A plugged-in reader correctly takes us to task for not previously covering the San Francisco School Board’s decision to enact a new school assignment system. So we’ll just co-opt her (slightly edited) tip:
This could have an impact on SF property values in two ways. First, since now living in a schools’ attendance area will actually give you preference in getting into that school, I suspect that areas surrounding some of the best schools will have their property values increase (note that many of city’s best schools are “alternative” and are designated for citywide enrollment, so living next them won’t matter).
Second, students from traditionally disadvantaged areas as measured by CTIP scores will now have enrollment priority over everyone else. Dark green areas are the ones where children will have the CTIP advantage in getting into a school of their choice, since they scored the worst on standardized tests. It’s best to look at this in conjunction with the official census tract map.
Potrero Hill caught my eye, it’s the only place in the city where dark purple (census tract where students perform best on standardized tests) meets dark green. Tract 227.01 is purple (North Slope, “highly desirable”) and 227.03 is green (it contains the Potrero projects).
The boundary between the two runs along Arkansas St between 20th & 22nd. As an ex-resident of Potrero Hill, I would actually consider Arkansas & 20th to be a pretty nice area to live in – as well as Connecticut from 20th to its dead end – and both are parts of the ”dark green” census tract.
The most interesting part is that if you’re living on Arkansas, between 20th & 22nd – if you’re on the East side, you’ll have an advantage into getting the school of your choice over the neighbor who’s living across the street! I wonder if this will have any impact on the property values in the nicest parts of 227.03 census tract…
It’s good food for thought. And on that note we’re off to find some Tater Tots.
∙ Recap: A new era for student assignment? [rachelnorton.com]
∙ San Francisco Schools Attendance Area Map [sfusd.edu]
∙ 2000 Census Tract Outline [census.gov]
Thanks for posting and highlighting this issue. What are generally considered the top 5 (public) grade and high schools and where are they located?
So what does it mean to property values if you live in the “Attendance area” of an “Alternative” school. I live near Clarendon Elementary, does living here not help you get your kids into that school, if not – what then becomes the school you’re assigned to?
I had a long talk with my uncle about this issue on Easter (his advice was to get out now while I still can)
Anyway, his concern was really with the middle schools. He also mentioned that near to me around Noe Valley the schools aren’t very good.
His advice was hope they get into the 1-2 K-8 publics and pray for Lowell or start saving
In the short-term, this program will create some arbitrage opportunities, such as living on a certain side of the street. Longer term, and if executed correctly, this new plan can greatly benefit SF. Families receive more predictability (over the current lottery system), and obtain real incentives to invest time, money and energy in their local schools. A big step in the right direction!
This is a program that can have a huge positive impact on the city, and stop driving civically minded people to the suburbs. A great start…
“top 5 (public) grade and high schools and where are they located?”
top 5 public high schools? I think its Lowell and then???
As far as I am aware we are way behind other large cities in creating small magnet schools.
I have friends and family who went to Philip Burton, Balboa, Washington, Lincoln and Mission and to be honest I can’t say it is white boy day at any of them
Does this fix the middle school problem?
If I spend 800K and buy a condo in Noe or a house in Bernal how is that middle school choice?
Jimbo, since Clarendon is “alternative,” living near it does not give your kids any admissions advantage.
This is a very good post, and I am sure I don’t understand the full argument…
In the first paragraph its mentioned that:
“First, since now living in a schools’ attendance area will actually give you preference in getting into that school…”.
Am I reading this as if you live next to a school you have priority to get into that particular school in your neighborhood? If so this makes perfect sense.
In the second paragraph its stated that:
“Second, students from traditionally disadvantaged areas as measured by CTIP scores will now have enrollment priority over everyone else”.
Does this mean that someone from a Dark Green area can go to a Dark Purple area if they wanted to and if they found a way of getting there? How does that work – if I am a kid that live next to a school in my neighborhood and its dark purple, can a person from dark green get my spot in the new school? If so, I think its ludicrous.
“I have friends and family who went to Philip Burton, Balboa, Washington, Lincoln and Mission and to be honest I can’t say it is white boy day at any of them”
@zig: WTF? I personally am not looking for my child to attend a school where it’s “white boy day”. My criteria is more based on quality education, good extra-curricular activities, and some diversity is a good thing IMO. As a non-white person who ended up getting a GREAT education, despite growing up in mostly black public schools, I take offense to that comment.
If you’re looking for “white boy day” then maybe you should move to Novato or drop the $$ for a good private school.
will they use 2000 census data or 2010 census data? Potrero has improved a lot in 10 years.
Yikes,
Sorry if I offended you. It was an unPC comment to make
My perspective on public high schools in SF is clouded by my brother and cousins going to them. Whites are very much the minority (at some high schools there are almost none) and in their cases at least, it meant a lot of fighting and posturing and very little learning.
Diversity isn’t the issue at all for me. Respect and a safe environment is. I would prefer to stay in the city and send them to a small diverse high school where education is valued but I am not sure we have any like this now (save for Lowell). It’s not as if the Catholic schools in SF aren’t ethnically diverse.
In all honestly how might a white kid have done in your high school?
The most interesting part is that if you’re living on Arkansas, between 20th & 22nd – if you’re on the East side, you’ll have an advantage into getting the school of your choice over the neighbor who’s living across the street!
At least until the meddling halfwits decide to improve everything again with a new plan to show how earnest & busy they are, leaving those who made housing-purchase decisions for education aims SOL, and to the capricious advantage of some other random strip of occupants.
Seriously, what do these board members take home in cash & prizes per year?
@eddy: This link lists API scores for all SF schools: http://api.cde.ca.gov/AcntRpt2009/2009GrthAPICo.aspx?cYear=2008-09&cSelect=38,San,Francisco It can be debated whether or not API scores is the correct metric to measure schools by, but I think it’s a good starting point. Any school above 875-900 is excellent.
@Jimbo: You are going to be in attendance area of a “regular” elementary school too – the map linked to in this post isn’t yet updated to reflect the new admissions policy. The draft of attendance area map for 2011-12 school year should be available by September 2010, and there will be a 30 day comment period on it.
@Zig: Yes, Noe schools are not very good. Neither are Bernal for that matter.
@Joshua: agreed, except the part that bugs me the most is that you are still NOT guaranteed admission to your attendance area school (you just get priority enrollment) – and that attendance area boundaries change every year! Compare that with other suburban places, where yes, technically attendance areas CAN change, but in reality they don’t and price of the “trophy” schools is built into property values. There is no place in SF I can buy a property and know with 100% certainty that my child will be able to attend an excellent public school.
@SFRE: Yes, if you live next to a school you have priority to get into that particular school in your neighborhood. And yes, anyone living in dark green area has priority over those living in purple area in attending purple’s area school. In reality, those who are living in dark green area probably will just want to attend their local school – and not bother with trying to get their kid to attend one of the “tropy” city-wide schools or another area’s excellent local school. Look at the map, and see where the dark green areas are, and you can make the same conclusions I did… Except, in that one area in Potrero Hill, where dark green area contains some pretty plush homes!
@random: They don’t use census data – they use just use census tracts as a way to divide the city into smaller areas, calculate the average result of California standardized tests (I’m certain they use recent results) per census tract and figure out which areas of the city have lower achievement scores.
As a mom currently selling our condo to buy a sfh, I’ve been watching this issue like a hawk. Our daughter heads to middle school in 2 years, and though it’s no guarantee, we aren’t looking in bernal, glen park, etc. for that reason. The better middle schools are on the west side of the city. My dh suggested we rent in a poor census tract til she gets in, but they are far from her current school. This does mess with your head, esp. since living next door to a school is still no guarantee…
Thank you for such a great post!
We are in the market for a SFH in SF and have started considering outside areas due to schools. Understanding where we can live to have the best education opportunities is important.
Our friends say “private school is the only option here”. How bad is it? We love living in/near the city, but if it takes buying a place on the Peninsula to ensure a good education we would do it.
According to SFKFiles rumors, Clarendon won’t be designated as an alternative school under the new regime. Good news for people who close by.
I’m curious to see how this all shakes out over time. We enrolled in our not-so-popular local elementary school and if our neighbors wind up enrolling in the coming years, the school will be awesome and my property will stay nice and inflated. But if they continue to shun it as they have in the past, I imagine my property values will decline.
OTipster
You seem very knowledgeable
It seems to me there are many public elementary schools that are just fine
I am more concerned with the public middle and high schools. If Johnny or Joanny doesn’t get into Lowell and one can’t afford Catholic (HS about 15K per year currently) what are the options?
Is this new cohort of middle class white kids I see around my house (apologizes in advance) going to continue on, will they all decamp for the burbs or are their parents just well heeled enough to go private?
What are the families saying?
As my uncle told me the other day, I should be planning ahead and his advice was to leave when buying or be ready for a lot of stress.
He went Cathlolic by the way. He was feed-up and worried about the middle schools
Outrageous that someone from another part of the city gets to displace your kid who may live right next to a school. So if a kid lives next to a school, and has a friend who is a neighbor, they can theoretically go to different schools on opposite sides of the city. Another very stupid idea by the people of SF.
