Myths about the SFUSD application process -- a message of hope

November 8, 10:10 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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I agree with Board of Education member Rachel Norton’s sheepish confession: I love the annual School Enrollment Fair. Whatever challenges different SFUSD schools face, what we see at that bustling event are proud members of every school community eagerly showing off their schools’ best faces – schools they genuinely care about.

With an increasing number of public schools on the A list every year, the crowds of anxious parents in quest of the perfect school just can’t leave that event feeling cynical, at least about the schools. And that’s despite the excessive bashing our public schools take from so many quarters – from the mainstream media to (I’m heartsick to say) President Obama.

But many of those anxious parents are pretty cynical about the assignment process, and are obsessing about the minutiae. I discovered that my longtime friend Vicki Symonds, who works for Parents for Public Schools doing outreach and has become the go-to resource on the fine points of the computerized assignment algorithm, is something of a rock star now.

I haven’t blogged much about those fine points – as a parent of older kids, I tend to take the long view. t did  help connect an involved parent/writer with examiner.com, which I hope will result in a new examiner covering those sought-after details, possibly in just a couple of days. I'll announce it when it happens.

Meanwhile, in my role as taker of the long view, I’m posting and refuting 10 myths connected with SFUSD school assignment, in the hope that I can help young parents understand some of the complexities that took me many years to grasp. Here are the first five.

Myth No. 1: It would be simple and fair if we just went back to good old neighborhood schools. Everyone would win.

That view is widely held by parents who live near obviously successful schools. But – the crucial point -- it’s pretty much unknown among those who live near less-popular schools. (Remember, guaranteed neighborhood assignment is essentially tantamount to mandatory neighborhood assignment.)

My own neighborhood school is the ideal example. When we applied for kindergarten for my older child in 1996, we were thankful that we weren’t locked into our unpopular nearby school, which was shunned by most neighbors, filled with bused-in kids from elsewhere, and headed by a worn-out-looking and uninspiring principal. When we got the letter assigning our son to our chosen alternative school, Lakeshore, I was waiting outside for the mail carrier (having been alerted that this was the day). I tore open the letter, sat down in my driveway and cried with relief.

Well, now my neighbors are frustrated and sometimes outraged that they don’t have guaranteed access to the school we were so relieved to escape -- Miraloma Elementary.

That illustrates the issue of fairness, or the depends-which-side-your-bread-is-buttered-on factor. And that’s complicated further by the fact that disadvantaged children from the highest-need demographics are more likely to live near struggling schools, and the current choice system is designed to give those children access to more successful ones.

All that said, though, I actually think that environmental concerns are likely to – and probably should – lead to more emphasis on proximity in a redesigned assignment process. The current system demands far too much carbon-emitting and congestion-producing driving.

But that needs to happen in full awareness of who wins and who loses.

Myth No. 2: But if everyone went to their neighborhood school, parents could be more involved, there would be more community pride, and that would make all schools successful.

That sounds good in concept. But there’s plenty of reality demonstrating that it doesn’t work that way. Take Oakland: Neighborhood assignment has led to a district with a massive gulf between the successful hills schools and the beaten-down flatlands schools – a far more extreme gap than has ever existed in San Francisco schools. There’s a lot of experimentation going on in Oakland right now with charter schools and other new schools with special status – which have more appeal specifically because they’re a way to escape troubled neighborhood schools. (In general, I’m skeptical about many of these experiments, but that’s another commentary.)

And think about it: While geographical convenience is a benefit, parents are still more likely to feel ownership of a school they’ve actively chosen, as opposed to one that was an automatic, mandatory assignment. To again cite “back in the day,” SFUSD families used to be assigned to their “attendance area” school, which was usually the closest school (with a few exceptions; explaining here would be off topic). Parents could request an alternative school, as our family did. Most likely that school was quite a bit farther from home than the school of assignment. Yet the alternative schools were often known for attracting strong parent commitment, because parents had reached out to request them.

Myth No. 3: SFUSD schools are the most segregated in the nation.

This one is clearly untrue, but it’s a remark I’ve heard repeated many times. Usually I think this comes from people who’ve never set foot in our schools, but new parents may not have had this cleared up yet.

It is true that SFUSD schools have become more segregated in recent years. That’s because the assignment process used to use a racial quota system, allowing a maximum of 35 to 40 percent of any one ethnicity at a school. This undoubtedly led to a lot of white families’ magically becoming Latino and so forth.

 The quota system requirement was banished a few years ago by the Ho court decision, the result of a lawsuit by Chinese families. (The complaint was that because of the ethnic cap, Chinese students, who tend on average to be high achievers, had to have higher grades and test scores than any other ethnicity to get into Lowell, SFUSD’s academic magnet high school.) When the ethnic quotas were eliminated, schools rapidly became less diverse – an obviously predictable effect.

However, it’s common in U.S. cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles to see schools that are 95-100 percent black or Latino, and to see schools around the nation in both affluent suburbia and poor rural areas that are close to 100 percent white. (I know my way around the California Department of Education Dataquest reporting system, but I haven't been able to find definitive research that reports the degree of segregation school by school in other states. My information comes from many years of following education news around the nation.)

