How can you leave out the critical piece that you are not promised a school anywhere near your house? Am I supposed to put my kindergartner on 3 MUNI buses to get across town for school? Am I supposed to drive an hour round trip twice a day to drive my kid across town to their assigned school? This is a crucial piece of information that has been left out of this conversation.
The other Bay Area counties all use residence-based school assignment so their high levels of private school enrollment must be explained by some other factor.
I've no doubt that San Francisco's elementary school assignment system does add to private school enrollment but I think it's a much smaller factor than (a) increasing wealth in the city, and (b) the history. San Francisco had the highest proportion of children in private schools even when school assignment was residence-based prior to 1971. The current system leaves many people unhappy but it's better than the busing and the diversity lottery and the other schemes that have been tried over the last 50 years.
I know multiple people who live in the outer Richmond who got placed in candlestick, vis valley, and hunters point. What about my comment is hyperbolic?
There are 85 elementary schools in San Francisco and you are allowed to rank all of them. This literally isn’t possible unless you just put down a couple. Some people decide “rooftop or bust” and if they don’t get their choice they will go private. No one ends up in the situation you describe unless they are ignorant or trying to game the system.
It sounds like you don’t know many people here in the city. Feel free to come out to the west side community and ask around. You saying this issue doesn’t exist, and that there aren’t many people who don’t get their top ten doesn’t make it true when I know MANY people where this is the case.
It seems like you really have lucked out or live in a bubble.
I have lived here 30 years but I do live on the east side where the problem is not as severe. We also have many more poor performing schools though.
The whole point is that you can’t put down 10 schools anymore, you have to rank them all. SFUSD added a location tie breaker but now everyone just games it (commits fraud) and the problem is worse than ever.
I am an SF native and have lived here 30 years as well. It is certainly a huge problem and I’m not pretending to have a solution. The goal of my post was to refute that the reason people are sending their children to private school because they are “racist” and that the desegregation of schools is why they’re going private.
It's not possible for everyone to get the school closest to them. He has a substack post how there are more kids on the westside than there are schools.
I’m curious, why were those schools your preferred school? Did they include neighborhood schools closest to you? And if not, wondering why if you’re willing to share.
The public schools we listed were closest to us. Same case as Magnolia with 2 preschoolers and 2 full time parents. We are non white and believers in public schools with a range of different backgrounds but it was not to be. And our kids cannot wait until ‘change’ happens. Lottery is not working as demonstrated by segregated outcomes, plus to purposely impeding neighboring kids to go to school together and building community.
Great article as usual. Why do you think SF had a high % of private school enrollment in the 60s while median income was at 100% of California's? Seems not to directly follow the idea that high income leads to high private school enrollment.
I'm going to indulge in some speculation because, frankly, I don't know the answer. Here are some facts:
- the Catholic Church has a long history of running its own schools.
- Most of the private schools were Catholic (over 80% of private school students in 1960 were in parochial schools)
- the population as a whole used to be much more religious
- San Francisco used to account for a much bigger fraction of the state's population. It was 23% of the state in 1900, 11% in 1930, 7% in 1950, 4.7% in 1960 (and 2.2% today).
Here's the speculation.
San Francisco had a large stable Catholic population in the first half of the 20th century and this was fertile ground for parochial schools. Other parts of the state with stable Catholic populations would also have had Catholic schools. As the concept of public schools gained a better reputation, there was less need to pay for schooling and so less demand for the construction of new parochial schools. Since San Francisco's population grew much slower than the rest of the state, the share of parochial schools stayed higher than elsewhere.
I've done some more investigation and have found an explanation that I think explains the data very nicely. I'm going to write it up as my next post. Spoiler alert: the speculation above is garbage. Please ignore it.
The point I was disputing was that wealthier parents were the ones leaving. We know lots of people left SFUSD at the time. If wealthier parents left SFUSD but enrolled their children in private school, this would obviously have no effect on the median income in the city because they would still be resident. Since the number of children in private school increased by only a few hundred, most of those who left SFUSD must have left the city. If those departing were indeed wealthier than the average, then their departure should have driven down the median income of the city. Since the median income was unchanged, my implied conclusion was that those who left were economically representative of the city.
I don't consider this to be proof of my point. There are ways in which Alexander's point could be true. It's rarely commented on but the number of Black students in SFUSD fell by about 40% during the 1970s (in the chart at https://www.sfusd.edu/facing-our-past-changing-our-future-part-ii-five-decades-desegregation-sfusd-1971-today", Black enrollment falls from about 25,000 to about 15,000 over the decade). Again, some of this could be due to declining birth rates but some is probably due to Black families leaving the city. If enough poor Black families left, then the White families who left could be wealthy without disturbing the city median.
"The data suggest" that KQED has been peddling some woke tripe from Quinn. Now that he's over at Penn, maybe Prof. Amy Wax there can ride a herd on him.
His book is actually a pretty fair recounting of the debates over the years. My quibbles with it are not about bias but about structure. It's a few years since I read it but my recollection is that it starts in the middle with a discussion of Educational Redesign rather than with a description of the pre-desegregation situation. It took me a while to figure out the chronology. It's also light on numbers.
How can you leave out the critical piece that you are not promised a school anywhere near your house? Am I supposed to put my kindergartner on 3 MUNI buses to get across town for school? Am I supposed to drive an hour round trip twice a day to drive my kid across town to their assigned school? This is a crucial piece of information that has been left out of this conversation.
The other Bay Area counties all use residence-based school assignment so their high levels of private school enrollment must be explained by some other factor.