How about this as a good idea…instead of moving kids around like cattle, let kids stay with the schools in their neighborhood, and move teachers/principles around. If teachers are the most direct link to the performance of a purple school, why not shift them to a green area.
Zig, your uncle is right – middle school is where it all falls apart, that’s the real reason Clarendon and Lakeshore are so popular.
Pretty much any elementary school in the city is going to be okay to good with some notable exceptions. Some have a nicer environment or more enrichment activities – but there’s a lot more options. But I can see the areas around Alamo or Lafayette getting a little bump since they do have something more to offer than some of the other elementaries.
At the high school level, Washington and Lincoln are okay-to-good if your kid isn’t getting into Lowell or SOTA, and the charter high schools – Metro, CATS, Gateway, etc – are pretty good. So if you can make it happen admissions wise, it’s possible to target your private school money in grades 6-8 and save the rest for college.
With middle school though, if you want a regular public school, it’s like get your kid into Presidio at all costs – and even that’s not so great. Our eldest went to Roosevelt, right on Arguello and to this day describes it as a “character building” experience. So we sent the other two to private and charter.
Gateway is pushing to start a charter middle school and I’ve met some nice parents at KIPP, who share Gateway’s campus.
SFRE, this is an improvement over the current system, where there is ZERO preference given based on residence.
kthnxybe-thanks
My wife has some family in Manhatten and Chicago and speaking to these people it seem their charter school options are better than ours
Since I don’t have kids yet the gamble is will things get better as more middle class people choose to stay?
Clarendon and Lakeshore I assume at the 2 K-8 schools?
With respect to ethnic diversity at our schools, I’ve notice that whatever the flavor the parent, they’ll tell you their kid is far outnumbered by the others if their ethnicity isn’t more than 60% of the school. For instance, Alamo is maybe 40% white and 60% Asian, but white parents will tell you it’s 80% Asian. Conversely, Gateway is about 20-25% Asian, 25% Latino, 25% black and 25-30% white – but Asian parents I’ve talked to think that it’s more like 10% Asian. I think it’s just plain human nature.
Since I don’t have kids yet the gamble is will things get better as more middle class people choose to stay?
Given the recent budget cuts — the biggest cuts to the education budget in CA’s history — the smart money is on the public schools getting (much) worse, not better, unfortunately. I wish I could find the SFPSD superintendent’s op-ed piece in the Chronicle on this. It may well have been overstated but he made it out to be near-Armageddon.
@original tipster
The API scores for SF are painful. No middle school in the 900s. Setting aside Lowell (940s), not a single high school in the 800s or 900s.
I contrast that with API scores for the district where my parents live (Cupertino) and I’m livid. Not a single elementary or middle school below 840. One school is 998! Four of the five high schools are above 850. The remaining, Fremont High, is 741.
What the hell? San Francisco just as, if not more, wealthy than Cupertino. Property values on a per square foot lot basis are a little lower in Cupertino. Why the disparity?
What the hell? San Francisco just as, if not more, wealthy than Cupertino. Property values on a per square foot lot basis are a little lower in Cupertino. Why the disparity?
Less children/families in SF (many of them move to Piedmont, Lafayette, Cupertino, etc. for the schools — it’s a self-perpetuating thing). And of the families that remain in SF, more send their kids to private schools. As a result there’s just less interest and involvement in public schools in SF than in some of the wealthier suburbs.
My kid has friends her age in Piedmont, Burlingame and Menlo Park (Oak Knoll). I frankly can’t tell one bit of difference between the work that my child is doing at her not-so-popular elementary school and what her friends are doing in their districts. California content standards are the same whether you live here or there and that’s what your kid will be taught unless you choose to shell out $20K+ for independent schools. There are similar “extras” – arts, music, etc., and my kid has the added benefit of having all of San Francisco for culture, arts, exposure, etc. My kid is flourishing but that’s not much of a surprise given that she’s coming from a family with a lot of advantages. It is elementary school after all and the basics are what matter at this age. Learn to read, learn to add, subtract, multiply and divide and learn how to write!
We love walking to school. We love having a better tie to our neighborhood. We love that our kid is challenged intellectually and that she’s developing the skills she needs to succeed later in life. She’s got a great group of friends. I like that my money and volunteer hours are helping not just my own kid, but a bunch of other kids whose parents can’t give their kids everything.
That said, if I had to move to the burbs, I would consider moving to Piedmont. They seem to have no limit to their parcel taxes in support of public education.
This is a hot button topic for sure! I think it was dumb to change from district schools in the first place. I went to a neighborhood public school in the late 70’s (gosh, I am old now!) and when you look at my class picture it was incredibly diverse. Any time they try to “fix” things, through lawsuits or not, they screw it up. My daughter is starting kindergarten this year (too late for the change they FINALLY figured out). We were apparently lucky to get into one of our 7 choices (#4). I spoke to the other parents at preschool and one other got their first choice whereas three got a bottom of the list in STATE rankings school in Lower Haight (0 of 7 choices). I am seriously concerned about what is going to happen with the cuts that are coming, so am opting for parochial school. It is cheaper than preschool at $7000/year (non-parishioner) and they have great academic scores. I figured you could do ok in public elementary school, but would get screwed in middle school and high school (unless you get into Lowell). The middle and high schools have terrible state rankings and CA is tied for last place in the country for reading at grade level across all grades! Ouch. The funny thing is I have two neighbors that are/were SFUSD teachers. One sent to Rooftop (public alternative) and then Lick Wilmerding (expensive private) and the other sent to Burke. One was a high school teacher that I actually had when I was in high school and she WARNED me that I don’t want to send my kids to public school these days. How crazy is that? I am sorry for going on so long, but I am DISGUSTED in this process and the failings of the schools.
Zig – you got it. I think there may be another K-8 SFUSD school and Creative Arts Charter is also K-8.
You know, the school situation in the city is frustrating, but it’s doable. Like everything else, it’s a matter of priorities. I like to walk and hate to commute, and living in the city works out for us. So our home is a little crowded and I’ve had my share of frustrating experiences with school placement. Our kids say they enjoy the freedom of living in the city where they can get to the things they want to do without having to be chauffeured, and I enjoy that too. It’s a real trade-off.
Reading the comments here is simultaneously tragic & hysterical. What convoluted madness.
Here’s the uncomfortable Truth:
Middle class breeders who prioritize the education of their spawn GTFO of San Francisco.
D-really? This surprises you???
San Francisco has a hugely stratified population by income and the highest percentage of kids in private schools
You are really surprised that Cupertino (and Palo Alto etc etc) has higher test scores?
Come on
@Zig
Surprised? No. I’ve known this for a long time. Just incensed.
My comment, though, is why? It seems like you think economic stratification is the cause. If that’s true, then gentrification should have lifted our schools over the past 20 years. Has that happened?
The other cause you list is the high percentage of private schools. I hope that’s not the cause, as it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course it will influence property values. We bought a SFH in a less-desirable neighborhood because we knew we had the ability to send our kids to school elsewhere in the City. Under the new rules, we would most likely have purchased a TIC instead to get into a better area.
There are lots of good elementary schools, Zig, but it is absolutely true that the middle schools are poor. High schools are a mixed bag. SFUSD has recently posted their list of “most requested” elem/mid/high schools for the current enrollment period. That’s a very good gauge of quality, because it’s based upon parents’ personal selections after doing research for their own kids benefit. http://portal.sfusd.edu/data/epc/Highlights2010-2011.pdf
One subtle edit to “original tipster” comment — the school board snuck in the caveat that you get priority to your local school (above dark green area kids) IF your child goes to a SFUSD pre-K program in the same area. Nice way to pad their own preschool enrollment, huh? http://portal.sfusd.edu/data/epc/Key%20Features_March%204%202010.pdf
As far as whether an individual family should decamp for the suburbs, well… I would argue that such a decision made solely on the basis of potential school issues 6 years from now (inappropriately) puts one small aspect of your family life at the absolute highest priority. A smart kid in the best school in the state will still suffer if Mom & Dad are quietly resentful of the sacrifice and have little time together because of a horrible commute.
Debtpocalypse-
Regarding “breeders,” how did you get here?
I would argue that such a decision made solely on the basis of potential school issues 6 years from now (inappropriately) puts one small aspect of your family life at the absolute highest priority. A smart kid in the best school in the state will still suffer if Mom & Dad are quietly resentful of the sacrifice and have little time together because of a horrible commute.
And that my friend is why we stay in the City!
If the budget cuts do scare you, the only real solution is to move out of state. It’s not going to be that much better in the burbs. Moving to a burb near Boston seems like the way to go. Stock up on long johns though. GreatSchools teamed up with Forbes on the issue: http://www.greatschools.org/ with a list of the best places to live for education bang for the buck. Despite all the trash talk – guess which large city was on that list?
A smart kid in the best school in the state will still suffer if Mom & Dad are quietly resentful of the sacrifice and have little time together because of a horrible commute.
