The last myth: Things were better in the good old days

November 9, 8:51 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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Myth No. 10: The SFUSD assignment process was easier and more parent-friendly in the past.

No way!

Well, maybe that’s easy for me to say as someone who experienced a past version. But here’s some history.

An early SFUSD desegregation process worked this way, in the early ‘70s: Neighborhood elementary schools had been K-6. They were newly broken up into grades K-2 and grades 3-6, and two schools paired together. All students from both schools’ attendance areas were bused to one school for K-2, and the other for 3-6. Voila! Instant integration!

Except, of course, parents hated it. Enrollment in parochial and other non-elite private schools (this was when secular private schools were truly for a certain social class) suddenly boomed. I’m told that the San Francisco Catholic Diocese, to its credit, spoke out against using its schools as a refuge from integration. I don’t know about others, such as West Portal Lutheran, which was suddenly the destination school for families in my neighborhood.

The process morphed over the years. Prop. 13 came along during that time and devastated school funding, too, so our public schools faced multiple new burdens.

Here’s how the process worked when my family went through it in 1996: The official word was that your options were your assigned attendance area school or an alternative school, period. Unofficially, families could request and get into other non-alternative schools, but that wasn’t announced -- we weren't aware of it.

Many neighborhood schools were downtrodden and unpopular – though not all. Most alternative schools, though not all, were oversubscribed and viewed as nearly impossible to get into. That was the era when the universal word among the middle class was: There are only five good schools in SFUSD, and if you can’t get into one, you have to go private or move to the suburbs.

So what we had was a huge number of parents fighting to get into those “only five good schools.” When our son got into Lakeshore, which was one of “the five,” many private-school friends said things like, “If we could have gotten Lakeshore too, we wouldn’t have had to go private.”

The “only five” is kind of apocryphal, though it was honestly what was said. Popular alternative schools were Argonne, Buena Vista, Clarendon, Lakeshore, Lawton, Claire Lilienthal, Rooftop. Even Alice Fong Yu was widely viewed as too specialized -- Cantonese? Scary! There were highly regarded neighborhood schools (Commodore Sloat; Alamo; maybe Jefferson, West Portal and Sherman) but not really on the radar of families outside their neighborhood, since the understanding was that no one else had access. For those who didn’t live near popular neighborhood schools, the notion of guaranteed neighborhood school assignment was not at all appealing.

As I described earlier, there were ethnicity limits for each school – a maximum 35 to 40 percent of any one ethnicity. There were two further weird quirks. “Satellite zones” for some schools meant that the school of assignment might be elsewhere in the city, as an effort to create diversity. Our neighborhood school, Miraloma, had two satellite zones in the Bayview. Friends who live just off Cesar Chavez in North Bernal Heights learned that they were in a satellite zone for then-Commodore Stockton (now Gordon Lau) Elementary in Chinatown.

The other quirk was in effect for just two or three years – the zip code preference. As another effort to increase diversity, applicants in zip codes 94110 (Mission/Bernal), 94124 (Bayview/Hunters Point/Silver Terrace) and 94134 (Visitacion Valley Portola) got preference behind only siblings – no matter what their actual demographics were. This caused intense tension and hostility at our kids’ coop preschool after the first lottery round, since about a third of the families lived in Bernal and all got immediately placed at Clarendon, Rooftop, Buena Vista or wherever else they chose. Our Bernal friends who would have had their child sent to school in Chinatown had they not specifically requested otherwise got their pick of schools and happily chose Buena Vista. The 94110 preference had a devastating impact on the schools within Bernal Heights, which of course were ignored by the rapidly increasing number of middle-class families in the neighborhood.

I’m told that both the satellite zones and the zip code preference were the handiwork, by the way, of nationally known school integration expert Gary Orfield. I personally think both those systems were incredibly hamhanded and am decidedly not a fan of Orfield’s.

Families like ours, who didn’t get their chosen school in the lottery, could go through the appeals process. At that time, the appeals process was simply based on how good a case you could make, with no parameters at all – it was essentially “just show us how assertive and persistent you are,” short of misbehaving badly enough to offend the all-powerful staff of the Educational Placement Center. So that was the ticket for those of us who are skilled at being assertive and persistent to get our kids into a school of our choice.

Families who didn’t have the stomach for it went off to private school or moved if they had the means; families who didn’t have the wherewithal went wherever they were assigned.

It’s obvious that the appeals process was user-friendly for those equipped to work it, though we didn’t feel so confident while we were going through it. It’s also obvious that this was outrageously unfair to the children of families who were not equipped to make a case, to challenge authority. I helped one family in our preschool go through the appeals process successfully – immigrants from Algeria, a country where standing up to authority can be hazardous to your health. The inequity issues are jaw-dropping.

The all-choice process that has been in effect for quite a few years now seems stressful and harrowing to many parents. But the fact is that a rapidly increasing number of schools are now viewed as successful and desirable – I could probably list at least 40, an unthinkable number 10 years ago. It’s not clear whether the choice process has led to that improvement or just happens to correlate with it, but it certainly hasn’t stopped the situation from improving rapidly. That’s something our district needs to think about a lot.

Since I've written a lot about my family's experience with the SFUSD enrollment process, here's where my kids have been since. My son started Lakeshore in 1996 and my daughter, of course with sibling preference, in 1999. By '99, we were getting inklings that formerly scorned Miraloma Elementary, around the corner of us, was looking better and better, but we stuck with Lakeshore as we felt like part of the community by then. In 2002, our son started middle school at Aptos, which was just starting to turn around from some years in which it had been viewed as a "dirty," "dangerous" "ghetto" school. By 2005, when our daughter started there, Aptos pickup time looked like Lakeshore pickup time. So that's our experience with daringly choosing a turnaround school. Both my kids went on to School of the Arts in band. My son is now a freshman studying jazz trumpet at Oberlin Conservatory, and my daughter is a sophomore at SOTA, studying trombone.