In SFUSD, a school that’s 60 percent or more of any one ethnicity is defined as “re-segregated.” Well, that’s not an ideal situation – but consider that any private and most suburban schools with a mere 60 percent of any one ethnicity would be considered admirably diverse. SFUSD’s most segregated school appears to be Cesar Chavez Elementary, with 85.7 percent Latino students. But it’s an outlier – few SFUSD schools are close to being that segregated. And schools as diverse as my kids'  SFUSD middle school alma mater, Aptos (roughly 37% Asian, 26% Latino, 12% white, 9% African-American), just to pick one, are rare elsewhere.

Myth No. 4: Achievement and other measures of success for SFUSD schools have been stagnant, or worse.

This one’s pretty easy to dispel. SFUSD has consistently been the highest-achieving large urban school district in California, and its districtwide Academic Performance Index (API) score has risen steadily.

In addition, the list of SFUSD schools that are viewed as successful and sought-after is increasing rapidly year by year. Also, it was routine in my educated middle-class social circle in the ’90 to submit an application listing only Clarendon, Rooftop or Lilienthal, as a backup in case the private-school search didn’t pan out right away. Now, my perception is that the demographic equivalents of those same parents are seriously aiming at SFUSD schools when they apply.

The list of elementary schools that middle-class parents viewed as unthinkable in the mid-’90s might amuse today’s incoming kindergarten parents: Alvarado, Miraloma, Grattan, Fairmount, Leonard Flynn, Monroe, Sunset, Ulloa, Lafayette, Harvey Milk, SF Community – and I could keep going. We have friends who fought hard to get out of their assignment to West Portal (which is walking distance from their house). Seats at Alice Fong Yu were up for grabs the year we applied to K.

And as those schools have risen to stardom, there has been no corresponding list of schools dropping in success or popularity.

One sobering note is the persistent achievement gap – the gulf between the success (overall, on average) of Asian and white students, and the lower scores (overall, on average) of black and Latino students. But this is widely attributed to the exodus of working-class families from San Francisco as they become successful enough to rent or buy single-family homes, which are of course far less costly in outlying areas. That may leave largely the high-income and the very-low-income in the city, especially those of child-rearing age.

An April 2007 Chronicle story on the departure of the African-American middle class quoted a Western Addition resident who said: "San Francisco no longer has a viable black community. The middle class is gone, and what we have left is underprivileged, uneducated, poor black folks." With the lowest-income students likely to struggle the most in school, that's likely to have a negative impact on the achievement gap.

Myth No. 5: Parents have to choose private because they can’t get their kids into a good public school.

I’ve been doing outreach for SFUSD schools for many years, including peer counseling for parents going through the admission process. For most of those years, I told parents, accurately, that I had never known or heard of a family who stuck it out through the SFUSD admissions process who didn’t get a public school they were happy with in the end. And for years, everyone who heard that was relieved and appreciative to hear it.

But in the past couple of years, parents have told me they found that assurance hollow and thus offensive. And in truth, the process does seem to drag on longer for many families now. I’ve kept close track of parents posting on TheSFKFiles blog and the Parents for Public Schools listserve, and for a time there truly did seem to be a few hitting a brick wall.

But those families eventually got acceptable school assignments too. Now, as far as I can tell, I truly can’t identify any families who stuck it out through the process and didn’t get a school they were happy with. Note that this does not necessarily mean the first-choice school, but one they were happy with. (One of those families got the first-choice school, Clarendon, at the beginning of first grade – but decided to stay in private.)

In other words, I truly can’t find anyone who “had to” go private because they “couldn’t” get assigned to a decent public school.

The number of kindergarten applicants has been increasing over the past couple of years, and then there’s the unquantifiable change, as I said earlier – more of those applicants seem to fully intend to attend SFUSD schools. Yes, that is making the process more stressful. But at the same time, the number of schools viewed as acceptable-to-desirable has increased significantly, too.

Then there’s the view that it’s worth going private to avoid the stress of the public school admissions process. This brings up:

Myth No. 5A: The private-school process is easier than the public-school process.

Definitely not true! The private-school process is far more labor-intensive, with mandatory interviews, playdates, screenings, tests, interviews and such. With the SFUSD process, all you have to do is fill out and submit the application form.

And there’s the stress of knowing that the private-school outcome is based on a close personal assessment of the child and the family. By contrast, the SFUSD process is entirely faceless – your child and family are a series of 1s and 0s in an algorithm.

And even if the applicant sails easily through the private-school process, remember that we’re still talking about $15,000-$25,000 tuition per year per child (before financial aid, if any). Multiply that by the years in school; that’s a pretty steep price for avoiding the weeks of stress of the SFUSD process.

Of course for a family who feels private school best meets their needs for whatever reason, that’s another story. But the notion that San Francisco families “have to” to choose private because they “can’t” get into a good SFUSD school doesn’t hold up.

To be continued.
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