I completely agree but here’s a fun fact: my wife and I work in the FiDi and our commute to/from Bernal (35 minutes to AN HOUR, depending on Muni’s horrendous service) was generally TWICE as long as our commute is now to/from Piedmont (25 minutes, barely any variation).
It can be debated whether or not API scores is the correct metric to measure schools by, but I think it’s a good starting point.
As a side note when comparing scores, I would recommend breaking out your demographic sub-group for comparison. Admittedly, this can be difficult if your sub-group is not numerically significant (per California API definition). For instance, if you looked at aggregrate API scores for middle schools in Albany, Piedmont and Berkeley, you might assume that Berkeley is poorest performing school system. However, there are a large number of socioeconomically challenged students in the Berkeley schools (over 40% receive subsidized lunches). If you look across a comparable demographic, though, you get a different story. For instance (when comparing middle schools), the white demographic subgroup in Berkeley outperforms the white demographic subgroup in Piedmont and Albany schools. I mention this just in case anyone wants to check out the East Bay. I know the Bunk, Shza, and these folks have found it to their liking (and they’re all renters, so they can move if they don’t like it).
That said, I wonder how this new system in Ess Eff will affect some of the (elementary) schools that are ‘turning the corner’ due to parental involvement…
EBGuy, do the Berkeley schools phase their students early on? I’m just wondering how certain demographic groups can maintain high scores if the teachers are having to spend large amounts of time covering remedial subjects/ babysitting poor performers. Obviously, the results are the results. It just seems counterintuitive unless these kids aren’t all in the same classroom.
@D
Gentrification hasn’t lifted schools because the majority of parents who really care about their kids’ educations don’t move here. No matter how much you spend on housing in SF, you still have a significant chance of ending up in a ‘crappy’ school. If you have the money, why not move to the suburbs, pay the same amount, and get a guarantee of a great school?
Those families that do buy SFHs here have the money to avoid public schools entirely.
There is no reason that schools in the city are as bad as they are. This is the fault of the Superintendent and the school system in general.
Books are more or less the same wherever you go. Desks are the same. Blackboards are the same. Why the difference in scores in SF?
Again, I vote for moving teachers to different schools as opposed to moving kids to schools outside of their neighborhood.
Just a side note. The real teacher from the movie Stand & Deliver recently passed away, Mr. Escalante. It goes to show that an education system that puts emphasis on education, as opposed to union, can really get it done. It also shows that there is no need to move kids out of their current neighborhood to get a quality education. That doesn’t solve the problem of dedicated teachers/parents.
@rr
My gentrification comment was to address the issue of lack of money. Property taxes in SF should bring in just as much, if not more, money than the burbs. And, with less children, we’re talking a higher $ per child. It seems obvious to me that paying teachers more, or spending more per child, doesn’t make a difference.
But, your response seems to imply that the factor isn’t the money the school has, but the money the parents have. Your implicit assumption seems to be that children from wealthier families do better on test scores. Since the wealthy families send their children to private school, the public schools have lower APIs. In essence, you’re arguing that the problem with the schools isn’t the schools, but the parents.
If that’s true, then fixing the schools is a meaningless task.
Regarding “breeders,” how did you get here?
Uhhh… through breeding.
Which my wife & I did in San Francisco, where our boys were born.
Shza, Give me 13 years and I’ll write a book on the subject (heck, I might even be your neighbor by then if something goes horribly wrong). I know that at least in the elementary schools, classrooms (and schools) are integrated across the socioeconomic spectrum (Berkeley census tracts are classified into one of three socioeconomic groups based on an aggregate of income level, parental education, and race). Trying to close the ‘achievement gap’ is taken seriously and there is currently some contention about how resources are allocated within the high school. I know that some kids thrive at Berkeley High, and others are challenged (I believe the ‘small schools’ help in that regard). Heck, even more than two decades ago, I know of someone who was ‘bored as hell’ (or something like that) at Albany High and transferred to Berkeley.
I live right on the border area. I can attest that at least one Potrero hill multi-million dollar home has accidentially benefited from the new system by situated in the prefer area.
Before you guys running off to make real estate specualation, let me warn you the boundry is far from fixed. The district can adjust it anytime. This year it is golden and next year it maybe not. I’m far more concern that renters are going to abuse new school assignment system.
1, with the new proposal, middle schools will feed from the same elementary schools, so there won’t be another assignment round at 6th grade. We don’t know which elementary school feeds into which middle school yet, but I would think it is somewhat neighborhood based (since K-5 are neighborhood based).
2, K-8 and immersion programs won’t have attendance area. K-5 will. That means Claredon and Lakeshore probably will become neighborhood schools.
3. Most of the west side elementary schools are good. South not so (including Noe Valley and Bernal Heights). In short term, I am guessing it will give Sunset a boost.
4. In longer term, it will encourage neighborhood schools and parent involvement, and it will help all the schools in the city. A lot of parents leave the city because they couldn’t stand not knowing which school the kids would go to. In this case, “not knowing” is worse than “bad school”. I expect Noe parents will now get involved at the neighborhood schools and things will happy – after all, the test scores is a reflection of middle-class white/asian parents.
By the way, SF schools improved a lot, at least at the elementary level. Ten years ago, there are probably only a handful of elementary schools which are acceptable (Claredon, Rooftop, Lawton and etc). Now, probably more than half are acceptable, and you won’t find a single bad school on the west side. Parents certainly have better choices than before.
I’m far more concern that renters are going to abuse new school assignment system.
And somewhere, LMRiM is smiling…
In my opinion, politics is at the heart of the SF school problem. Due to progressive SF politicians, diversity and equality are the primary goal of SF school Board – and not academic excellence.
Let’s compare and contrast, shall we:
Mission of the SFUSD:
The mission of the San Francisco Unified School District is to provide each student with an equal opportunity to succeed by promoting intellectual growth, creativity, self-discipline, cultural and linguistic sensitivity, democratic responsibility, economic competence, and physical and mental health so that each student can achieve his or her maximum potential.
Another quote: (http://portal.sfusd.edu/template/default.cfm?page=policy.placement.assignment.so_far_current):
The biggest challenge facing SFUSD is the inequity of achievement facing students of different socio-economic, linguistic and racial/ethnic backgrounds.
Compare that to mission of Palo Alto Unified School District:
We work to enable all students to:
* Strive for academic excellence
* Acquire the knowledge and skills that support learning
* Value creativity and life-long learning
* Demonstrate respect for self and others
* Participate meaningfully in our democratic society and interdependent global community
PAUSD’s number one goal is “Academic Excellence and Learning” – obviously not SFUSD’s goal…
@D
First, we would need to look at the median and average property value for tax purposes, not sale value, in order to determine money going to schools. San Francisco is full of renters who pay no property tax and live in buildings owned by long-term landlords who pay little in property tax, which makes me think that the per-pupil tax income is lower in SF than in other nearby cities.
Second, I am not convinced test scores are a meaningful metric for student achievement or success. If you created a reasonable metric for post-school success, you could compare test scores to success and see how it correlates. I bet on a per-kid basis the correlation is weak, because so many other factors are involved in success, but on a per-school basis it may be okay because schools that can teach how to take the tests well are probably giving the kids other necessary skills too.
My Theory: money is not the cause of higher achievement, parental involvement in education is. And time to get involved in your kid’s education is easier to find when you have more money (e.g., because you don’t have to work 2 jobs). It’s also easier to find time to attend PTA meetings, parent/teacher conferences, and other activities that allow you to have a strong voice in the education system.
Those ‘activist’ parents bring up the quality of the whole school. Get enough of them and you reach critical mass, creating a self-sustaining virtuous cycle.
It’s one reason, I think, that charter schools can be very successful– because the parents have to choose to send the kids to the specific school, you automatically self-select for families with a strong involvement in education.
SFUSD: each student to achieve his or her maximum potential
PAUSD: Strive for academic excellence
Doesn’t sound diverging for me.
When SFUSD says “biggest challenge is the inequity of achievement facing students of different socio-economic, linguistic and racial/ethnic backgrounds”, it is talking about a real issue it is facing each day. You really can’t archieve academic excellence without addressing this issue. My bet is Palo Alto is not facing as much a challenge as SF.
Not that I thing SFUSD’s system is any good, but I think we should be more fair to them and understand their challenge in a larger context.
I’m glad we sold our SFH in Pac Heights and decamped to Palo Alto (I enjoyed the comments thrown by the posters about our former property on Socketsite – very entertaining, BTW).
I miss The City and the lifestyle, but my kid comes 1st. And in SF, even with these modifications, this system still doesn’t give parents enough control over where to send their kids. Parents who care want the perception (whether valid or not) of control over their opportunities.
And SFUSD still hasn’t delivered.
Being the egocentric that I am, I would imagine that we would be the demographic that would try to help lift SFUSD schools out of the morass that it’s in, but after looking around and much discussion, I’m afraid that while there are some signs of progress, it wasn’t going to help soon enough for my family.
So here we are with better weather, a slightly larger yard and a much shorter commute. Wait… what about the city did I miss?
