Sup. Chris Daly: Fleeing San Francisco in search of less-successful schools?

August 5, 2:12 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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  Are SF schools too elitist for him?

It’s been all over the news for several days that San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, a fiery leftist, has announced that his wife and preschool-age children have moved to suburban Fairfield – really an exurban “edge city” rather than the stereotypical leafy  suburb.

Daly explains that he and his wife have bought a house in Fairfield (actually, they’ve bought two, one to rent out, both foreclosures) to be near her parents, and that he’s keeping his Mission District loft and his residency in San Francisco.

Well, all kinds of speculation and charges are flying. Daly even invited Chronicle reporter Marisa Lagos over to his loft, where he served her homemade brownies, to emphasize that he really lives there. That’s all interesting, but not my area.

Some uninformed observers – those who don’t know much about Bay Area communities and those who don’t know much about schools – may have been jumping to the conclusion that the Daly family was abandoning urban schools for higher-status suburban classrooms, the “leafy enclave” image. Actually, the opposite is true; SFUSD schools are more successful academically than the schools in the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District, based on test scores. Again, Fairfield is not an upscale suburb.

Fairfield-Suisun Unified 2008 Academic Performance Index (API)* 721**
SFUSD 2008 API 772

*The California Department of Education’s API “measures the academic performance and growth of schools on a variety of academic measures.”

**The number is on a scale of 200-1000, with 1000 being the highest; 800+ is considered excellent.

SFUSD has slightly more low-income students than Fairfield-Suisun -- 56.3% compared with 49.4% -- but not significantly more.

Here are more figures, from 2008-09:

Fairfield-Suisun Unified
Latino 33.1%
White 25.4%
African-American 22.8%
Asian 5.5%

SFUSD
Asian 41.3%
Latino 23.1%
African-American 12.3%
White 10.8%

The press coverage and public discussion about Daly's announcement has largely been well-informed and avoided the “fleeing to better schools” misconception. One exception was an article in the dead-trees San Francisco Examiner real estate section last weekend, which is not available online. The writer jumped to the uninformed and incorrect assumption that Fairfield schools are superior. This was apparently one of those specialty newspaper sections filled with barely edited, slapped-together copy that’s not held to professional journalism standards – a practice that in my opinion is a bad idea, harming the credibility of the publication and the entire, already-tottering newspaper business, but that’s another story.

Anyway, let’s just be clear; San Francisco schools are more successful than Fairfield’s, so whatever Supervisor Daly’s motivation for putting down roots in Fairfield, that's not it.