Berkeley Blog: Robert Reich
America is embroiled in an immigration debate that goes far beyond President Obama’s executive order on undocumented immigrants. It goes to the heart of who “we” are. And it’s roiling communities across the nation. In early November, school officials in Orinda, California, hired a private detective to determine whether a seven-year-old Latina named Vivian – whose single mother works as a live-in nanny for a family in Orinda — “resides” in the district and should therefore be allowed to attend the elementary school she’s already been attending there. On the basis of that investigation they determined that Vivian’s legal residence is her grandmother’s home in Bay Point, California. They’ve given the seven-year-old until
December 5 to leave the Orinda elementary school. Never mind that Vivian and her mother live during the workweek at the Orinda home where Vivian’s mother is a nanny, that Vivian has her own bedroom in that home with her clothing and toys and even her own bathroom, that she and her mother stock their own shelves in the refrigerator and kitchen cupboard of that Orinda home, or that Vivian attends church with her mother in Orinda and takes gym and youth theater classes at the Orinda community center. The point is Vivian is Latina and poor, and Orinda is white, Anglo and wealthy. And Orinda vigilantly protects itself from encroachments from the large and growing poor Latino and Hispanic populations living beyond its borders. Orinda’s schools are among the best in California – public schools that glean extra revenues from a local parcel tax (that required a two-thirds vote to pass) and parental contributions to the Educational Foundation of Orinda which “suggests” donations of $600 per child. Orinda doesn’t want to pay for any kids who don’t belong there. Harold Frieman, Orinda’s district attorney, says the district has to be “preserving the resources of the district for all the students.” Which is why it spends some of its scarce dollars on private detectives to root out children like Vivian. The bigger story is this. Education is no longer just a gateway into the American middle class. Getting a better education than almost everyone else is the gateway into the American elite. That elite is now receiving almost all the economy’s gains. So the stakes continue to rise for upscale parents who want to give their kids that better education. The competition starts before Kindergarten and is becoming more intense each year. After all, the Ivy League has only a limited number of places. Parents who can afford it are frantically seeking to get their children into highly regarded private schools. Or they’re moving into towns like Orinda, with excellent public schools. Such schools are “public” in name only. Tuition payments are buried inside high home prices, extra taxes, parental donations, and small armies of parental volunteers. These parents are intent on policing the boundaries, lest a child whose parents haven’t paid the “tuition” reap the same advantages as their own child. Hell hath no fury like an upscale parent who thinks another kid is getting an unfair advantage by sneaking in under the fence. The other part of this larger story is that a growing number of kids on the other side of the fence are Hispanic, Latino, and African American. Most babies born in California are now minorities. The rest of the nation isn’t far behind. According to the 2010 census, Orinda is 82.4 percent white and 11.4 percent Asian. Only 4.6 percent of its inhabitants are Hispanic or Latino, of any race. All of its elementary schools get 10 points on the GreatSchools 10-point rating system.
Hiring a detective to throw a 7-year-old out of elementary school is over the top. What kind of community would do such a thing? Can you say “racist”?
Is placing their graduates at the top of the economic heap really the mission of Ivy League schools? Didn’t these schools, in the past, try to create an intellectual elite (as opposed to an economic elite)? While there’s nothing inherently wrong with parents wanting their kids to get excellent educations, excellent grades, and get into excellent colleges, and then succeed in a highly competitive society, it’s probably fairly safe to say the IQ distribution works about the same in wealthy exurbs as it does in lettuce fields, and things do get out of whack when a white parent’s worst nightmare turns out to be getting stuck with an average kid while some lettuce picker’s kid is born a genius. What should an Ivy League school’s response to such a situation be? You and I both know the answer, and if they do anything else, we can’t think of them as Ivy League anymore.
This story illustrates the fallacy of our school system What is Seattle going to do now that we have no Black kids?
UPDATE: Orinda will allow her to stay. This year. Shining a light on things works!
Roger, is behavior of Orinda covered by the same definition of “ethics” used by you on other legal matters.
Orinda, presumably with unlimited financial resources, is simply using the legal system to enforce its will. Do you consider the behavior of the Orinda attorneys going after this child “ethical?”
It seems to me that your use of the term ethical has no meaning in a system where access to attorneys is anything but equal.
An ethical school district attorney would have tried to talk his client out of doing this.
You do need to make a distinction between the attorney’s role in giving advice to a client before he does something, and the attorney’s role in defending the client after he does something.
This depends on the money being paid for the advice and the morality or lack there of of the attorney.
A doctor who executes a person who he knows is innocent is immoral and, regardless of the rules, unethical.
It’s my understanding that the medical profession as a whole views the Hippocratic Oath as preventing the participation of doctors in any execution, without reference to whether the inmate deserves to be executed, therefore no doctor in the U.S. would ever “execute a person” and the entire question of morality is immaterial when it comes to doctors not participating in executions.
The “morality” of lawyers who represent unpopular clients or causes presents a more opportune target for the self-righteous morality police. Our legal system is based on the notion of “may the most credible evidence and the most persuasive argument prevail.” To get there, you need both sides of the dispute to have diligent and competent representation. I’m not saying “lawyers can do no wrong.” It’s obviously unethical (not to mention immoral) for a lawyer to fabricate evidence or lie to a court. Certainly, there are unethical lawyers who do such things (and get away with it). My own personal view is that if you are not one of those relatively rare people who are honest and moral to a fault, then you should not be a lawyer and should seek some other occupation. Of course, real life is less perfect than that, and people who’ve had bad experiences with shifty lawyers are likely to feel embittered against the whole legal profession and legal system. I understand that. What I can do about it is not be that kind of lawyer myself, and do my best to be the kind of lawyer I think all lawyers should be, that’s all. If I could make other human beings perfect, I would, but I can’t. The legal profession, like all occupations, has its bad apples.
Now, getting back to the question of whether the lawyer representing the school district in this case did something immoral, all I can tell you is that if I found myself in his position, I would have advice the school administrators and/or school board to not go after this kid in this manner, and if I was ordered to do it, that would have been my cue to look for another job. Perhaps that will sound like cheap talk to some readers. It isn’t. I was, in fact, fired from a job I’d had for over 20 years for taking a principled stand on an issue of conscience and I and my family suffered greatly as a result. I’ve paid my dues for the right to call myself an ethical lawyer.
Roger, I think the problem is the lawyers use the word ethics as a façade. Courts should be abut truth, not who has the smarter attorney or the one most wiling to find ways of getting around the intent of the law.
BTW .. the Hippocratic oath is not binding.