Bringing you presentations and other information in front of the Board tonight in real time:
Experienced nonprofit leader, advocate, communicator
Bringing you presentations and other information in front of the Board tonight in real time:
Rachel Norton 
Just pointing out as a parent of older kids that it’s not correct that SFUSD has always been anti-neighborhood.
In 1996, when our son started K, the assignment was to your assignment-area school, and the alternative schools were the only option. (Or at least this was the official word. In reality I think it was pretty possible to get another school, but since parents were told that wasn’t an option, not many asked.)
Because SFUSD had created satellite zones for many schools designed to promote diversity, the assignment-area school wasn’t always your neighborhood school, or even nearby. For most families it was, though. I have a friend who lives a couple of blocks from Leonard Flynn ES whose assignment area school was Jean Parker (then Commodore Stockton) in Chinatown, but that was a rarity. We have friends who were assigned to all of these schools, all of them close to their homes, but refused them and pursued other options (this was the normal response for middle-class families): Miraloma (that was us), Sunnyside, Fairmount, Grattan, Lafayette, West Portal, Ulloa, Sunset, Peabody and more.
Our schools have been improving at a rapid rate — it’s really eye-p0pping now — under the all-choice system. Just giving that history.
thank you for remaining so calm and considerate when some of us are losing are cool and ranting, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly… i appreciate your constant effort to inform us and “do right” by us.
Thanks for clarifying. I’ve been reading these comments and the thread over on SFKfiles. I’m letting it percolate a bit but this weekend I’ll post some answers and my take.
ps- that comment isn’t aimed at rachel, and i don’t want to suggest that she isn’t doing the best job possible to keep us informed about what is going on. i cannot say enough how happy i am to have this website. but if garcia is going to back a plan, he needs to have the details figured out and let us know what they are.
what is as frustrating as figuring this all out is the incompetence of the people doing this to present a cohesive plan. there are a million different ideas out there, and this one does not appear to be the best, nor what they had been suggesting was going to happen all along- they’ve ALWAYS been anti-neighborhood, and now they do it in this weird way, out of nowhere. this system could work okay if all of the details are tweaked to account for the people that are getting screwed (the ones with only “alternative” schools in their neighborhoods, for example). But, why would they present this plan without all the details? do they have them worked out, or don’t they? if they don’t, why are they even bothering presenting b/c they don’t know if/how it’s going to work and maybe when they work through all of the details they’ll realize another option is better. i just am completely shocked at how incompetently this transition is being handled. pick an option, work out the details, commit to it, and sell it to us. don’t dangle these 1/2 put together things in front of us just to work everyone up into a tizzy b/c we’re not sure if the details are going to work out alright. honestly, it’s really just baffling and jaw-dropping how poorly this is consistently handled. some good ideas, and glad they’re trying to fix things, but c’mon, handle the dessemination of information better than this for crying out loud. if you’ve got the details, give them. if you don’t, don’t purport to have come up with a plan yet. jfc.
Dear Bernal Dad,
Let me give an example. I will use Alamo, because that school begins with an A. Suppose that sibling prefernce is applied and that only 100 seats are left available.
Take 50 seats for local preference first, and set aside 50 seats for integration preference first.
A lottery among Alamo area students will fill up the 50 seats reserved for Alamo area students. The Alamo area students who have lost in this lottery get a second chance–in the lottery where residence does not count–where only academic diversity counts.
Remember the 50 seats set aside for integration preference first? That is where they get their second chance. The factors here are: low, medium, and high academic achievement; CTIP1, CTIP2, and CTIP3; and a goal of a balance of 1/3 CTIP1, 1/3 CTIP2, and 1/3 CTIP3.
The Superintendent wrote that everything could be modified. Let’s give him the modifications, and the sooner the better.
Dear Bernal Dad,
I am not a parent. It makes no difference to me whether neighborhood schools seem to be favored or not. I just want to call it as I see it.
I’ll call your side Choice. In the current proposal, with Local Preference trumping Census Tract Integration Preference, Choice can only be exercised through an integration preference, and the integration preference is subordinate to the local preference.
Your task is to get set asides for integration preference so that local preference does not use up all the available seats. One formulae: push for CTIP1, CTIP2, and CTIP3. Push for a goal of available seats going to 1/3 CTIP1, 1/3 CTIP2, and 1/3 CTIP3. That ought to open up seats for people outside of the attendance area. If you want choice, you need to support integration preference.
