The San Francisco Public Press’s Jeremy Adam Smith just published a devastating report on the inadvertent segregation of the city’s public school system. If you’re thinking of sending your kids to SFUSD (or even if you’re considering having kids at all, really), it’s worth a thorough read.
Although many parents report satisfaction with the status quo, the 50-year goal of achieving real classroom diversity is receding fast. Even when factoring in SF’s unusual demographics, the reality is unseemly. For instance, white students comprise only 12 percent of the district, but they’re not distributed equally. At one quarter of SF elementary schools, less than two percent of the students are white (making them “apartheid schools”), even as majority-white schools have begun springing up since 2009. As research shows that student performance correlates strongly with diverse schools, this is a big step backward for the kids.
What’s causing this distortion? The unintended consequences of school choice, which is prized by parents and may be politically impossible to abolish. When sought-after schools with experienced teachers have more applicants than spaces, the assignment system uses four criteria to determine who gets to go there — meaning it’s anything but a random lottery. (Notably, it’s forbidden from using race or ethnicity.) Allowing parents to rank their preferences has, in the words of one Board of Education member, created a “mismatch of intent and results.”
And how. Schools like Noe Valley’s Alvarado Elementary are full of children who live below the poverty line, many of them Latino, while the surrounding neighborhood is considerably whiter, with a six-figure median income. As Smith notes, “Though San Francisco has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country and one of the highest income levels, 58 percent of public school students are poor. And almost all the poor children are Asian, Latino, and black.”
While the existing system might sound like the stereotypical case of well-intentioned, top-down liberalism clumsily undermining itself through sheer complexity, it’s not that easy. School choice acts as a force multiplier for privilege — even though some affluent parents believe it’s working in precisely the opposite way. Smith relates how one undocumented Mexican immigrant felt comfortable sending her kids to an underperforming neighborhood school because it was nearby and 90 percent Latino, while dual-income white families are going on interviews and setting up spreadsheets years before their children even enter kindergarten.
Meanwhile, 30 percent of San Francisco children attend private school (the highest rate in California), and unsurprisingly, those students skew white. The public school system they’re leaving behind is arguably more segregated than it’s been in decades, a sea of inequity in a city of plenty.
[Via SF Public Press, photo from Thinkstock]
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