Interesting article. I do think your discussion of Starr King ES is off base and poorly thought out, particularly with the line "Mandarin Immersion does not belong at Starr King" for several reasons.
1) Language immersion schools are city-wide, not local, in their admission. They need to draw from a large catchment area. As mentioned in the SFUSD metrics, proximity to freeway access needs to be considered. Starr King's close proximity to 280 on/off ramps allows it to serve a large catchment area within a reasonable driving time (10 min), even during commute times. Have you tried driving through the Sunset during rush hour? Any school located in the Sunset would afford huge transportation inequities to anybody not able to live within close proximity to that school, and would be detrimental to a program intended to be "city-wide"./
2) If you do want to talk about geographic alignment, I think you need better information on the distribution of Mandarin speakers. I cannot find information on Mandarin speakers, but at least for "Chinese" speakers a Sunset location would poorly suit concentrations of Chinese speakers living in the Chinatown area and large areas south of 280 (including the Portola area)
3) Starr King Mandarin Immersion has no trouble filing 2 classrooms/year with its current location. This to me indicates that it is geographically well aligned with large enough portions of the demand for such a program.
4) SFUSD really just needs more Mandarin immersion programs given the demand for the two existing programs (Starr King with 2 classrooms/year, Jose Ortega with 1 classroom/year).
5) SFUSD also puts Facilities Condition as one of its metrics. Starr King ES has been recently renovated (completed 2015) and has a large enough campus to include at least 3 classrooms per grade level, exactly the sort of campus SFUSD needs to keep in operation.
6) Maintaining general education in the local neighborhood. Given the nearby housing stock is in transition, Starr King would not currently perform equally well as a neighborhood general education elementary school. An immersion program at Starr King makes great use of an existing resource, it allows sufficiently easy transportation from a large catchment area for a geographically dispersed student body (students interested in MI), and allows the continued presence of a general education classroom that serves the currently small number of neighborhood children interested in a general education program at this location. Note this "small number" will likely change in 10 years as the housing transition completes.
Hi Andy, thanks for the thoughtful reply. I strongly agree that SFUSD needs more Mandarin immersion schools. The success of the two private Mandarin immersion schools, and the fact that SFUSD Mandarin immersion programs are oversubscribed, demonstrates that there is demand.
The point I was trying to make is that the district should try to distinguish between the popularity of a program and the popularity of a school. That's hard to do because the demand for a language program at a school is partly dependent on the popularity of the program and partly on the school. The Korean program at Claire Lilienthal owes a lot of its popularity to the fact that it is at Claire Lilienthal, which has a reputation of being a very good school and is K-8 which means parents avoid the fraught middle school transition. People apply because they want their kids to attend Lilienthal and the Korean program happens to be a way to get in. I'd be willing to bet that many of the 60 non-native speakers who listed the Korean program among their top 3, were also among the 370 who listed the GE program among their top 3. The Japanese program at Clarendon is much more popular than the Japanese program at Rosa Parks (166 top 3 applicants for the English cohort at Clarendon vs. 31 at Rosa Parks) because Clarendon as a school is more popular than Rosa Parks as a school, as revealed by the number of applications for their respective GE programs (277 listed Clarendon in their top 3 vs. 43 for Rosa Parks). Again, I would bet that a considerable number listed both Clarendon GE and Clarendon Japanese in their top 3.
My contention is that the placement of the two Mandarin programs at Ortega and Starr King serves to hide or suppress the demand that exists for Mandarin immersion and provides the illusion of popularity for the schools. If the program were at, say, Feinstein ES, in the Sunset instead of at Starr King, the number of applicants would be much higher, in part because there would be more Mandarin speakers in the vicinity and in part because people would think Feinstein is a better school. To take another hypothetical, if the Korean program were moved from Lilienthal to Starr King, its popularity would crater.
Yes, it would be great to have accurate information about the residence of Mandarin speakers. All I have is the number of children at each school whose home language is Mandarin and those are concentrated in the Sunset and Richmond. It's theoretically possible, but unlikely, that this is not an accurate reflection of where they live.
If you’d like to make recommendations on a specific school site I’d recommend you consider walking to that location. I can tell you first hand there are multi family housing units preparing to go online right across from Starr king and I take offense to your mention of closing that school. I agree construction and planning are slow and mostly delayed due to past zoning for single family housing - but that is particularly true where there is single family housing zoned-largely the west side of our city. The east side however has densified housing significantly-soma, mission, mission bay, dogpatch/potrero, and a more along corridors primarily on the eastern previously redlined areas of the city - this is also where schools should be considered as a focus for community serving areas.
To add onto Emily's comment, there are some major assumptions here that Starr King doesn't serve the Potrero Hill neighborhood, but I know plenty of families in Mandarin Immersion who live within walking distance. It would also be a mistake to use Chinese speakers as the sole data point in making the case for MI to be relocated to the west side of the city, when the reality is that many Chinese heritage families don't speak Chinese and list English as their primary language when they enroll in SFUSD. Frankly, there's plenty of demand for Mandarin and ideally there would be several programs located in a few different neighborhoods scattered around the city.