It’s not just teachers and principals that make a difference; however, there is a strong correlation, but it is parental and community involvement that makes or breaks the schools. The reality is the green areas generally don’t have strong nuclear families, strong parental support and/or involvement in the school or a culture of success.
Moving children around hoping to bring up their test scores forces an achieving school to lower their bar to accommodate them, or imports the issues of the individual to the school distracting the learning process.
Raising the bar on teacher quality (good luck with union involvement, and making quality teachers available to all area purple or green, and getting parent(s) involved is the key to success; not some bureaucrat.
(sorry to double-post, but WTY’s post merits a response)
On the surface, yes, Wai, PAUSD’s and SFUSD’s missions don’t sound divergent, but the problem is *execution*.
The way that SFUSD addresses inequities is by subtraction – rather than lifting everyone, which would be what everyone would agree is the appropriate way of doing things, but more expensive of course, SFUSD instead allocates its scare resources by reducing the opportunities to those who have been arbitrarily defined as having enough opportunities already.
And the result is the inevitable lowering of the bar all around.
MissingTheCity,
I cannot agree with you. When a class has students from different backgrounds, the kids from poorer families would take more time from the teachers and admins. That’s not a problem in Palo Alto, but is a real problem in SF.
So, yes, resources must be allocated to help those who need it.
It is a trade-off that parents much make – move to a middle-upper class city and get the best academic but be in a monolith setting, or be in a diversified environment with the risk of lower academic performance. To some extend, I would say it is a balance of book smart and street smart.
And SF offers some unique programs which aren’t matched by suburb schools. For example, the immersion programs are unique and I would rate the ability to speak a second language fluently outweigh potential academic risks (yet, all the immersion programs do very well on the test scores).
I have come across a discussion thread about adding a Chinese immersion in Palo Alto district. Let me just say that some of the narrow-minded comments astonished me.
Its not the physical location of the school that makes the difference, its the involvement of the parents/teachers. That is why it is such a stupid policy to move kids out of their neighborhood to go to school. Good students will always do well wherever they go. Bad students will likely only improve marginally.
Again, move the teachers not the students.
“Middle class breeders who prioritize the education of their spawn GTFO of San Francisco”
They did. That’s why SF’s pop. has a much greater % of over 65s and under-18 yr olds than the Cali avg.
Enjoy.
So glad I don’t have kids.
SFRE…I have to throw one more into your pot: Good students and bad teachers make adults who only have a mediocre education.
With that said, I had a very bad time with the SFUSD lottery but did well with the private school selection.
Yes, education matters to families who buy houses. And, for the person who is against middle class breeders in the city: Hey, who the heck do you think is buying those family homes in the city?
And, um…it looks to me that some neighborhoods are really going to do well with the redistricting. Let’s see…chunks of the Richmond…chunks of the Sunset…Forest Hill is looking good…chunks of Lake St…and more…hey wait a second, aren’t those areas that have really felt the softening of the housing market? Oh, this will be interesting…!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, education matters to families who buy houses. And, for the person who is against middle class breeders in the city: Hey, who the heck do you think is buying those family homes in the city?
Boy. Now there’s some silliness out of context.
Let’s get over the “breeders” part of my post. It’s a pointless distraction.
I will clarify – those middle class parents of school age children who make a priority of education for their children leave San Francisco.
I said further that I have two sons who were born in the city.
We moved away, because we aren’t interested in playing Nitwit Schoolboard Lotto when there are superior schools available within a simple BART ride of FiDi where we previously worked.
I understand that this trade-off is unbearable to some here – that other priorities compete vigorously.
That’s why I wrote, “prioritize the education.” As in, make it the priority.
And I focused on the middle class, because the upper class has means to afford alternatives to the Nitwit Lotto, and the poor are somewhat stuck with circumstance.
I tend to agree that good students and bad teachers can equal adults who have a mediocre education. But that is where parenting comes into play.
If there was ever an experiment where all the children in a green district switched a purple district and the children in the purple district switched a green district, I’m willing to be over 4 years, the purple district will turn green and the green district will turn purple.
I think lowering the bar for everyone by mixing the students and making them leave their neighborhood doesn’t solve anything. I also think money and bureaucracy doesn’t solve the education problems.
I ask the people in this thread to think of the 3 things that really make a particular school good. My list would be (in order):
1. Teachers
2. Parenting/Parental involvement
3. Community support
Using the variables that I mentioned that would make a particular school good, can someone explain to me how by moving kids out of their neighborhood, they are solving anything? (1) Teachers can be assigned to a different school. (2) Parenting/Parental involvement will not change by moving kid out of their neighborhood. (3) Community support is localized – when the children of the people who support their local community are no longer in the local school, community support deteriorates.
Extensive data from SFUSD shows that very few people want schools out of their neighborhood. All the data is on their website.
The current system (until 2010) messes up everyone’s commute route. The new system default to neighborhood based. If some parents would want to drive a little bit farther everyday for whatever reason, they could.
My daughter is entering K this year. Let me tell you, the primary consideration of schools is 1, location, and 2, start/end time. If those two factors do not match the work schedule/life style, we don’t consider them no matter how good it is.
I don’t think many parents from Bay View will send the kid to a school in Richmond. They may try to pick the best one within 10 to 15 minutes of driving during traffic hours (even that, it may mean 1 hour additional driving time per day).
Look at how comparatively expensive SF housing is and how crappy the schools are – you’re telling me this is going to have any real effect on property values? And barely 17% of SF households have kids. There might be some movement at the margins, but this talk of property values being influenced by these changes is largely inflated.
Regarding the differently stated priorities of the school districts in Palo Alto and SF: Palo Alto starts with a much more socially homogeneous pool of children, and does not have a significant proportion of their children living in poverty. The median income of families in the district is $141K. 77% of the adult residents of the district have four or more years of college. There’s not a lot of worry there about equal opportunity for all.
The flip side of this is that SF doesn’t appear to average one high schooler every other month feeling so desperate they throw themselves under an oncoming train.
SJM wrote:
> One was a high school teacher that I actually had when I was
> in high school and she WARNED me that I don’t want to send
> my kids to public school these days. How crazy is that? I am
> sorry for going on so long, but I am DISGUSTED in this process
> and the failings of the schools.
I have a couple relatives that teach in San Francisco Schools (Hoover Middle School and Lincoln High). Both are close to retirement and will go on for hours that sending a kid to any SF middle or high school (other than Lowell or SOTA) is a huge mistake. The administration is more concerned with not hurting anyone’s feelings and will not do anything about kids with discipline problems (and there are a lot of them). The relative at Hoover was told recently that she should feel sorry for the kid that tells her to F’ Off on a regular basis since he has “turrets syndrome” (she has an undergrad degree in Psychology and is pretty sure that the kid is just a jerk).
Then Debtpocalypse wrote:
> Middle class breeders who prioritize the education of their
> spawn GTFO of San Francisco.
I can honestly say that I do not know a single person with kids in San Francisco that don’t send them to Town, Cathedral, Burke, UHS, Convent, or SI. Most of the parents (and many of the grandparents) also went to Town, Cathedral, Burke, UHS, Convent, or SI. Since we have not been donating to the above schools for 50 years and since we don’t want to join the Guardsmen and/or JLSF and kiss ass to try and get one of the few slots they give to white “outsiders” we plan to move to the Peninsula before our kids start school and probably send them to the same great public grammar school (API Score 982) and middle school (API Score 941) I went to as a kid (my wife went to a private grammar school and middle school on the Peninsula that are currently over $25K and $30K a year)…
FormerAptBroker wrote: “I can honestly say that I do not know a single person with kids in San Francisco that don’t send them to Town, Cathedral, Burke, UHS, Convent, or SI.”
Really? I mean, really, really? Not anyone? I mean, it’s a big wide world out there – you should try to get out into it sometime.
we plan to move to the Peninsula before our kids start school
FAB, you’re breeding… congrats. Don’t you want to move closer to Sac so that the kids can learn the finer points of managing an apartment complex (that son, is a popcorn ceiling, this is a scraper). Or will you just send them over to Grandpa’s occasionally to help out with ‘routine maintenance’ so that they learn to appreciate you more?
My kids do go to one of the schools FormerAptBroker mentions. I have not been donating for the past 50 years, in fact I never donated a cent until my 1st child started school. I am not a member of The Guardsmen and/or JLSF. We do not live in close proximity to any of those schools mentioned… So I really do not understand your point. They truly do look for a diversified student body.
FormerAptBroker – you have a lot to learn about private schools in SF. To start with, there are many more of them than the 6 you listed.
I’m still boggling. No “underacheivers” going to Drew? No hippie moms from Waldorf?
Anyway, the really dirty truth about schools is that API score schools aren’t any kind of golden ticket for your child’s future success unless your kid is smart, logical, resourceful, resilient and hardworking in the first place. Everyone wants “the best” for their children, but you really want to make education THE priority, your home life is going to be where you have the best shot of doing so.
“They truly do look for a diversified student body.”
As long as they are from middle/upper class white families.
Seriously, there are many good private schools and parents should look at them as options. However, don’t bury your head in the sand and thinking the student population there represent a diversified SF student population.
