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Friday, April 26, 2019

Dana Goldstein: San Francisco Had an Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation. It Made It Worse. - The New York Times

San Francisco Had an Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation. It Made It Worse. - The New York Times

San Francisco Had an Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation. It Made It Worse.


SAN FRANCISCO — Like many parents in San Francisco, Melvin Canas and Delfina Ramirez described applying to public kindergarten as a part-time job. They researched schools all over the city for their daughter, Cinthya; took unpaid hours off their jobs as cooks to tour over a dozen; and ultimately ranked 15 of them on her application.


San Francisco allows parents to apply to any elementary school in the district, having done away with traditional school zoning 18 years ago in an effort to desegregate its classrooms. Give parents more choices, the thinking was, and low-income and working-class students of color like Cinthya would fill more seats at the city’s most coveted schools.


But last month, Cinthya’s parents, who are Hispanic, found out she had been admitted to their second-to-last choice, a school where less than a third of students met standards on state reading and math tests last year. Only 3 percent were white.


Results like these have soured many on the city’s school enrollment plan, which is known here as “the lottery” and was once considered a national model.


“Our current system is broken,” said Stevon Cook, president of the district Board of Education, which, late last year, passed a resolution to overhaul the process. “We’ve inadvertently made the schools more segregated.”


For decades, the education mantra from presidential campaign trails to local school board elections has been the same: Your ZIP code should not determine the quality of your school. Few cities have gone further in trying to make that ideal a reality than San Francisco. CONTINUE READING: San Francisco Had an Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation. It Made It Worse. - The New York Times