How Testing and School Choice are Undermining Education
By Bill Shireman, Wed, August 29, 2012
San Francisco, where I live, has a rich array of public school choices – more than 100 different schools or programs that can satisfy almost any need.
Late last year, my wife Aileen and I joined with thousands of parents to select from those options, and submitted a set of 32 priority choices for our twin five-year-olds. We just received our letter from the district, revealing the result.
San Francisco has a system of school choice, and I think I am grateful for it. But it does have its limitations. In this system, the schools choose the parents, not the other way around. When one of the top-performing or most popular schools fills up, parents are shifted to their second, third, or twentieth choice, to make sure all the schools are, ultimately, full.
Since selecting our 32 priorities was almost a full-time job last January for Aileen, I suspect that the