That makes your post sound like a sarcasm… wait, maybe it was sarcasm?
I agree this won’t have much impact on property values in a city where most people are childless renters. Still, there could be a bump in Midtown Terrace/Forest Knolls, since Clarendon will lose its “alternative” designation. Clarendon is K-5, not K-8. Rooftop is the K-8 school in that area.
Our child goes to one of the better public elementary schools in San Francisco, and I have to say it’s better than any school I ever went to (I grew up in a wealthy suburb). We are certainly concerned about middle school, but if the elementary schools in San Francisco can be turned around (and they are being turned around, largely through the efforts of dedicated and involved parents) then we’re optimistic it can happen for middle schools as well.
The move to a more neighborhood-based enrollment system is definitely a positive. However, I find that most of the anxiety about public schools in San Francisco is in large part a result of the kind of fear-mongering and hostility evident in these comments. Reading comments about how bad the San Francisco public schools are from people who moved out of the city before their kid spent a day in one of the schools is typical.
If you all are really interested in property values (and I know you definitely are), the smart thing to do would be stop running down the local schools (particularly if you yourself are not a “breeder” and have no experience at all with them) and instead start doing something positive, like contributing time, energy or just good vibes towards them. I know that would mean you might be helping someone other than yourselves (God forbid, children no less!) but it really would ultimately benefit you as it would boost the property values in your neighborhood. And at the end of the day, isn’t that really what life is about?
I haven’t seen a school age child in the real sf in 4 yrs
“It is a trade-off that parents much make – move to a middle-upper class city and get the best academic but be in a monolith setting, or be in a diversified environment with the risk of lower academic performance. To some extend, I would say it is a balance of book smart and street smart.”
I love when people try to make a “book smart” vs. “street smart” comment in order to defend inferior schools in any big city. I’ve known plenty of perfectly provincial people from NY and SF, and I’ve known plenty of much more worldly people from Short Hills and Moraga. Street smarts has a lot more to do with parenting and opportunities than it does simply living in the city.
Jimmy:
There are over 55,000 children enrolled in public school in San Francisco. I don’t know what the “real San Francisco” is but I’m guessing that in the past 4 years you’ve missed seeing a lot of things that are all around you.
We like SF and would prefer to stay, but are def. worried about middle school. The thing that makes me feel stuck is, as a “middle class family” (ivy-league-educated architects without a trust fund), we’re looking for sfh’s up to $750k. Haven’t seen many of those in Piedmont or Mill Valley. Where does one move, within a 30 minute commute to SOMA? I’m asking seriously – are there better schools in Pacifica, Daly City, or SSF?
JimBobJones,
“Street Smart” is about everything not on the book, which involves culture, language, and knowing there are a lot of different people living different ways other than yours.
And it is about having options about what kind of life you want, the knowledge that you could travel the world or work outside US, knowing that you can deal with people from all backgrounds.
Yes, I do think that you will learn that better in an diversified environment.
And don’t twist my word. I am not defending inferior schools in any big city. I was talking about SF – a lot of elementary schools are as good as suburbs, and a few “trophy schools” are as good as private, and the immersion programs are just not that available in the suburbs (or private).
I am not talking about middle schools or high schools yet. As Uncle Festus, I believe they will be turned around as the current elementary school kids move to middle schools (dozen or so elementary schools were turned around only during the last five years or so).
leeinsf, on a psf basis, Piedmont and (especially) Mill Valley are cheaper than SF, where you are now.
There also tend to be plenty of rentals in Mill Valley (again, cheaper than SF). We’re renting in Piedmont now (a full 3BR SFH for what we paid for a 2BR flat in Bernal) — though it took quite a while to find something; not a whole lot for rent there.
leeinsf – this is my question (and price range) as well – people will say talk about how their suburban home has a short commute with a big yard and excellent schools and what a great value it is, but uhm, Piedmont is expensive.
Let’s take it a step further than the life skillz John is talking about. I’d say a college admissions officer favors the kid from the urban school district where 50%+ of the kids receive subsidized lunches. YMMV.
Piedmont is certainly not 25 minutes to anyplace in San Francisco at anytime there is significant traffic on the freeway. I don’t know why people always lowball their commute, but I have seen many people do this.
Neighborhood schools are going to freak out some Noe parents at first, because their kids are going to be assigned to a traditionally mediocre school, but in the medium run it should mean that the schools get much better. I think it is the kids and their families that tend to make a school good.
Cupertino has the highest scoring schools in the state, it is kind of odd to compare a place like San Francisco to them.
Shza, Piedmont has zero active homes on the MLS for $775k and under. Mill Valley has 12 (and lookers they are!) SF has 160, not including D10. Which is more affordable? At the low end in Mill Valley, I’d argue the psf number as well – most of those 12 are less than 1500 sf.
“Piedmont is certainly not 25 minutes to anyplace in San Francisco at anytime there is significant traffic on the freeway.”
I believe Piedmont is only ~20-25 mins by casual carpool. Not sure about express buses on ACTransit.
Sorry, forgot to add we want to OWN a SFH – not against renting but what’s the point of being an architect if you can’t mess with your walls?
I grew up in Palo Alto and when my mom came to pick me up for a dr appointment and found that the teacher put had me in front of the TV with a group of other kids they pulled me out and put me in private school. On the other hand, at the time Gunn and Paly were ranked no 1&2 in the country. Now Gunn is #56 and Paly is not on the list. Lowell is #10 (from memory).
When I look at what my kids are getting for an education in elementary even compared to the private school I went to, I am simply stunned. My daughters LOVE learning. The teachers are amazing. And I had someone tell me it was criminal for me to send my kids to the school where they attend.
My friends who have moved to the burbs for schools have ended up putting their kids in private school anyway and the competition for private school in the burbs seems worse than SF.
I think it’s 40% school and 100% what you put into it.
EB Guy wrote:
> Don’t you want to move closer to Sac so that the kids can learn
> the finer points of managing an apartment complex (that son,
> is a popcorn ceiling, this is a scraper).
I’ve scraped off plenty of (ACM) popcorn ceilings in my day (and as a kid no one told me that a pump sprayer will not only make the stuff come off easier but will keep down the dust) and that is not on the list of “character building” tasks that I plan to make the kids learn to do…
Then AParent wrote:
> My kids do go to one of the schools FormerAptBroker mentions.
> I have not been donating for the past 50 years, in fact I never
> donated a cent until my 1st child started school. I am not a member
> of The Guardsmen and/or JLSF. We do not live in close proximity
> to any of those schools mentioned… So I really do not understand
> your point. They truly do look for a diversified student body.
I know that the schools look for a “diversified” student body and if they are going to let in another white kid with parents that went to Cal and Stanford it will probably be the grandkid of an alum (who has sponsored some members of the admission committee to the Bohemian Club wait list). Like I said I’ve got plenty of friends that have kids in those schools and even the friends with kids who will be third generation are stressed out that their kids won’t get in and work hours at school plays and auctions before their kids are two years old (since the African American, Asian, and Latino kids that give the schools “diversity” take the places that used to belong to the SF old money WASP kids).
@ Ryan
Not sure what ‘score card’ Ryan used for high schools but U S News & World Reports ranking has Lowell at #28, with Gunn #67 and Palo Alto High School (Paly) at #83! As a Paly grad I just had to get this ‘fact’ on the table.
FormerAptBroker – Really? Get out more and certainly not with your “friends”. It will do you a world of good. The bourgeois entitlement attitude displayed in your post is somewhat frightening.
I guess it is true when people say there is more than a physical barrier posted by the Caldecott Tunnel. If you folks have looked and not seen anything interesting in Piedmont, why not cross the tunnel and see if you can locate decent properties in Orinda or Lafayette ? Their school district is every bit as good as Piedmont’s. When we moved out of San Francisco, we elected to go slightly farther away where we bought a big house with a big yard in a great town with great schools. Our kids swam, played soccer, baseball, softball, basketball, sang in a terrific choir and spent K through 12 in the public education system. My oldest is about to graduate from an Ivy League institution. And we now have a second home in the City. It all works out in the end. You just have to bite the bullet and leave for a while. San Francisco will still be there when you are ready to move back…
I believe Piedmont is only ~20-25 mins by casual carpool.
You belief is wrong.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-09-21/bay-area/17206122_1_curve-traffic-trip
“The trip from Interstate 80 at the Fourth Street ramp in downtown San Francisco to the MacArthur Maze in Oakland, for example, took 10 minutes on the Wednesday after Labor Day in 2008 and 17 minutes for the same trip this year.”
So it takes 17 minutes just to cross the bridge. Then you have to add in getting to the freeway, getting to the Maze (at least 10 minutes) time on surface streets in San Francisco, parking, walking to the office, etc.
Time it sometime. I think you would be surprised to find out what the actual number is. It is not 25 minutes door to door.
It is easier to get into UCLA, UCD, San Louy or UCB if you went to public high school where a low % go on to college. Your class rank is higher your GPA is higher. Since Public schools require more standardized testing the students are used to take long tests more than private schools.
