Naming race in the school enrollment process
Last Monday, I attended an SFUSD Board of Education Ad Hoc Student Assignment Committee Mtg. which is taking on the daunting task of implementing a Board Resolution directing district staff to redesign SFUSD’s Student Assignment System.
I’ll be transparent in stating I have many “feels” about this work, and whether we should be doing it. I didn’t vote for this resolution (I wasn’t on the Board when it was approved. In fact, I stood in agreement with many other parent leaders on parent advisory councils (such as the SPED CAC, AAPAC, and SF Families Union, who have consistently asked the District to focus on investing resources into increasing programs and enrollment in under-enrolled schools.
As you may imagine, there has been decades-long discussion around this topic, which I won’t go into here. If you are interested in recent presentations to the Board, you can find last Monday’s presentation here, and previous presentations here, and here.
The purpose of last Monday’s meeting was to discuss a district definition of “quality schools” called for in the Resolution, which set this whole process in motion and to understand the Commissioner’s priorities on three primary goals outlined in staff’s work: Proximity, Predictability, and Diversity.
We can’t fix it if we don’t talk about it
I found it interesting that in discussing the topic of “school choice,” “quality schools,” and “diversity,” staff seemed to be dancing around the real issues impacting SFUSD’s school enrollment process. Too many families pick the same ten schools, and primarily these choices are made (either intentionally or unintentionally) around the racial demographics of students at the school. I wrote about this observation a while back in a post titled: “Most Requested” or Most White?:
When central office staff talk about why some schools are so highly requested (some are harder to get into than Harvard, while others have a Kindergarten class size of 14), many cite parent concerns around the race and socioeconomic status of the children who go there. Often, the challenges we are discussing aren’t really about “parent choice” or “predictability.” On a deeper level, we are talking about segregation and integration and the CONTINUE READING: Naming race in the school enrollment process - SF PUBLIC SCHOOL MOM
