talk to me?
Destiny: Yeah-- female: All right, so let's pause, you guys remember him?
Think back to, like, Christmas.
You were in here and you were talking to them, Destiny, about do they wanna be an A or did they wanna be an F. Destiny: Oh, yeah.
female: Do you remember that?
Destiny: Yeah, I do remember that.
Wait, so are y'all A's or F's?
male: I'm in the middle.
Destiny: Did some of 'em become A's, now some of-- female: Yes.
And some of them aren't necessarily A's yet but they're C's and B's.
And some of the F's are D's, so we're at least going this way, and not this way.
Destiny: Okay, so wait, real quick, I'm gonna ask y'all one question.
It's--let me see if y'all can, like, keep up.
Stand up if you plan on going to college.
Ooh, you stood up-- Lawton: Being a principal of a school like John Muir is almost like being a private school principal, you know?
You care about the curriculum, you care about instruction, you care about things going on in your campus, but you have to be a seller of your school because now you're competing.
People don't feel they have to go to their school that's in their area.
You have to compete for every student that's out there.
And that's a good thing.
Competition's good.
Alfredo: I went into my son's class to just trying to check up on him.
It struck me in that moment that there were no white students in this class at all.
Later on that day, after school, I said, "How many white classmates do you have this year?"
And he said, "I don't have any."
So then we decided to do the math.
I said, "Okay, let's go back on your entire PUSD existence, your whole PUSD career, and let's take a look and see, maybe in the year books and see what we can think of."
And he said, "Dad, I already know."
He said, "In elementary school, I might have had four or five white classmates."
And then he said, "In middle school, I might have had two."
Are you saying that in your entire career you've had seven classmates?"
And he's like, "Yeah, Dad, I've only had seven white classmates in my entire career."
And it hit me, he can't even go to a school with people who look different than him but who live in his neighborhood.
He knows that there's over 50% of white kids in Pasadena, but he sees when he comes to school that they're--that representation isn't there.
And as a dad, it struck me, the most socialization that he had with white kids was on his baseball team, on his travel baseball team, on a team that I had to pay for in order for him to play with other white kids.
♪♪♪ Pablo: I knew that Muir had become less diverse, but I didn't know how the school compared academically with the Muir I had attended 30 years earlier.
I took a tour of the school with Principal Gray to find out what Muir had to offer.
Even after decades of budget cuts, the facilities had actually improved since I was a student at Muir.
An unintended consequence of Prop 13 was that school districts increasingly started putting bond measures directly on the ballot.
Unlike tax increases, these measures generally pass.
The tricky part is that, by law, these bonds can only be used for building and maintaining facilities, so schools often struggle to afford enough qualified faculty and staff.
Despite these challenges, Muir continues to find a way, not only to educate the kids, but also to produce scholars who are accepted to University of California campuses at a higher rate than most of the neighboring public schools.
A recent partnership with Pasadena City College gives Muir students the opportunity to graduate with up to 2 years of college credits while earning their high school diplomas.
This could save a family tens of thousands in college expenses.
At Muir today, graduation rates are higher and discipline rates are lower.
By almost every measure, the school has improved academically.
This hasn't stopped the perception in the community, even among some alumni, that the school has gotten worse.
Lawton: Here at John Muir High School we have the Arts, Entertainment and Media Academy, we have the Business and Entrepreneurship Academy, and we have the Engineering and Environmental Science Academy.
These academies are set up for students to get real-world experiences here at the school and prepare them to go out into the real world, into the job force, with tools and experiences that will help them be better in their workforce and later in life.
Each of our academies have something special here at John Muir so, for example, our Arts, Entertainment and Media Academy has a brand new $3.1 million production studio that students actually can do video editing.
They have two green screens where they can create whatever environment they wanna create to do their videos in.
They have three professional cameras in the studio.
At our Business and Entrepreneurship Academy, we have a--we actually have a banking institution on our campus.
Our students are working in the branch, been trained by the Pasadena Service Federal Credit Union staff, and then with our Engineering Academy and Environmental Science, we have something called the Solar Cup where students actually build a boat from scratch and they actually race it against other competitors.
We also have the other electives like Spanish and art and music, and all I ask is to come on a tour.
If you don't like it, you don't like it.
But I haven't had one parent who's left the tour saying, "I wouldn't--this was a waste of time."
They've all said, "My gosh, I didn't know you had this many things for kids on campus."
Ella: My experience as a student within the district, I've heard a lot about the perceptions of the schools that I've gone to, and I remember distinctly, like, when I came to John Muir High School my peers were being, like, "Why did you come here?
