How Ravenswood Became the Lowest-Ranked District in Silicon Valley

In November 1954, the first Black family bought a house in East Palo Alto.

Floyd Lowe was watching.

Lowe, then-president of the California Real Estate Association, learned of the sale and immediately planned to capitalize on it. Lowe aggressively pumped out propaganda that a “Negro invasion” was coming to white-dominated East Palo Alto (EPA), property values would plummet, and white families needed to sell before it was too late. Taking advantage of collapsing racial deed covenants—clauses that banned non-white families from buying homes—Lowe bought panicked white sellers’ homes at lower rates, then resold them at inflated prices to Black families who desperately needed housing.

Within six years, EPA’s Black population skyrocketed to 82%, while white-owned businesses fled.

“East Palo Alto was transformed from a white to a Black neighborhood through blockbusting,” Economic Policy Institute scholar Richard Rothstein wrote in his book, “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”

Importantly, Rothstein noted that Lowe’s choices were not just the actions of a private company. “This [was] government action,” he said. “Every real estate agent in California is licensed by the state, and the realtor’s association did not pull the license of the real estate agent who led that effort in East Palo Alto, which means the licensing agency was violating the 14th Amendment.”

A 1961 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report found that of 600 real estate brokers in the Palo Alto area, only three showed properties to buyers on a nondiscriminatory basis, including the same homes to Black families as they did to white families.

“I don’t like to say this, and I don’t want you to misunderstand, but we have a problem in that area… it is a Negro problem. There is a very high percentage there. About 52% of the children in the East Palo Alto schools are Negro,” one anonymous real estate agent said in 1957, to deter white families from moving into EPA.

The Freeway

In 1949, Menlo Park annexed the Belle Haven neighborhood, stripping EPA of roughly a quarter of both its population and its property tax base. Simultaneously, Palo Alto took land to the south for a municipal golf course. Neither city consulted EPA residents.

Between the late 1940s and 1958, the state widened Highway 101, demolishing over 50 of EPA’s local businesses. Residents begged state planners to reroute the expansion eastward toward the Bay. They were not successful. Communities west of the Bayshore Freeway began seceding from the Ravenswood City School District (RCSD) and joining neighboring, wealthier districts, further draining EPA’s tax base.

In the 1950s, the NAACP nicknamed the widened Highway 101 the “Concrete Curtain,” as it physically isolated Belle Haven and EPA from the rest of Menlo Park. Highway 101 was a landmark manifestation of racial discrimination, paralleled by other segregationist barriers, like Atlanta’s Berlin Wall, to save white neighborhoods from integration.

For decades after, EPA remained unincorporated with no city government or zoning authority. Instead, San Mateo County used EPA as a site for chemical waste treatment facilities and a county landfill. To make matters worse, a Phase 1 Environmental Site Assessment of a planned Ravenswood school campus at Runnymede found the ground contaminated with toxic arsenic from a neighboring industrial property.

Today, the average life expectancy in EPA is 75.8 years, more than a decade below the San Mateo County average of 86 years, and the freeway’s air pollution contributes to one of the Bay Area’s highest pediatric asthma rates.

As EPA’s property tax supply dwindled, its educational funding was hit hard.

“EPA schools had deteriorated significantly during the 1950s and 1960s. As white residents fled, unimpeded by racial discrimination in housing and labor markets, they eased the pressure on educators—most of whom lived outside the community—to uphold academic standards… The Ravenswood district itself became a symbol of failure,” historian Russell Rickford said.

When Ravenswood High closed in 1976, enrollment decreased from 1,285 in 1964 to under 900 as surrounding communities refused to participate in integration. That same year, Stanton v. Sequoia Union High School District alleged that the closure plan placed “the burden of desegregation entirely upon Black students.”

Shockingly, EPA students were bused 10-12 miles away to schools like Carlmont and Woodside, even though M-A was significantly closer. In 2013, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights issued a report arguing the arrangement violated Brown v. Board of Education. Only after the threat of a lawsuit did SUHSD discreetly allow EPA students to enroll at M-A.

To this day, EPA is notable as one of the few cities on the Peninsula without a public high school.

