Berkeley High School in Berkeley, Calif., has always been symbolic for me. I've seen it as a kind of lighthouse for multicultural education and a model of a school that illuminated the often-foggy issues of race and racism. When I was fortunate enough to become part of the history department there in 2001, I couldn't believe what I saw.

Not only did Berkeley High have an African-American studies department , it offered an array of social studies electives that included Chicano/Latino studies and Asian-American history. It even boasted a ninth-grade Ethnic Studies graduation requirement. As a teacher of color who has always placed a premium on social justice education, I thought I had died and gone to multicultural history heaven.

My two years as a teacher of Identity and Ethnic Studies (IES), Language Arts, and Asian-American Studies there were rich and mostly lived up to my expectations. I regularly engaged with students on a myriad of critical issues ranging from the anti-war movement to race as a social construction. But later, as I left Berkeley High, it was becoming increasingly clear that multicultural education was being threatened at the school. This school, which has been in the vanguard of navigating rocky conversations about the value of multiculturalism in public education, was clearly being guided towards age-old practices of institutionalized racism as it made decisions about what to cut in the face of its budget crisis.

Berkeley High is perhaps most famous among education researchers for its racial tensions and its omnipresent achievement gap. Here the richer, more privileged kids from the predominantly white "hills" meet the lower income black and Latino students of Berkeley's "flats." It is a highly contentious, politically charged school that struggles with disparate inequality while simultaneously staking a claim to the radicalism of the Free Speech and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This brackish mix of contradiction is what makes Berkeley High so lively and was the main reason I wanted to work there.

In my first year, the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) faced an $8 million budget shortfall, with another projected $8 million deficit for the next year. Considering that the BUSD is relatively small with only one high school of 3,000 students and an overall annual budget of approximately $100 million, this $16 million deficit over two years constituted a crisis.