Like, aren't you supposed to be, like, 'the smart kid'?"
I think I've gotten the best education possible, coming to John Muir and so it's really sad when I know other families are, like, "Ooh, I don't wanna send my kids there," out of fear instead of, like, actually I feel like wanting their kids to succeed.
[laughing] Sorry, that was a bold statement.
♪♪♪ [chanting] ♪♪♪ Manuel: I think it's criminal that we don't support our public school system the way we support our military, for instance.
I have students, former students, who are now soldiers and they put their lives on the line for our country here every day.
And I feel teachers and counselors and everyone involved in education fights for freedom in their own way, not out in the battlefield, not overseas, but in our classrooms.
And the lack of respect towards public education, lack of support, the blame game, this is all tearing down our students' opportunities for success in the future which is only gonna bring our entire nation down.
So until public education gets the respect that our military does, we're facing dark times.
male: Of the historic United States Supreme Court decision for the desegregation of public schools, a veritable Emancipation Proclamation of the mind and the human spirit.
We have come to demonstrate the unity of the Negro and their allies.
Pablo: School desegregation did not begin with the signing of the Civil Rights Act the day I was born.
It started 10 years earlier with the Supreme Court's Brown versus the Board of Education ruling.
This ruling stopped the explicit segregation common in many schools in the South, but it did nothing to stop the de facto segregation common in places like Pasadena.
Back then, it seemed to me a lot easier to identify an integrationist from a segregationist.
Growing up, I always believed that the Supreme Court was an instrument of equality.
Today, I don't feel that way at all.
In 2007, the Supreme Court quietly ruled that even voluntary desegregation plans were unconstitutional.
Chief Justice Roberts' opinion states: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Outraged by Roberts' backwards interpretation of Brown versus Board of Education, Justice John Paul Stevens was compelled to state in his dissent that no member of the court that he joined in 1975 would have agreed with this decision.
Although it was the lead on the nightly news the day of the decision-- male: How are schools around the country going to diversify their student bodies if they can't do it on the basis of race?
Pablo: It was overshadowed the next day by bigger news.
male: The iPhone went on sale.
female: I feel like I won the Olympic gold medal right here.
Pablo: There were no protests, no riots, no outrage.
Five members of this group, hardly a picture of diversity, yet old enough to understand the impact of the Civil Rights movement, chose to eviscerate the cornerstone of integration.
Pretty much no one noticed.
I certainly didn't.
My son wouldn't be born for another year, and I wouldn't be interested in public schools for several years after that.
The government can no longer end segregation in public schools.
Now, it would be up to parents like me.
♪♪♪ Cameron: Public schools in Pasadena did not end up like this just because that's the nature of things.
We had a system in place that was working.
It was working.
It was working, it was working, man.
And a whole lot of people who had been mad since 1970 found a way to undermine the system.
And now, we have a school that has a-- now we have a school, John Muir High School, we're on this historic campus, a school with this rich extraordinary heritage of achievement and success, much of it against the odds, a school which has been set up to fail, so that somebody who never loved us in the first place could say, "See?
I told you," and it's a--shame, 'scute my language.
But it is.
Pablo: John Muir High School was integrated from the day it opened its doors in 1926.
For over half a century, the school was well funded and represented the entire community it served.
I know; I was there.
I look at Muir today.
It continues to weather the budget cuts that started with Proposition 13, the rise of school choice, and the abandonment of public schools by the middle class.
Despite all these challenges, Muir continues to successfully educate students, so would I send my son to Muir?
Yes.
Yes, I would.
I think every parent should visit their local public school, challenge the false perception that public schools are inherently worse.
I believe we all are responsible for segregation.
American public schools are now more segregated than before desegregation began, and it seems to me almost no one cares.
Thurgood Marshall: For unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together and understand each other.
Desegregation is not and was never expected to be an easy task.
Racial attitudes ingrained in our nation's childhood and adolescence are not quickly thrown aside in its middle years.
The short run may seem to be the easier cause to allow our metropolitan areas to be divided up into two cities, one white, the other, black.
But it is a cause I predict our people will ultimately regret.
And for these reasons, I respectfully dissent.
male: Thank you, Mr. Justice Marshall.
male: Swing low 15. all: Swing low 15.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Kennedy Hackett: Whether you are headed to a 4-year university, trade school, a local community college, the workforce, or the military, you have the capacity and tenacity to make a difference in our community.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Lawton: Would I send my kid to John Muir?
Yes, 'cause I went here but I was, "Eugh, it would be a little tight."
But I would still do it.
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ...