In a speech to the House of Commons in 1947, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
I have thought about and quoted that statement a lot as I sent two kids through the San Francisco public school system: The SFUSD school assignment system is the worst form of school assignment systems—except for all the others.
It’s complicated: What do you do when neighborhoods in the city are still segregated, both by race and by class, and all students, no matter where they live and what ethnic group they belong to, have the right to a first-rate education—and when SFUSD doesn’t have the money to make every school a top-tier school? How do you decide who goes where?
Add the popularity of language-immersion schools, which thousands more parents want than the district can provide. Then add in the dirty secret of SFUSD funding: Schools that enroll the kids of rich parents raise hundreds of thousands of dollars through their PTAs, and use that money to provide curriculum enrichment and to avoid budget cuts, and none of that money goes to schools with a less-wealthy parent base.
Then add: Wealthier parents, who can organize and give money to groups that push their agendas and help elect School Board members, tend to want to send their kids to neighborhood schools. Sounds great: The parents and kids can walk to school, the kids can meet other kids who live in the same neighborhood, and the local school becomes a neighborhood center.
But that only works if the city’s neighborhoods are not facing radical economic inequality. And they are.
Sadly, neighborhood schools mean segregated schools—not just by race but by class. Wealthy neighborhoods will have great, well-funded schools. The kids whose families and neighbors aren’t rich will lose out—big time.
The current system allows families to apply, under a ranked-choice system, for schools anywhere in the city (with some exceptions). Families from some vulnerable neighborhoods get priority. District data shows that 97 percent of families get one of their choices, and 80 percent get their first choice.
Brandee Marckmann, a board member at the San Francisco Education Alliance, told me, “it’s a bit presumptuous to tell parents whose schools have been attacked by racist disinvestment for years that they can’t try to send their kids to better resourced schools.”
The School Board has been under immense pressure from well-funded parent groups who want neighborhood schools. The board will consider proposals Tuesday/13 that would move the city closer to a system where residents would get a neighborhood school preference.
Under all proposals, families would have some guarantee of access to a school in their defined neighborhood. Access to schools outside of that geographic area would be much more limited.
That would mean more rich kids in schools in wealthier neighborhoods, where parents could raise money for extra enrichment programs, and more isolated, underfunded schools in less wealthy neighborhoods.
Mfalme Mashairi, executive director of Coleman Advocates, told me the School Board should “start from scratch and hold a series of town halls to ask communities what they need.”
The proposals, Mashari told me, would be worse than current system, flawed as it as (and unpopular with rich families as it is). Families in the Southeast part of the city will have less choice and underfunded schools, which wealthier communities will have better opportunities for their kids.
Everyone agrees the best solution is to make sure all schools in the city are fully funded. The state has made that very difficult, by limiting property taxes (Prop. 13) and making it difficult for local governments to pass other sorts of progressive taxes for schools.
If the well-funded groups that say that rich families will abandon the public schools unless they have a neighborhood-based system supported a city income tax, the whole situation might change. But they don’t. None of the parent groups that are pushing this proposal have ever come up with a plan to tax local wealth (including the wealth of their backers) to fund public education.
There’s another element here: The district could insist on a PTA tax, ensuring that some of the money the rich parents raise for their schools also goes to help the underfunded schools. I have suggested this repeatedly, as a journalist and as a public-school parent. Hardly anyone wants to even discuss it.
The School Board meeting starts at 6:30pm, at 555 Franklin.