Its not what you learn on the way there, it is the destination (college). Yes you can go to UCLA and find students from compton who just can not keep up and you have students at Cal State East bay who went to Saint Ignacious who can coast through with honors.
This is advice coming from a private grammar school, private HS student who is now a college counselor.
Using the variables that I mentioned that would make a particular school good, can someone explain to me how by moving kids out of their neighborhood, they are solving anything?
Diversification. So poor kids won’t be stuck in classrooms full of poor kids, who bring their contagious bad attitudes from their single parent households. It levels the playing field. As was quote earlier:
The mission of the San Francisco Unified School District is to provide each student with an equal opportunity…
The problem with this is not only inconvenience and unpredictability for parents, but also that those with means who don’t get their choice will end up moving out to the suburbs or sending their kids to private schools (as was already mentioned).
@joh: What a poor line of thinking.
Are you telling me that because someone is poor, it means they have a “bad attitude”? And why must you associate “bad attitudes’ with single parent households?
When will we as a society stop making excuses and blaming someone’s failures on something/someone else, instead of our own shortcomings.
I grew up poor, and didn’t have a bad attitude. In fact, it made me want to work harder to do better.
That was such a lame explanation, and now you are reaching for straws.
Piedmont is certainly not 25 minutes to anyplace in San Francisco at anytime there is significant traffic on the freeway. I don’t know why people always lowball their commute, but I have seen many people do this.
You live in Noe and have no idea what you’re talking about. I walked out my front door today at 8:22 and walked in the door to my office in the FiDi at 8:48. This is completely typical. There was traffic on the freeway leading into the toll plaza but the bus gets to skip that. And I never once had a commute anywhere near that quick when I lived in Bernal. I’m not sure what you gain by accusing people of lying about something that has nothing to do with you (and for which you clearly have no basis to judge).
“I believe Piedmont is only ~20-25 mins by casual carpool.”
NoeValleyJim: “You belief is wrong.”
Just re-confirmed this with my co-worker who lives in Piedmont. Takes something similar on ACTransit. And it only takes 21 mins if someone drops my co-worker off at Rockridge BART.
For my co-workers in Oakland — usually around 20 mins on the ACTransit express buses.
But that’s just a first-hand account from someone who actually lives there, JimBobJones. Weak evidence when you put it up against some guy who needs to justify purchasing at near-peak in Noe grabbing some inaccurate times off of google maps and an old SF Gate article. (PS, NVJ, your attributing 10 minutes to “surface roads” in SF would be the first place to rethink your calculations — try 2 minutes; 1 minute for bus).
I used to do a Berkeley -> SF Downtown commute and also a reverse commute, so I am very familiar with East Bay to SF travel times. I also have actually timed it a few times to see what it is like and it is no where near 20 minutes.
BART from Rockridge -> Montgomery is 21 minutes, but this would only be your commute if you lived in the BART station in Oakland and worked in the BART station in SF. How long does it take to get to the BART station? 5 minutes? 3 minutes? How long is the average wait for a train? They run every 15 minutes, so the average wait would be seven. Maybe you could time it, but you would want to show up at least a few minutes early. Then you have to walk from BART to the office. The “21 minute commute” is realistically more like 30-35.
But I have no doubt that it is faster than traveling via Muni from Bernal Heights. What was your travel time via car from Bernal to Downtown? That is an apples to apples comparison. I am willing to bet that Bernal is closer, but not by much.
Google maps says from “Piedmont” (near the high school) to 2nd and Mission is 22 minutes with no traffic and “up to 50 minutes in traffic.” My experience with Google maps tends to make me think that they are usually pretty accurate.
I can’t believe you’re still trying to argue this. NB: Piedmont is closer to SF than Berkeley is. And the bulk of the traffic your favorite source (googlemaps) is talking about comes at the maze and only affects non-carpool/non-bus lanes. There have been occasions when there is hard rain that the commute is more like 30-35 minutes, but those are very rare.
As I mentioned, my commute from Bernal (bus – bus – BART) OFTEN took close to an hour, since none of the buses there run on time; the fastest that commute could ever be (if each bus or train came the moment I got off the previous one) was 35 minutes.
“For my co-workers in Oakland — usually around 20 mins on the ACTransit express buses.”
Keyword is “on”. It is like saying “usually around 15 minutes on Muni to downtown”.
Most of the commute time is to walk to the station, wait for the transit, (on the transit), walk to work.
And if you drive, it may take 25 minutes _ON_ freeway, but then you have another 30 to drive from your home to the freeway, (on the freeway), getting off freeway to parking close to your office, walk from parking to office.
“my commute from Bernal (bus – bus – BART)”
Well that explains your long commute. You were doing it wrong. No reason to take two buses from Bernal to get to BART.
No reason to take two buses from Bernal to get to BART.
I lived right up by the main Cortland drag. If it was pouring rain, I’d generally catch the Cortland bus down to Mission. If it wasn’t raining, I’d walk down to Mission and only take the one bus and BART. This was not much faster (I can’t walk faster than a bus can drive). Bernal is just a super-inconvenient neighborhood no matter how you slice it (for getting downtown; I must say, it was great for getting to the airport). In the end, once we had to also drop off our older son at preschool in the morning, we just switched to driving and paying $350/month for parking in my building. This made the commute in closer to 20 minutes but the commute back home at 7pm was often horrendous — we’d often spend 20 minutes just waiting to get on 101.
Anyway, we’re way OT now. Our decision to move was undoubtedly the right move for us. We live about 30 yards from an express bus stop and 2 blocks from the elementary school my kids will go to in Piedmont (I think our “neighborhood school” in Bernal would have been Paul Revere, which has been designated as “failing”; and we work enough that tacking on another 50 minutes of driving to/from a better school would have made our lives unbearable). Our commute is quicker and we have twice as much space (and no downstairs neighbors) for an extra $125 a month.
john: “It is a trade-off that parents much make – move to a middle-upper class city and get the best academic but be in a monolith setting, or be in a diversified environment with the risk of lower academic performance. To some extend, I would say it is a balance of book smart and street smart.”
That’s a completely false choice. What SFUSD needs to do is provide high quality education in a diversified environment, not one over the other.
Your post underlies a bias that diversity is more important than getting a good education. That’s the bias that SFUSD has made, so congratulations, SFUSD is perfect for you.
NVJ: “How long is the average wait for a train?”
Actually, between Rockridge and Montgomery, there’s a train every 5 mins during commute hours, if I remember correctly. So average wait is 2.5 mins, not the 7 you claim.
Does Muni drop you off at your front door? Does Muni have consistent wait times? (from my experiences on the 38-Geary, I can tell you it doesn’t — big difference between scheduled wait time and actual wait time with the clustering of 3-4 buses back-to-back-to-back[-to-back] often). I mean, you can add on your walk times and wait times, but the comparison is still better for Oakland/Piedmont vs. my experiences in SF.
And upper Peninsula commute times via BART ain’t that bad either.
Sorry, forgot to add we want to OWN a SFH – not against renting but what’s the point of being an architect if you can’t mess with your walls?
Ugh. Sorry, but you don’t get everything you think you’re entitled to. I know you and your wife are “Ivy League-educated” (so are my wife and I, twice-over) but if you pick a low-paying job out of idealism, you’re going to have to sacrifice on other things. If my wife and I had gone to the ACLU or the Government instead of to big law firms, I’d understand that owning a home near good public schools was just not an option. As it is, it’s still something years away for us (should we decide that’s what we want to spend money on), and I’m guessing our household income is multiples of yours.
You should try Portland.
rr @ 12:26
“money is not the cause of higher achievement, parental involvement in education is. And time to get involved in your kid’s education is easier to find when you have more money (e.g., because you don’t have to work 2 jobs). It’s also easier to find time to attend PTA meetings, parent/teacher conferences, and other activities that allow you to have a strong voice in the education system.
…
It’s one reason, I think, that charter schools can be very successful– because the parents have to choose to send the kids to the specific school, you automatically self-select for families with a strong involvement in education.”
Truer words were never spoken. That’s also why starting an immersion program at a poor-performing school can work miracles for that school, but it’s a zero-sum game: the immersion program will draw kids with a willing/able family behind and change the demographics of the school for the better (academically speaking; don’t take the bait, those of you overly PC). But those same kids will not enroll at other schools, which -in turn- will lose that human potential and head south academically. You an only set up so many immersion programs before you run out of “good material” to fill them up.
That’s why throwing more money at schools can only achieve limited marginal benefit. We can only have so much overall academic accomplishment when teaching to the existing school population in SF. You’ll find the occasional kid from a broken family/at-risk background/lower-SES who beats the odds and makes for a feel-good inspirational Oprah story. But the end results depend on the majority of the cases, not on a few outlier ones.
Actually, I’m the wife, don’t feel entitled, also I.L.”twice-over”, am only trying to do the best I can for my kids, am quite confident you make much more than we do, and like SF very much, thank you. Just wish our school options were better, somewhere within our own state! Also shocked that a larger percentage of parents aren’t outraged that CA would rather prop up home prices with tax credits than fund our schools.
