Unanswered questions about a new school

Blogger Alexander Russo asked me if I feel that when I have questions about charters and small schools, I get answers. After sputtering for a while, all I can say is — no.

I thought I'd try again with questions I have about a planned new small high school, Bayview Essential School of Music, Art and Social Justice, to be opened in SFUSD in fall 2008. I feel like all these questions have floated out there unanswered, or have been answered with non-answers. (This school has been variously proposed as a charter and a non-charter; current plans are for it to be a non-charter with semi-charter-like autonomy.)

Questions about the school include the following:

• SFUSD enrollment is dropping, and opening a new school drains students and resources from existing schools, harming them. Opening one more new school will likely mean closing an existing one. Is this healthy for our district, schools and students? Which school should be closed?
• The school's backers predict that SFUSD will stop losing students because their school will attract them back. But the target demographic for this school is not the demographic that's notably leaving district schools -- middle-class families going private. African-American families are leaving the city in search of affordable housing, often when they move into the economic bracket that might enable them to own or at least rent a single-family house (far costlier in San Francisco than in many surrounding suburbs). Do the Bayview school's backers believe that the school's existence will persuade those families to stay?
• SFUSD is not Chicago or Oakland. There are already small-school and charter options for high-schoolers in the southeastern part of the city (June Jordan, Leadership, City Arts & Tech -- plus Metro Arts & Tech, though its location is in flux, and the Academy of Arts & Sciences, which is outside the immediate area but easy to get to). Balboa High School and Mission High School are larger nearby schools organized into small learning communities. Another budding small Bayview high school with extra enrichment resources, the "Dream School" Gloria R. Davis (GRD), was just closed. (One big, possibly fatal, problem for GRD was that the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) union was unhappy with its hiring policies -- and the union is not comfortable with the Bayview Essential setup either.) How would the Bayview Essential School offer a better option to all those?
• Under SFUSD's all-choice enrollment system, any family can request any school. As middle-class parents often complain, students from low-income communities have some advantages under the SFUSD Diversity Index process in getting into the district's highest-achieving non-magnet high schools (Lincoln, Washington, Raoul Wallenberg, Galileo), if they so choose. They also have some boosts in the application process for Lowell (academic magnet) High School. School of the Arts (arts magnet) High School is eager to recruit low-income minorities as well. With the already-existing small schools and small learning communities in and near southeastern San Francisco, and access to any school citywide, what unmet need is the Bayview Essential school filling?
• SFUSD has committed to implement a new department to oversee small schools, at a time when essential central office positions are going unfilled. How can our fiscally strapped district do that without taking resources from other needs?
• The new school promises to be successful and high-performing. It even sent out a press release saying it would be high-performing (dutifully reported as such by the less-savvy neophytes in the non-mainstream press). Don't all founders of new schools expect them to be high-performing? We have other schools in that area and elsewhere in the city that also committed to be successful and high-performing, with mixed success. What key do the Bayview Essential backers feel they have to making their school successful and high-performing where others have had mixed success?
• The organizers of the new school say it has grassroots support. But it appears to have won that support by running a Bayview summer school that paid students $50 a week for working on a fun project to make a socially relevant music video. Kids who enjoyed that summer school, and their families, are eager supporters of the proposed new school. But presumably the new school won't be built around paying its students $50 a week to work on a fun project making a music video. Is support that was won in such a way truly genuine, grassroots support?
• The small-schools organizers call for more hiring autonomy than other schools have. I believe that what they mean is exemption from the union seniority system, so they can autonomously hire whom they choose. That's why the UESF union is dubious. Wouldn't all schools like to be able to hire whom they choose and circumvent the union seniority system when it comes down to it? How is it reasonable and justifiable to allow some schools to do that and not others (meaning that other school communities must hire the rejects that Bayview Essential has the discretion to pass up)?

— Caroline

Addendum: I neglected to mention Gateway, SFUSD's most successful charter high school. It didn't fit into the categories I was discussing -- it's not close to the Bayview and it doesn't employ SFUSD's Diversity Index assignment system. It's another popular high school option worthy of mention, though (with my personal caveats that I'm not a charter fan and that much of its success is surely attributable to the fact that it transparently screens applicants while non-credibly claiming not to).