Are neighborhood schools the panacea?

San Francisco's Mission High School. (Photo by KC Jones from the San Francisco Schools blog.)



A reader praises the San Francisco Grand Jury report on the SFUSD assignment process, and asks what I have against kids' attending their neighborhood schools.

Nothing. As I've said, the ideal is a good school in your own neighborhood. And I agree with the Grand Jury report’s recommendation that the confusing, alienating and ineffectual Diversity Index be scrapped in favor of a straight lottery. (The Diversity Index kicks in when a school is oversubscribed, and assigns students based on demographic characteristics.)

But outside of that, the Grand Jury veers off into areas where it honestly doesn't even begin to grasp situations, and makes actual recommendations based on utter incomprehension. I found that both irresponsible and scary. For example, its section on alternative schools reveals total befuddlement about what alternative schools are (agreed that it IS confusing), yet in that state of utter incomprehension, the report still suggests eliminating many alternative schools And it clearly says that the district should be encouraging as many current principals as possible to leave – which is honestly not a view that anyone with actual contact with our schools would share. Here’s my blog critique of the report.

When we first applied to kindergarten in 1996, the school assignment system sent you to your own “assignment area” school. Your only other options were the district’s alternative schools, which were by request and had no neighborhood assignment zones. The alternative schools were either popular and hugely oversubscribed – thus very difficult to get into – or in a few cases struggling and unappealing.

We were among the many families who didn’t want our neighborhood school, so we took the alternative school route – after a stressful battle to get in. Today’s all-choice assignment system is far from perfect, but despite its many problems, it appears to me that parents prefer having the wider options.

What do the numbers show? The Grand Jury report states that 30 percent of San Francisco families choose private or parochial schools, and implies inaccurately that that’s a new high caused by the Diversity Index. But I attended a presentation on SFUSD demographics several years ago (presented by an outside demographics consultant as part of a committee I served on) that gave figures back to 1982, and the 30-33 percent figure going to private school has held steady since then, under several different assignment processes, including the neighborhood-based process of our era.

By the way, the neighborhood school we fought hard to get out of was Miraloma Elementary, around the corner from us – largely disdained in 1996 and now wildly popular (more so now than Lakeshore, the school we fought to get our son into). The day the appeal letter arrived from the district assigning our child to Lakeshore after all, the phone had been ringing with the news that it was coming today, so I was waiting outside for the mail carrier. When I opened the letter, I sat down in my driveway and cried with relief.

Another comment on neighborhood schools: Some commentators are voicing the opinion that low-income families in disadvantaged communities too would like to send their kids to neighborhood schools. That view implies that those families are being prevented from doing so now, but that’s not accurate. Since schools in low-income neighborhoods are often struggling (due to a critical mass of at-risk, high-need, disadvantaged students), those schools are almost never oversubscribed. So anyone who lives nearby and requests the school can get in, and families who live nearby and don’t make a request at all are also assigned to those schools by default – SFUSD’s assignment process defaults to the nearest school that has openings. The assignment process also works to offer low-income, high-need children access to higher-performing, less-challenged schools if their families request it, though. Does anyone really think that’s something the system should not offer?

Back to the befuddled Grand Jury report: After reading it, some parents in various discussion forums are proposing innovative new ideas for an assignment plan. I can’t say how well any of them would work, but it seems to me that the Grand Jury report would have been useful if the research had sought out ideas like that and presented them. The Grand Jury had such huge difficulties with comprehension that this would have been a lot to ask, unfortunately. Too bad they can’t go back to the drawing board.

 

Topics: San Francisco schools , Grand Jury