Regarding commute times, sure, you can get from Piedmont to the financial district in 25 minutes, which is the minimum amount of time it takes me to get from the inner Richmond to my job out at the VA in the outer Richmond. (It was about the same when I worked downtown.) The difference is, if it’s a nice day and I don’t feel like waiting for the bus, I can walk it in 45 minutes. 😛
Also, if I want to go out at night, I can take a cab home for a lot less than if I lived in Piedmont. And if I have to go to the doctor before work, it’s a fifteen minute walk there. In fact, it’s a fifteen minute walk or less to almost any kind of restaurant I want, my doctor, my dentist, the grocery store, the library, the comic book shop, a bookshop, the beach, the park, museums, almost anywhere I need or want to go. Which is really nice, and why it costs a million dollars to buy a single family home in the inner Richmond. (Or Noe.) Which is the real reason middle class families leave instead of staying and improving the schools. Not everyone is like us and okay with raising kids in a flat. If we didn’t have all boys, we might be in the suburbs too.
Getting back to the original topic, I think the new school assignment scheme probably will have an influence in the micro-neighborhood way, at least as much as Google shuttle stops do. Considering the way the school board operates, it will be awhile before we know if the new system works out though, so I don’t think anyone should count on an immediate or lasting effect.
PS 1st time buyer is quite right – I said “Clarendon” way upthread when I totally mean to type “Claire Lilienthal.” D’oh.
The difference is, if it’s a nice day and I don’t feel like waiting for the bus, I can walk it in 45 minutes. 😛
Far fewer nice days with all that fog though….
MissingTheCityBut:”Your post underlies a bias that diversity is more important than getting a good education. That’s the bias that SFUSD has made, so congratulations, SFUSD is perfect for you.”
You are living in a bubble.
Given the same resource, having diversity (on income) will definitely have a negative impact on the quality of academics. The teach must spend more time on the kids from poorer families.
Yes, I do believe diversity is more important than test scores, as long as it is not diversity for diversity’s sake (as the old lottery system). It is about knowing the real world. Knowledge can be acquired, common sense cannot.
The school test scores is a reflection of middle-class white/asian families. That’s just the reality.
I think you will fit right in at Palo Alto, for better or worse.
Then why on earth are you hanging out on a SF RE blog?
shza, it’s true. The fog can be a bit much in the dead of summer. Then again, I’d personally rather have fog than have it too hot.
That’s the thing, isn’t it – it’s all trade offs. I’m not sure there is the perfect, affordable, convenient neighborhood with a great public school system and short commute in the bay area. You have to pay, you have to drive, or you have to get creative.
But unlike others on this thread, I don’t buy into the idea that if you don’t put a high API scoring public school above all else, you’ve somehow failed as a parent. I think if you’re really prioritizing your kid’s education, you put them in the school that suits them best and arrange your home life so that it is conducive to supporting them, with API scores being just one of many ways to compare your options.
Shza, I appreciate your input, but I do hope you realize just how unique your situation is. It’s too bad the thread got sidetracked on your particular commute experience. The majority of families are going to be more like leeinSF than yours. Families who strongly debate moving to San Ramon or Dublin/Pleasanton for housing and schools, but still work in downtown SF. Often, they choose to prioritize the kids’ education, but find their commute going from 45 minutes to 75 minutes (door-to-door).
And it’s true that this is partially fed by a desire to own not rent. I have one slightly insane friend who decided to move to Antioch because prices there cratered so deeply.
SFUSD policies regarding shuffling students around are not from some incomprehensible conspiracy to defraud honest families access to a decent education. They are faced with competing demands, and have to muddle through. Unions won’t let them fire (or relocate) teachers, lawsuits have required them to forcibly attempt “equal access” for the poorer minority, laws require them to provide extra resources for many categories of non-typical students (English learners, autistic, etc), many of the buildings are — lets face it — falling apart, and the funding is razor-thin.
I wish SF schools generally were better, and I would like to see them be good enough to inspire families to not move to the ‘burbs. But, obviously, the populace of SF sees already high property values and doesn’t feel a need to spend on a tangential element of public infrastructure that they won’t utilize (even if it would boost values slightly higher). As for me, I will do what I am able to make a difference at the (public) school my kids are attending, and — hopefully — that involvement inspires my kids more than me spending another 5 hours a week commuting and apart from them.
My situation is only as unique as it is *because* so many people like leeinsf have a desire to own rather than rent (I get it in her case, given her career — though it still seems hopelessly unrealistic; but more typically it’s completely irrational). Look at what EBGuy said about schools in Berkeley. That’s a reasonable commute (faster than from plenty of parts in SF) and rental rates are enormously cheaper there — *easily* affordable for someone talking about making payments on a $750k home. If someone has convinced themselves that it’s stay in SF or buy a house in Dublin, that person has created his/her own quandary.
And you can thank NVJ for sidetracking the thread about my particular commute. I’m with you — I was quite bored with that tangent myself.
“If someone has convinced themselves that it’s stay in SF or buy a house in Dublin, that person has created his/her own quandary.”
I heard a preposterous story about there being jobs in and around Dublin! We all know that jobs are only in downtown SF.
“The school test scores is a reflection of middle-class white/asian families.”
Where are you going with that?
Yeah, John – I’d like to know where you’re going with that quote as well.
As for diversity, perhaps john, you are unaware of the Tinsley VTP program, which admits children from the Ravenswood school district area (East Palo Alto and east Menlo) to PAUSD.
As for the tradeoff, it’s unfortunate that some groups feel that academics need to suffer for social engineering with dubious results.
I admit we can only (barely) handle $750 b/c we bought a 2 unit with a partner in 2001 and condo converted – so we’re trading up.
Any fwiw, we’ve pretty much decided to stick it out in SF, doing what we can with the middle school we get (prob. Hoover) and aim for Lowell.
Agree with kthnxybe et al on lifestyle, parent input, etc.
LeeinSF, there is a lot of positive chatter about Aptos these days, and you could find a nice house in the assignment area for $750K.
We’re sticking it out. Our son is a real city kid – totally takes it for granted that we can go to the Academy of Sciences, Exploratorium, Zeum, etc., pretty much anytime the mood strikes.
Here are some items that should be corrected here:
There already are neighborhood school boundaries used in SFUSD’s assignment system. Living inside these attendance areas *today* gives you preference for these schools. http://portal.sfusd.edu/data/epc/Map_final_SFUSD_map_layout.pdf
There is much misinformation swirling about on this comment thread.
Just because Kfiles is “popular” does not mean all of the information is accurate. Her eldest child is in first grade. She only has that much experience with the school district.
SFUSD has some great schools, but if you want your kid in, don’t give up without a fight. It works, I know from experience.
If you want your kid in Lowell, go to a private middle school. This increases the chances dramatically.
Investigate the schools yourself, don’t rely on “word of mouth” views.
Remember, the new policy will last until the superintendent leaves or is bought out.
About real estate price increases:
Houses in the Sunset where the “good” schools are concentrated, aren’t going up in price.
MissingTheCityBut,
Dig out any school’s test score and social-economic data and you will see the strong link between middle-class white/asian population and the scores.
The Tinsley VTP program assign 60 kids for three grades per year, so around average 4 kids per school per grade. Big deal. Are you going to pad yourself on the back for being progressive now?
Nobody said “academics needs to suffer”. It is a fact that there is a trade-off. The definition of trade-off is that you can make a choice on whether to accept it or not. Obviously you don’t like it, that’s fine. A lot of SF parents do accept it and even think it is important.
Life is all about choices. You are free to make your own choice by moving to Palo Alto, just don’t attack people who choose differently.
And note, I have not attacked Palo Alto schools whatsoever. It kind of shows the difference between you and me.
Lee – good luck. FWIW, I know a Hoover family who is really happy there – the oldest is now a senior at Washington (didn’t want to go to Lowell) and now has her pick of several UCs. She is probably going with the one where she is getting the biggest merit (not need, not diversity) based scholarship package. Mom and grandma both have PhDs, but they just want her to be happy. 🙂
@John: I still don’t get your point about white/asian population and the scores.
Nobody said “academics needs to suffer”. It is a fact that there is a trade-off. The definition of trade-off is that you can make a choice on whether to accept it or not. Obviously you don’t like it, that’s fine. A lot of SF parents do accept it and even think it is important.
Well, okay, that’s fine. The fact that matters to me is that the academics at SF schools often aren’t good. I don’t care why and I don’t really care about pointing fingers at specific causes. If I were a teacher, administrator, politician, school board member, etc., I would certainly care why, but I’m not. I can’t fix these things from the inside, so my suggested solution for many people is more likely to be private school or moving outside the city.
To address a few other people’s points, the fact that elementary schools in SF could be good and middle and high schools could be questionable is the same problem that occurs in other not-good school districts. Oakland has several good elementary schools too, but the middle schools and high schools can suffer, and this is also true in many other Bay Area school districts that don’t have great middle/high schools. Same deal in parts of LA from what I understand — people are more than happy to send their kids to certain elementary schools, but it gets dicey with some of the middle and high schools.