“The initial assignment to the attendance area school means that the old neighborhood school system has largely been brought back.”
That’s exactly what I’m bitching about. I understand the politics of it, especially as more of the non-alternative schools upped their game and a guaranteed assignement to the McKinley’s, Licks, Moscones, Monroe, Jose Ortega’s, Harvey Milks as well as the Grattans and Miralomas start to look pretty good (because of rapid feedback mechanism the lottery gives when a school starts to improve), the political pressure for neighborhood schools increases.
Just I think it’s five years premature to move from the city-wide lottery. More schools need to work their way up from the API 1-3 ranking, and we need to recover from the impact of next year’s budget cuts. Option A, or even Option B, were better than this proposal.
“Now is the time to hit up the westside for support for school funding, such as after school care for eastside schools.”
Jam tomorrow? Splendid.
The initial assignment to the attendance area school means that the old neighborhood school system has largely been brought back.
Now is the time to hit up the westside for support for school funding, such as after school care for eastside schools.
What wrongway jack said.
Also, it seems that dividing the schools into CTIP1/CTIP2 groups has been dropped, which would seem to reduce the “nudging” of families into schools where there may be fewer of their socioeconomic or ethnic group. This helps a Latino family in the Mission get into Moscone over a Bernal or Noe family, but doesn’t get the Latino family to consider Clarendon or Sunnyside or Miraloma instead.
This looks a lot more like the old Option 6 and the old OER than the (better) Option B presented by Orla last week. And it’s going to be lot worse than Option A in terms of integration.
This is disappointing.
“b). We have an incentive for students to do poorly on standardizded exams (unless all future exams are off the table).”
Leslie, this isn’t the case. The pool of applicants versus the pool of kids in the schools are two separate sets of people. Further, Lowell and SOTA aren’t affected by this redesign. You could make and argument that there might be a perverse incentive for 5th graders and 8th graders to tank their exams to push their census tract into CTIP1, but statistically they’ll be outweighed by the other K-12 kids. I don’t think this is an issue.
This new policy will hit neighborhoods in the 40-60% percentiles, though, or those neighborhoods where there’s a lot of ranked 1-3 in API, where even if your local school is OK you might have a risk of the overflow going to a much worse school: e.g. Portola parents get E.R. Taylor (great), but their overflow would go to Hillcrest (err, not so great). Good news for Forest Hill and Parnussus, Sunset and Richmond, pretty bad news for Bernal, Potero, Portola & Visitacion Valley.
Which, from a revenue point of view, is probably good for the district; there’s only 50% participation rates in the publics in the West of the city, and 80-90% in the South-East. Making folks in the West happier at the expense of those in the SE will probably net more students for the district. Outside of the parochial sector, there’s not much private school capacity in the SE. But as a SE resident, this is not good news.
“We have an incentive for parents to move from CTIP2 to CTIP1.”
Which is not so bad, I guess. But there’s also an incentive to move from a CTIP2 neighborhood close to CTIP1, as if your kid is in the overflow to your local school, you’ll want to feel confident their nearest schools isn’t a poorer performing school.
The Superintendent’s proposal reads like Option B, with the highlighting that everything can be modified.
Multiple choice question:
Question. What does it all mean on a nuts and bolts level?
Answer.
a). We have a difficult address fraud problem to police.
b). We have an incentive for students to do poorly on standardizded exams (unless all future exams are off the table).
c). We have an incentive for parents to move from CTIP2 to CTIP1.
d). We have no money for buses. The future is lay off people or lay off the gas pedal.
e). All of the above.
The answer is e) All of the above.
Rachel, in my quick scan of the assignment policy, it appeared to me that living in the attendance area would trump requests from CTIP1 census tract students. In other words, I didn’t see anything that said the district would set aside seats in desirable neighborhood schools to improve their diversity.
The document also said, “In order to effectively use choice as a tactic to reduce racial isolation and the concentration of underserved students … the Superintendent will undertake the following measures: placement of high quality and attractive
programs at schools with high concentrations of underserved students”.
So does this mean that the establishment of more desirable citywide programs will be your main strategy for giving options to disadvantaged students? Because if you don’t significantly increase the set of citywide options, then the new system seems to greatly reduce the options for students who get assigned to a low-scoring, undesirable neighborhood schools.