In your review of metrics I find that SFUSD is not including permitted and additional housing under construction near these schools as part of their review process. Item 7 - you mentioned Starr King - which my children attend. Consider the entire neighborhood surrounding has been demolished and is under construction with 1,700 new units underway. That also should be considered, which is also a reason there are "less" people requesting it that are within walking distance - the housing stock is in transition and has been for several year. Take a look at that consideration and challenge SFUSD to do a better job in their consideration, and please add your notes.
Back in 2018, SFUSD hired a demography firm which did a really in-depth analysis of every permitted and planned housing development in the city and forecasted how many additional SFUSD students each could be expected to produce. You can find the report at https://demographers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/SFUSD-dynamic-report-2018.pdf. The conclusion of this analysis was that "by 2030, total enrollments could range from 64,000 to 73,000, up from 57,500 students in fall 2016". The report was wrong from the moment it was written and has gotten progressively more wrong with every year. San Francisco as a city makes it extremely hard to build. We produce these housing plans for statewide approval but then we delay and delay and lard them with requirements to make them uneconomic except in a boom. If the new housing materializes and produces the expected number of students, mothballed schools can always be restarted. But staffing for a boom that didn't materialize is one reason SFUSD's finances are in such a mess.
For Criteria 3, I suspect that the language "experienced by students in the school" means that they are going to calculate the index score according to the zip codes of the kids enrolled in each school, not according to the zipcode of the school itself. So, if a school like Cobb, in a very privileged zip code primarily serves students coming from less privileged zipcodes, it's index score on this criteria should make it less likely to close than a nearby school serving more kids from the wealthy surrounding neighborhood. I share your impression that there are LOTS of questions still unanswered about the criteria and how this math gets us to a sensible list of closures and consolidations, but anyway, that was my read on his criterai based on the "Metric & Meaning" document they linked in the Stanford presentation on the May 20th meeting of the DAC https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13ftfFG8EU2N4MaEeCW9m5eEBAupE5h_v_RF3KGOE2PE/edit#slide=id.g2718bff3d41_0_0
I hope so. There's no mapping between zip codes and census tracts so they'd have to map from home address to census tract. That might require some specialized software. I know how to see on a map which census tract an address is in but I don't know how to get that in data form. It's probably trivial with the right software.
Interesting article. I do think your discussion of Starr King ES is off base and poorly thought out, particularly with the line "Mandarin Immersion does not belong at Starr King" for several reasons.
1) Language immersion schools are city-wide, not local, in their admission. They need to draw from a large catchment area. As mentioned in the SFUSD metrics, proximity to freeway access needs to be considered. Starr King's close proximity to 280 on/off ramps allows it to serve a large catchment area within a reasonable driving time (10 min), even during commute times. Have you tried driving through the Sunset during rush hour? Any school located in the Sunset would afford huge transportation inequities to anybody not able to live within close proximity to that school, and would be detrimental to a program intended to be "city-wide"./
2) If you do want to talk about geographic alignment, I think you need better information on the distribution of Mandarin speakers. I cannot find information on Mandarin speakers, but at least for "Chinese" speakers a Sunset location would poorly suit concentrations of Chinese speakers living in the Chinatown area and large areas south of 280 (including the Portola area)
https://subject.space/projects/san-francisco-language-maps/images/chinese.png
3) Starr King Mandarin Immersion has no trouble filing 2 classrooms/year with its current location. This to me indicates that it is geographically well aligned with large enough portions of the demand for such a program.
4) SFUSD really just needs more Mandarin immersion programs given the demand for the two existing programs (Starr King with 2 classrooms/year, Jose Ortega with 1 classroom/year).
5) SFUSD also puts Facilities Condition as one of its metrics. Starr King ES has been recently renovated (completed 2015) and has a large enough campus to include at least 3 classrooms per grade level, exactly the sort of campus SFUSD needs to keep in operation.
6) Maintaining general education in the local neighborhood. Given the nearby housing stock is in transition, Starr King would not currently perform equally well as a neighborhood general education elementary school. An immersion program at Starr King makes great use of an existing resource, it allows sufficiently easy transportation from a large catchment area for a geographically dispersed student body (students interested in MI), and allows the continued presence of a general education classroom that serves the currently small number of neighborhood children interested in a general education program at this location. Note this "small number" will likely change in 10 years as the housing transition completes.
Hi Andy, thanks for the thoughtful reply. I strongly agree that SFUSD needs more Mandarin immersion schools. The success of the two private Mandarin immersion schools, and the fact that SFUSD Mandarin immersion programs are oversubscribed, demonstrates that there is demand.
