"When San Francisco school officials opened a public Montessori program in an under-enrolled elementary school adjacent to the city's low-income Western Addition neighborhood in 2005, it sounded like a good idea."
It meant that poor, mostly African American students would have free and convenient access to what often is an expensive private program, out of reach and relatively unknown to inner-city children.
Instead, the effort has turned into a major headache for district administrators who now are embroiled in a bitter community battle over the educational fate of Cobb Elementary School.
At the heart of the fight is a district plan to phase out the school's traditional general education program - now serving predominantly African American students - to convert Cobb to all Montessori. While the program is offered to any family in the city, the intent of placing a Montessori program at Cobb was to better serve the neighborhood's African American families. Yet few parents from the community there seem to know much about the program or want it.
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