In 1976, Margaret Tinsley and over 170 EPA parents and students sued the State of California and nine neighboring school districts, alleging that their school district boundary policy was segregation. Tinsley argued that the district boundaries were being deliberately maintained to trap Black and Latino students in the severely underfunded RCSD and isolate them from the affluent, overwhelmingly white schools nearby.

Tinsley’s original goal was to force the courts to dissolve borders and consolidate the districts entirely. However, after a decade of litigation, the plaintiffs accepted a 1986 compromise: the Tinsley Voluntary Transfer Program.

The settlement had three explicit goals: first, “reduce the racial isolation of students of color,” second, “improve educational achievement of Ravenswood students,” and third, “enhance inter-district cooperation.”

To achieve the first goal, the Tinsley settlement established a lottery-based busing system. Specifically, it allowed 206 minority students (now 135) in transitional kindergarten through second grade to transfer out of RCSD and enroll in participating districts in the surrounding area. Palo Alto Unified takes the largest share, with up to 60 seats annually, while the remaining students are distributed among districts like MPCSD, Las Lomitas, Portola Valley, San Carlos, and Woodside. The second and third goals were “studied” but ultimately abandoned.

Despite salary increases that place Ravenswood teachers in the top third of San Mateo County pay, the district has struggled to retain them. Compared to the statewide average of 13%, 34.5% of RCSD teachers left their schools in the 2018-19 school year, a figure that has largely persisted in years since.

“Every time you have a new teacher come in, they need to be trained and supported. No one is their best teacher their first year, or even their second year of teaching. It takes at least until the third year to get really good. So if we’re losing people at that time, then we have to keep investing and investing and investing,” Executive Director of the Ravenswood Education Foundation (REF) Jenna Wachtel Pronovost said.

The REF, a non-profit founded in 2007 that fundraises primarily from Silicon Valley philanthropists and tech companies, has made substantial progress in securing funding for RCSD. In 2025, per-student spending was $40,001, nearly double the state median of $18,395. The REF raised $12.2 million in fiscal year 2024 and currently funds 20% of the district’s budget, including 36 staff positions, salary increases, and an arts, music, and robotics program that doesn’t exist in most low-income districts.

Despite the significant influx of money, test scores have not substantially increased.

In the 2023-24 school year, less than 5% of RCSD students met or exceeded state standards in math on CAASPP tests. Less than 10% met or exceeded English language arts state standards. By contrast, the statewide average is about eight times higher in math and five times higher in ELA.

All the while, San Mateo County averages 51% proficiency in math and 58% in English. RCSD is ranked #1889 of all 1,908 California school districts.

In the 2008-09 school year, RCSD served over 4,500 students. Today it serves 1449. There are two primary reasons for this.

First, gentrification has displaced many families. A UC Berkeley study found that EPA lost thousands of low-income Black households from 2000 to 2015. A home that sold for around $200,000 in 2009 is now valued at over $1 million. As a result, the current Black population of EPA has dwindled to 9.5%.

Second, charter schools absorb many of the students who remain: Aspire East Palo Alto Charter School enrolls 447 elementary students, while KIPP, Oxford Day Academy, and East Palo Alto Academy admit hundreds more.

In 2023, the district launched Ravenswood Promise, a five-year program that aims for 30% proficiency in ELA and math by 2029. Though ambitious, the goal would still be 17 percentage points below the current statewide average.

Ravenswood remains at the heart of Silicon Valley, at the epicenter of global innovation, bordered by Stanford University and Meta headquarters. Yet, despite the extraordinary wealth surrounding it, RCSD test scores are some of the lowest in the state.

“I came to the conclusion that school segregation was one of the biggest problems we face in American education and that segregation largely explains the achievement gap,” Rothstein said.

Tens of millions of dollars in philanthropic funding have not remotely bridged the academic gap. Four decades of the Tinsley transfer program have not undone the legacy of redlining. The top-third teacher salaries have not stopped more than a third of teachers from leaving every year.

If millions in funding, proximity to Silicon Valley, and four decades of the Tinsley program haven’t fixed Ravenswood’s education crisis, what will?