Personally I’m much more concerned about middle school and high school. It’s relatively easy for a involved parent to supplement an inadequate elementary school in the early years and there’s only so much that is taught in elementary school in the first place, so there’s only so much that can be inadequate. Well, in the U.S. at least that’s true; I’ve heard immigrant parents say something like “wait, you learn multiplication when?” when learning about what their kids are taught here.
john, you’ve completely missed the point. The problem with the act of “enforcing” diversity, SFUSD has pretty much randomized the rules on knowing which school(s) your children will go.
To be clear, I think diversity is great. I can tell you are inferring that I don’t think it’s important, but you would be wrong.
However, the mechanism to infuse diversity in SFUSD doesn’t work well at all. In fact, it completely sucks because it degrades academics, which is the whole point of having kids go to school.
As I’ve stated before, what many parents who care about their kids’ education want is enough influence over the opportunities they give to their children. SFUSD’s Rube Goldberg-esque admissions process doesn’t give comfort to many parents, which drives families out. It’s pretty obvious why San Francisco has so few under 18 kids as a percentage of population.
In fact DP’s statement: “Remember, the new policy will last until the superintendent leaves or is bought out” pretty much validates our decision to leave SF for the sake of our kid.
The politics of social engineering trumps everything in San Francisco, including education.
MissingTheCityBut,
You haven’t studied the data.
Yes, the SFUSD purposely _tried_ to enforce diversity. However, all the data shows that they _failed_ to do that. Location and time are the primary considerations for parents and extremely few would apply out of the area. Look at the demographics of Lawton (majority Asian) and Claredon (majority White) would clearly show that, even though they are both alternative schools, with no attendance area. SFUSD also have a detailed spread sheet showing for each school, where the students are from. Kids may not go to their neighborhood schools, but generally they go to a school within reasonable commute time (10 to 15 minutes).
So the only result of the old system is that parents don’t know which school their kids would go to, and mess up their commute route. With fear, the parents move out of the city. There is very little impact on diversity (despite the ill intention). Each school is diversified enough, in the sense that it reflects the general population of the surrounding area. However, don’t believe for a second that kids commute across the city.
I also said earlier that I am against the old lottery system which purposely introduce diversity.
Take a look at greatschools.net. There are a lot of good public elementary schools. Generally, every schools on the west side are pretty decent. It fails apart on the South East (again, think about social economics). If the city’s “diversity” technique worked, we wouldn’t see this difference.
My daughter is entering K this fall, so I looked at the data extensively. Before I looked at the data, I had the same knee-jerk perception as you, but the reality is different.
Like I said, I don’t know about middle school and high school yet because I am not at that stage. However, by looking at how some of the elementary schools get turned around (some of them now approach “trophy school” status, like Miraloma), I don’t see why it won’t happen at middle and high school levels too.
The new system will remove the fear of middle-class families. They would know by a fair certainty which school their kids are going to. That’s much easier for the parents’ planning, and good for school community since neighborhood parents are more likely to participate in school events. This has to be good for the schools, and for the city.
One thing about middle school – the new system won’t have a round of lottery for middle schools. Each elementary school feed into a particular middle school. That’s good for child development and good for the school.
@joh: What a poor line of thinking.
Are you telling me that because someone is poor, it means they have a “bad attitude”? And why must you associate “bad attitudes’ with single parent households?
When will we as a society stop making excuses and blaming someone’s failures on something/someone else, instead of our own shortcomings.
I grew up poor, and didn’t have a bad attitude. In fact, it made me want to work harder to do better.
That was such a lame explanation, and now you are reaching for straws.
Reaching for straws?
First of all, I never said I agree with the lottery system. I do think diversification in general benefits society as a whole, as I don’t believe people should be raised in a segregated environment in such a diverse city.
Secondly, you asked what good could come of SFUSD’s lottery system. I provided an example. An extreme example, full of stereotypes, which was used to make a point about diversification and not to be taken literally. I thought that was obvious, but apparently not. There are of course other benefits of diversifying the public schools. And since you like to read these posts so literally, I should also restate that there are far more disadvantages of of the existing lottery system.
John wrote: However, don’t believe for a second that kids commute across the city.
Uhm, yes, yes they do, from middle school on, and in elementary if it’s an OER (alternative) school. It’s really common.
I know I spoke about why families might want to stay in the city up thread, and yes, there are those of us who make it work. But kids do routinely get assigned to schools across town, sometimes because their parents request it, and sometimes because the closer school is full.
This made the commute in closer to 20 minutes but the commute back home at 7pm was often horrendous — we’d often spend 20 minutes just waiting to get on 101.
So when you drove South to Bernal Heights, it would take 20 minutes to get to the freeway at rush hour, but now that you are headed East it only takes a few minutes to get to the same freeway? That is pretty miraculous.
In any case, you have made a choice that is obviously the right one for you and your family. Good for you! As I have said on an earlier thread about schools, Piedmont near the Oakland border, hopefully just off Grand, is definitely our Plan B, depending on how school assignment works. That area has great walkability, a nice urban diverse vibe *and* great schools.
San Francisco schools have improved greatly since the choice aka lottery system was put in place. The School District was under a court ordered consent degree to desegregate the schools and since our neighborhoods are segregated, something had to be done. In some cities, they just bused kids all over the place, others built magnets, here we tried something else. It worked pretty well, in that the schools are both less segregated than they used to be *and* higher performing. Which is actually kind of incredible if you think about it a bit. Lots of school districts have tried to do this, but outside of Berkeley I don’t know of any other with a similar level of success.
But it no doubt creates a huge burden for families in a bunch of ways: natural communities of geography are broken up, parents have to somehow kid their kids halfway across town and the whole unpredictable nature of the process is problematic.
Everyone wants their kids to go to an above average school, filled with above average kids, but hopefully it is obvious that this is not possible for everyone in a large diverse district. Perhaps in Lake Wobegon 🙂
I think that SFUSD does very good overall given the following challenges: what should be the top 25% of academically performing kids are pulled into private school, we have an average to slightly above average percentage of students in poverty and eligible for free lunch, the cost of doing everything is high here and we suffer from the white flight effect as evidenced by many of the posters on this thread. In spite of all of this, we have the best performing urban school district in the state and an above average school district overall.
But this has to put in the context of the generally poor state of California schools. Before Prop 13 California had well-funded schools that were some of the best in the country. Now we we have slipped to the middle of the pack in per pupil spending and have correspondingly mediocre schools. Money doesn’t always guarantee good schools, but when you slash spending like that performance predictably suffers. And California looks to be trying to solve its chronic budget problems by slashing school spending even more. What The Boomers have done to what was once a well-functioning state is nothing short of criminal.
Personally, I don’t know how the new system is going to work for us. Our local school is Fairmount, but since it is fully language immersion now, we are not guaranteed assignment to it. Does anyone know the geographical boundaries for the new system are going to look like? Where will Upper Noe/Glen Park kids be assigned to? We will try and get our daughter assigned to a Mandarin immersion program or one of the K-8 schools, but if we don’t get that, I really don’t know what we are going to do. Either St. Paul’s Catholic School or off to Piedmont or Palo Alto, I suppose. I really want to send my children to public school.
No one would wait 20 minutes to get onto 101 to get to Bernal, but not wait to get on the Bay Bridge. First, the traffic back ups are much worse getting on the Bay Bridge after work than going south. Second, one would take surface streets or 280 and be in Bernal in under 20 minutes. From downtown by car, I can get all the way to Bernal in less time than it takes me just to get on the Bay Bridge at rush hour.
For transit, I take BART to get downtown– walkable from north Bernal. From south Bernal, I suppose taking one bus to the J Church might be faster than 2 buses to BART, but neither sound ideal to me. I’d bike to BART, or all the way downtown rather than rely on MUNI if that were my commute, but that’s just me.
(But if one had a few kids and a great deal on a rental home, Piedmont indeed would sound attractive.)
“Does anyone know the geographical boundaries for the new system are going to look like?”
The new maps are supposed to be ready sometime this fall. Not very specific, sorry – that’s the best info I have.
I have a vague recollection that the new assignment maps would be published in September with a public comment period to follow – but I can’t find it. I know several people in your neighborhood who are all warily eyeing the schools that surround you. Glen Park residents probably have a good chance at an assignment at Glen Park Elementary. I would also venture that Junipero Serra ES will be on that list for the Fairmount Heights area. Glen Park Elementary will be at the Glen Park Festival with a booth where you can meet parents and teachers…our family has only been there since September but so far we don’t the school deserves the lousy rep that it has.
So when you drove South to Bernal Heights, it would take 20 minutes to get to the freeway at rush hour, but now that you are headed East it only takes a few minutes to get to the same freeway? That is pretty miraculous.
NVJ, we’ve established your complete ignorance on the subject; why do you persist in highlighting it?
What you’d know if you had any basis for commenting here is that there is a separate bus ramp onto the freeway eastbound that completely cuts out the wait. So what takes 20 minutes in your own car takes 30 seconds on the bus. Do you want to ask some more uninformed rhetorical questions now?