In a report released Thursday, a San Francisco Civil Grand Jury has recommended that the San San Francisco Unified School District should dump its “confusing, time-consuming, alienating” system of assigning students to schools via lottery, and instead assign students to schools in their neighborhood.
It was tough to hear over the “Oh HELL yeah” emanating from local parents, but the grand jury insulted the lottery system on all fronts: it’s expensive, it’s confusing, it chases intimidated families out of the city, and worst of all, it doesn’t even work. One 2005 study found that more than 50 percent of the SFUSD’s schools were “severely segregated.”
The lottery was only a stopgap solution anyway. As a story in the San Francisco Examiner explains, a 1983 NAACP suit caused a federal court to order San Francisco to integrate its public schools. Another lawsuit in 1991 said that using race to assign students to schools was also unfair. Thus our bizarre lottery system, which assigns weight to such factors as the languages students speak, their socioeconomic background, and the performance of individual schools.
For parents the process is stressful and confusing; for taxpayers the lottery’s expensive: it costs $2 million a year just to maintain the 29-member staff necessary to help parents with the application process. And here’s the real kicker: The federal order to desegregate the schools expired in 2005, so there’s not even anyone making us run it anymore.
Does that sound racist? I’m not jumping up and down that schools are so segregated. I drive by the nice, expensive private schools in town and see only white faces, and then by the schoolyards in the neighborhoods I can afford to rent in and see only brown ones. It bums me out because weren’t we supposed to be over this by now? Actually melting together in our melting pot?
It’s not working, but the lottery isn’t the solution we need either. And it’s a stressful time-suck for the parents and students who have to research scores of schools, and who can’t be sure which (if any!) of their ultimate choices they’ll get. And maybe they get School X all the way over on the other side of town, and either Mom or Dad are hauling them, or they’re getting up at 5:30am to take two buses in order to get there on time.
School board president Mark Sanchez agrees that the lottery ain’t working, and this fall there’ll be discussions and probably changes.
Yippee.
[…] Why did we move? The East Bay had been beckoning us for several years. As for why the rush, I’ll just invite you to peek at the madness of the San Francisco Public School lottery. […]
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