Why Is Private Schooling So Popular in the San Francisco Bay Area

It's about money, not desegregation

KQED’s Bay Curious recently ran a story: “Why is Private Schooling So Popular in the San Francisco Bay Area” (transcript). Before we answer the question, some of the interviewees said things that are worth debunking.

Among the interviewees was Rand Quinn. He is now a professor at Penn but his PhD thesis at Stanford was based on SFUSD’s desegregation experience and was turned into a book: Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Although he has literally written the book on the topic, he gets his facts wrong. Here’s his exchange with the interviewer in full:

Pauline Bartolone: … Private school attendance in San Francisco has been very high for a long time.

Rand Quinn: It most certainly has roots in the desegregation process.

Pauline Bartolone: Rand Quinn once worked in San Francisco public schools. That experience inspired him to get a doctorate in education, and to write a book on the history of racial integration in the city during the late 1960s and 70s. In the beginning, kids were bussed out of their neighborhoods as a way to mix up each school’s student population.

Rand Quinn: When the courts demanded that San Francisco Unified School District desegregate, private school enrollment surged. And that this surge essentially created a permanent shift away from public education that we see today.

Pauline Bartolone: Bussing wasn’t popular among any ethnic group, but research shows, white and Asian families were the most dissatisfied. Some parents believed that racial integration would lower educational standards. Tens of thousands of kids left San Francisco public schools over the next couple of decades.

Rand Quinn: There were robust options both in terms of Catholic schools and private independent schools for San Francisco families.

Pauline Bartolone: The flood of families opting out of the public system was the beginning of a negative cycle that’s been hard to reverse, Rand says. Kids leave, funding dwindles. The district responds by closing school buildings, maybe ending programs. Then, perhaps, cuts to staff make big news. The thinner the resources are at public schools, the more the community’s confidence in them erodes.

Rand Quinn: So even more families may opt out of the district and send their kids to private schools, especially middle class families with the means to leave. And so the burden of under-resourced schools falls disproportionately on working class and poor families.

In the KQED news article that accompanies the radio broadcast, Board of Education Commissioner Matt Alexander, the longest serving member of the board, echoed Rand Quinn’s claims and added some wrinkles of his own.

“The large share of private school enrollment in [San Francisco] has been true ever since I started teaching in SFUSD in the mid-1990s,” Commissioner Alexander shared with KQED in an email, adding that he believed the trend started when the district began racially integrating schools back in the early 1970s.

“That’s when the big declines in SFUSD enrollment began,” Alexander wrote, “due to wealthier, mostly white families leaving SFUSD to avoid integrated public schools.”

The testable claim being made is that desegregation led to a permanent increase in the number of students in private school in San Francisco. Did it?

Fortunately, this is easy to test. Starting in 1960, the decennial Census included estimates for the number of students in private school. SFUSD implemented its first desegregation plan starting in 1971 so we can look at two datapoints before and two datapoints after desegregation.

Public school enrollment did fall by 36%¹ during the 1970s. Even though the number of students in private school was nearly flat, this was enough to drive the share of students in private school up to nearly 30%. This was only temporary. The fall in private school enrollment during the 1980s left the share of students in private school in 1990 lower than it had been in 1960.

In short:

1. It is factually incorrect to assert that “private school enrollment surged” due to desegregation.

2. The share of students in private school did increase temporarily, entirely because the number in public school fell so precipitously. It is factually incorrect to assert that desegregation caused a “permanent shift away from public education.”

3. Alexander contended that “wealthier, mostly white families [left] SFUSD to avoid integrated public schools”. If wealthier families were the ones leaving, then we would expect median family income in the City to fall. In reality, median family income (as a percentage of California’s median family income) was the same in 1980 as it was in 1970.

My narrative explanation of how San Francisco’s population has evolved since 1950 can be found here.

Why is Private School Enrollment So High?

If desegregation is not the root cause, why is private school enrollment so high? Money.

The KQED radio broadcast expressed wonder that Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Marin all had private school populations more than twice the state average but never stopped to think about why this should be, given that the preferred explanation (“desegregation”) was never an issue in those other counties. What those counties do have in common with San Francisco is money. They are the four counties with the highest median family income in the state. When people have a lot of money, one of the things they choose to spend it on is education.

Palo Alto Unified has more money than any school district of its size in the state. Its class sizes are small, its teachers are well paid, and its students are very successful. Both of its public high schools had more national merit semifinalists than all of San Francisco. And yet 30%² of Palo Alto students attend one of the 27 private schools in the city. It doesn’t matter how good the public schools are. When people have money, some of them are going to choose to spend it on a differentiated education experience for their children.

Median family income in San Francisco, which hovered around the state average for decades, has soared since the 1990s. The reason private schooling is now so popular is that people can afford it. It’s as simple as that.

1. The census estimates for public school enrollment are consistently 3,000-5,000 higher than those actually recorded by the California Department of Education. An alternative way to estimate private school enrollment would be to take the census estimates of the school-age population, subtract the actual CDE enrollment figures, and assume that everyone in the school-age population who is not in public school is in private school. I did this in one of my first substack posts. You get different numbers but the story is the same.

2. In 2023-24, there were 10,271 public school and 4,514 private school students. The 30% figure assumes that all the students who attend private schools in Palo Alto live there.