The point I was trying to make is that the district should try to distinguish between the popularity of a program and the popularity of a school. That's hard to do because the demand for a language program at a school is partly dependent on the popularity of the program and partly on the school. The Korean program at Claire Lilienthal owes a lot of its popularity to the fact that it is at Claire Lilienthal, which has a reputation of being a very good school and is K-8 which means parents avoid the fraught middle school transition. People apply because they want their kids to attend Lilienthal and the Korean program happens to be a way to get in. I'd be willing to bet that many of the 60 non-native speakers who listed the Korean program among their top 3, were also among the 370 who listed the GE program among their top 3. The Japanese program at Clarendon is much more popular than the Japanese program at Rosa Parks (166 top 3 applicants for the English cohort at Clarendon vs. 31 at Rosa Parks) because Clarendon as a school is more popular than Rosa Parks as a school, as revealed by the number of applications for their respective GE programs (277 listed Clarendon in their top 3 vs. 43 for Rosa Parks). Again, I would bet that a considerable number listed both Clarendon GE and Clarendon Japanese in their top 3.
My contention is that the placement of the two Mandarin programs at Ortega and Starr King serves to hide or suppress the demand that exists for Mandarin immersion and provides the illusion of popularity for the schools. If the program were at, say, Feinstein ES, in the Sunset instead of at Starr King, the number of applicants would be much higher, in part because there would be more Mandarin speakers in the vicinity and in part because people would think Feinstein is a better school. To take another hypothetical, if the Korean program were moved from Lilienthal to Starr King, its popularity would crater.
Yes, it would be great to have accurate information about the residence of Mandarin speakers. All I have is the number of children at each school whose home language is Mandarin and those are concentrated in the Sunset and Richmond. It's theoretically possible, but unlikely, that this is not an accurate reflection of where they live.
If you’d like to make recommendations on a specific school site I’d recommend you consider walking to that location. I can tell you first hand there are multi family housing units preparing to go online right across from Starr king and I take offense to your mention of closing that school. I agree construction and planning are slow and mostly delayed due to past zoning for single family housing - but that is particularly true where there is single family housing zoned-largely the west side of our city. The east side however has densified housing significantly-soma, mission, mission bay, dogpatch/potrero, and a more along corridors primarily on the eastern previously redlined areas of the city - this is also where schools should be considered as a focus for community serving areas.
To add onto Emily's comment, there are some major assumptions here that Starr King doesn't serve the Potrero Hill neighborhood, but I know plenty of families in Mandarin Immersion who live within walking distance. It would also be a mistake to use Chinese speakers as the sole data point in making the case for MI to be relocated to the west side of the city, when the reality is that many Chinese heritage families don't speak Chinese and list English as their primary language when they enroll in SFUSD. Frankly, there's plenty of demand for Mandarin and ideally there would be several programs located in a few different neighborhoods scattered around the city.
In your review of metrics I find that SFUSD is not including permitted and additional housing under construction near these schools as part of their review process. Item 7 - you mentioned Starr King - which my children attend. Consider the entire neighborhood surrounding has been demolished and is under construction with 1,700 new units underway. That also should be considered, which is also a reason there are "less" people requesting it that are within walking distance - the housing stock is in transition and has been for several year. Take a look at that consideration and challenge SFUSD to do a better job in their consideration, and please add your notes.
Back in 2018, SFUSD hired a demography firm which did a really in-depth analysis of every permitted and planned housing development in the city and forecasted how many additional SFUSD students each could be expected to produce. You can find the report at https://demographers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/SFUSD-dynamic-report-2018.pdf. The conclusion of this analysis was that "by 2030, total enrollments could range from 64,000 to 73,000, up from 57,500 students in fall 2016". The report was wrong from the moment it was written and has gotten progressively more wrong with every year. San Francisco as a city makes it extremely hard to build. We produce these housing plans for statewide approval but then we delay and delay and lard them with requirements to make them uneconomic except in a boom. If the new housing materializes and produces the expected number of students, mothballed schools can always be restarted. But staffing for a boom that didn't materialize is one reason SFUSD's finances are in such a mess.
For Criteria 3, I suspect that the language "experienced by students in the school" means that they are going to calculate the index score according to the zip codes of the kids enrolled in each school, not according to the zipcode of the school itself. So, if a school like Cobb, in a very privileged zip code primarily serves students coming from less privileged zipcodes, it's index score on this criteria should make it less likely to close than a nearby school serving more kids from the wealthy surrounding neighborhood. I share your impression that there are LOTS of questions still unanswered about the criteria and how this math gets us to a sensible list of closures and consolidations, but anyway, that was my read on his criterai based on the "Metric & Meaning" document they linked in the Stanford presentation on the May 20th meeting of the DAC https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13ftfFG8EU2N4MaEeCW9m5eEBAupE5h_v_RF3KGOE2PE/edit#slide=id.g2718bff3d41_0_0
I hope so. There's no mapping between zip codes and census tracts so they'd have to map from home address to census tract. That might require some specialized software. I know how to see on a map which census tract an address is in but I don't know how to get that in data form. It's probably trivial with the right software.