I've no doubt that San Francisco's elementary school assignment system does add to private school enrollment but I think it's a much smaller factor than (a) increasing wealth in the city, and (b) the history. San Francisco had the highest proportion of children in private schools even when school assignment was residence-based prior to 1971. The current system leaves many people unhappy but it's better than the busing and the diversity lottery and the other schemes that have been tried over the last 50 years.
You are being overly hyperbolic.
The lottery is a mess without needing to exaggerate like this.
I know multiple people who live in the outer Richmond who got placed in candlestick, vis valley, and hunters point. What about my comment is hyperbolic?
https://www.ppssf.org/news/2017/10/31/pps-sf-enrollment-tips-ranking-schools-on-your-sfusd-application
There are 85 elementary schools in San Francisco and you are allowed to rank all of them. This literally isn’t possible unless you just put down a couple. Some people decide “rooftop or bust” and if they don’t get their choice they will go private. No one ends up in the situation you describe unless they are ignorant or trying to game the system.
It sounds like you don’t know many people here in the city. Feel free to come out to the west side community and ask around. You saying this issue doesn’t exist, and that there aren’t many people who don’t get their top ten doesn’t make it true when I know MANY people where this is the case.
It seems like you really have lucked out or live in a bubble.
I have lived here 30 years but I do live on the east side where the problem is not as severe. We also have many more poor performing schools though.
The whole point is that you can’t put down 10 schools anymore, you have to rank them all. SFUSD added a location tie breaker but now everyone just games it (commits fraud) and the problem is worse than ever.
What is your solution?
I am an SF native and have lived here 30 years as well. It is certainly a huge problem and I’m not pretending to have a solution. The goal of my post was to refute that the reason people are sending their children to private school because they are “racist” and that the desegregation of schools is why they’re going private.
It's not possible for everyone to get the school closest to them. He has a substack post how there are more kids on the westside than there are schools.
Sure, that doesn’t change the fact that your assigned public school may be incredibly impractical and much further away than a private school.
We didn’t get a slot in any of our preferred public schools, which we would have taken instead of paying a king’s ransom in private school.
I’m curious, why were those schools your preferred school? Did they include neighborhood schools closest to you? And if not, wondering why if you’re willing to share.
How many public schools did you list? I know people who listed three oversubscribed schools and then were surprised when they didn't get one.
We put down nine immersion schools and then our neighborhood Glen Park and got Glen Park, but then got into an immersion school off the waiting list.
The public schools we listed were closest to us. Same case as Magnolia with 2 preschoolers and 2 full time parents. We are non white and believers in public schools with a range of different backgrounds but it was not to be. And our kids cannot wait until ‘change’ happens. Lottery is not working as demonstrated by segregated outcomes, plus to purposely impeding neighboring kids to go to school together and building community.
Great article as usual. Why do you think SF had a high % of private school enrollment in the 60s while median income was at 100% of California's? Seems not to directly follow the idea that high income leads to high private school enrollment.
I'm going to indulge in some speculation because, frankly, I don't know the answer. Here are some facts:
- the Catholic Church has a long history of running its own schools.
- Most of the private schools were Catholic (over 80% of private school students in 1960 were in parochial schools)
- the population as a whole used to be much more religious
- San Francisco used to account for a much bigger fraction of the state's population. It was 23% of the state in 1900, 11% in 1930, 7% in 1950, 4.7% in 1960 (and 2.2% today).
Here's the speculation.
San Francisco had a large stable Catholic population in the first half of the 20th century and this was fertile ground for parochial schools. Other parts of the state with stable Catholic populations would also have had Catholic schools. As the concept of public schools gained a better reputation, there was less need to pay for schooling and so less demand for the construction of new parochial schools. Since San Francisco's population grew much slower than the rest of the state, the share of parochial schools stayed higher than elsewhere.
I've done some more investigation and have found an explanation that I think explains the data very nicely. I'm going to write it up as my next post. Spoiler alert: the speculation above is garbage. Please ignore it.
Why is it logically correct that the median income in S.F. should be affected by the % of wealthy people sending their children to private schools ?
Also popular opinion in parents who complain about public schools happens in middle school. Do we have the data for grade level % leaving?
MDB
Let me try to rephrase:
The point I was disputing was that wealthier parents were the ones leaving. We know lots of people left SFUSD at the time. If wealthier parents left SFUSD but enrolled their children in private school, this would obviously have no effect on the median income in the city because they would still be resident. Since the number of children in private school increased by only a few hundred, most of those who left SFUSD must have left the city. If those departing were indeed wealthier than the average, then their departure should have driven down the median income of the city. Since the median income was unchanged, my implied conclusion was that those who left were economically representative of the city.
I don't consider this to be proof of my point. There are ways in which Alexander's point could be true. It's rarely commented on but the number of Black students in SFUSD fell by about 40% during the 1970s (in the chart at https://www.sfusd.edu/facing-our-past-changing-our-future-part-ii-five-decades-desegregation-sfusd-1971-today", Black enrollment falls from about 25,000 to about 15,000 over the decade). Again, some of this could be due to declining birth rates but some is probably due to Black families leaving the city. If enough poor Black families left, then the White families who left could be wealthy without disturbing the city median.
We do have data about enrollment by grade level. See this substack post: https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/private-school-enrollment?utm_source=publication-search
"The data suggest" that KQED has been peddling some woke tripe from Quinn. Now that he's over at Penn, maybe Prof. Amy Wax there can ride a herd on him.
His book is actually a pretty fair recounting of the debates over the years. My quibbles with it are not about bias but about structure. It's a few years since I read it but my recollection is that it starts in the middle with a discussion of Educational Redesign rather than with a description of the pre-desegregation situation. It took me a while to figure out the chronology. It's also light on numbers.