For years, families and the public have criticized the San Francisco Unified School District’s process for assigning new students to elementary schools. School district staff and the school board are now taking steps to reform it. On Tuesday, the school board is scheduled to vote on two systems intended to make it easier to assign students to their neighborhood school.
But the path to a better system rests on a weak foundation with no certainty it will achieve its goal. Last week, the school board discarded the enrollment option most favored by parents and chose two that the district’s own experts predict will place more African American, Latino, and Pacific Islander students in high-poverty schools. One organization, Parents for Public Schools, evaluated last week’s action as “eliminat[ing] the middle ground” and unintentionally increasing socioeconomic and racial segregation.
The current enrollment system depends on families identifying an unspecified number of assignment preferences from among the school district’s 72 elementary or kindergarten–grade 8 schools. While the district says up to 96 percent of students are assigned to one of their choices, staff also acknowledge that the process is complicated and stressful. Many parents point to the current student assignment lottery as a major factor in their decisions to transfer to charter or private schools or leave San Francisco altogether.
The current reform effort, which the district wants to implement a year from now to govern student assignments for the Fall 2028 semester, is the latest phase of a policy change the school board adopted in late 2020. Up to now, the district’s assignment lottery process has sought to increase campus diversity and provide families access to a limited number of citywide schools typically focused on particular language immersion programs. At the same time, the existing process includes exceptions that give additional preferences to students based upon their residence in particularly low-income census tracts (without having to be low-income themselves) or having a sibling already enrolled in a school. Under the current system, individual school diversity has not increased, but this may be due to changing demographics of the entire student population, families leaving the school district for private schools or simply leaving the city. The new options set for discussion and action at Tuesday’s school board meeting may produce even weaker outcomes.
This summer and fall, the school district rolled out three possible options for a new school assignment plan. Option A would have created geographic attendance zones of five schools to which the district would assign a student. A student could also apply for a school that draws students from anywhere in the city and has a specialized program, including a combined program that extends to grade 8. Option B would permit a family to choose the specific school close to their home assigned by the school district or apply to any other school in the district, including the citywide specialized program schools. Option C would also assign a student to a designated school close to the student’s home but allow applications only to the citywide enrolled schools and thus offer less choice than the other two options.
Simulations of predicted outcomes prepared at the district’s request by Stanford University researchers produced troubling results. Favorably, the new options would reduce the average distance from home to school by between 1,000 and 1,500 feet and improve as much as 48 percent the percentage of students living half a mile from school from the current 35 percent. At the same time, however, every option would increase the percentage of African American, Latino, and Pacific Islander students in high-poverty schools. The two options picked by the school board — B and C — would increase the number of high-poverty schools overall, while the third option, no longer being considered, would have produced the same number as the present system. District staff, while presenting these simulations, also warned the school board and public, “These are high-level simulations. Take these with a grain of salt.”
The school district staff also presented partial results of its community survey. Option A that relies on assigning a student to a school from among five schools in a geographic zone based on a student’s residence was favored by more families (73 percent) than the other two options but was eliminated by the school board from further consideration. The choice is now between Option B, (the closest neighborhood school instead of a zone and the ability to apply to any other school) and Option C (closest neighborhood school and ability to apply to a citywide specialized program.) Fewer than half the survey respondents stated that Option C would likely or very likely meet family needs. Option C, according to the district’s simulation, has the most negative racial and poverty impact. Among all 13 categories of respondents shown by the district, including African Americans, residents of Southeast neighborhoods and potential future school district parents, Option C came in last among the three options in every sample. Respondents in 13 ZIP codes favored Option A; eight ZIP codes favored Option B, and zero favored Option C.
School district staff stated that Option A is the most difficult option for them to implement. Yet, it was offered as a choice. Going forward after Tuesday, district staff will begin to draw school attendance maps to ensure there is room in each school to deliver on the guarantee of a neighborhood school seat. They predict more seat shortages under Options B and C than in the discarded Option A.
While more planning and decisions will be made between now and April when the board is scheduled to take what is described as a “final” vote, timing and other circumstances reduce the likelihood of making any course correction after Tuesday’s vote. Similar to June’s school budget vote when skeptical board members were told there was insufficient time to make changes, the calendar contemplated for enrollment reform suggests that even a short delay would postpone implementation an entire school year and not likely be possible. The outcome of Tuesday’s vote is uncertain.
