Meet the superintendent and Mayor Newsom
I'm passing on information about a great-sounding event this coming Saturday, and my comment below it on what I'd like to ask the city to do to help our kids and our schools:
Comment from Caroline: I don't know if this will be an opportunity for the public to expound
on our ideas. I wanted to share three things our schools need help with. I'll mention them if there's a forum to do so.
1. I keep hearing from eloquent parents that one of the big draws of K-8 private school is the promise of seamless child care before and after school, as compared to the random and uncertain patchwork that has grown up around SFUSD schools. Every parent I know who needs child care in/connected with their SFUSD school has found it satisfactorily, but it's never just right there, guaranteed.
It's time for the city to step in and fill that gap. Just do it!
2. At high school level, the major, undeniable advantage private schools offer is college handholding. Not only do they provide counseling, resources and every other possible type of assistance, they also have greased "rich get richer" connections to prestige colleges. It's standard for high-end private high schools to hire as their college counselors former admissions officers from desirable colleges — they must budget a whopping amount for this expenditure.
Aside from connections and pull, this is about packaging/presentation/marketing, not the actual merit of the students or quality of their education.
At SFUSD high schools, college counseling is a patchwork, varying from school to school. SFUSD would never be able to match the connection/insider advantage that the prestige privates offer, but consistent and greatly enhanced college counseling/resources/handholding would make a big difference. Private funders? City?
3. The city needs to step in and make up the difference between what SFUSD can manage and the top-quality feasible school food. San Francisco should be ensuring that the community's children are fed as well as possible. This should not be a burden dumped on educators,
forcing them to choose between classroom needs and good-quality food for our kids.
(We need to understand that working kitchens in every school and scratch-cooked food are not feasible — but it's possible to serve much better food than SFUSD can currently provide if the will and the money are there.)
So, those are the three things I call on the community and private funders to step in with.
— Caroline
Please join Mayor Gavin Newsom, Supervisor Bevan Dufty, and School Superintendent Carlos Garcia for a community discussion on education in San Francisco This is an opportunity to learn about what the School District and City government are doing to improve our schools and
expand educational opportunities, and to share your ideas on improving education in our community.
Saturday, August 11th 2007
at 2:00pm to 4:00pm
at
Fairmount Elementary School
65 Chenery Street (at Randall)
Parking lot is accessible from Randall St. (at San Jose Ave.)
The location is wheelchair accessible; Real-Time Captioning and Assisted Listening Devices will be provided. For other accommodations, please contact the Mayor's Office on Disability:
ph: 554-6789, TTY: 554-6799. Providing 72 hours notice will help to ensure availability of the accommodation.
Comment from Caroline: I don't know if this will be an opportunity for the public to expound
on our ideas. I wanted to share three things our schools need help with. I'll mention them if there's a forum to do so.
1. I keep hearing from eloquent parents that one of the big draws of K-8 private school is the promise of seamless child care before and after school, as compared to the random and uncertain patchwork that has grown up around SFUSD schools. Every parent I know who needs child care in/connected with their SFUSD school has found it satisfactorily, but it's never just right there, guaranteed.
It's time for the city to step in and fill that gap. Just do it!
2. At high school level, the major, undeniable advantage private schools offer is college handholding. Not only do they provide counseling, resources and every other possible type of assistance, they also have greased "rich get richer" connections to prestige colleges. It's standard for high-end private high schools to hire as their college counselors former admissions officers from desirable colleges — they must budget a whopping amount for this expenditure.
Aside from connections and pull, this is about packaging/presentation/marketing, not the actual merit of the students or quality of their education.
At SFUSD high schools, college counseling is a patchwork, varying from school to school. SFUSD would never be able to match the connection/insider advantage that the prestige privates offer, but consistent and greatly enhanced college counseling/resources/handholding would make a big difference. Private funders? City?
3. The city needs to step in and make up the difference between what SFUSD can manage and the top-quality feasible school food. San Francisco should be ensuring that the community's children are fed as well as possible. This should not be a burden dumped on educators,
forcing them to choose between classroom needs and good-quality food for our kids.
(We need to understand that working kitchens in every school and scratch-cooked food are not feasible — but it's possible to serve much better food than SFUSD can currently provide if the will and the money are there.)
So, those are the three things I call on the community and private funders to step in with.
— Caroline
Labels: SFUSD Politics
5 Comments:
di you go?
Yes -- I'll just re-post what I posted on the PPS listserve in response to a question:
***
Except for introductions (and a sweet performance by San Francisco School of the Arts singers
Allen Darby and Lauren Shaw and piano department head Ava Soifer), the meeting was entirely Q&A from the audience, based on question cards filled out beforehand. So it jumped from topic to topic. I'll share a few random impressions.
Garcia (and Newsom, for what it's worth) take an attitude of
hard-headed, pragmatic realism about the need to close schools where enrollment is dropping. Garcia also mentioned not providing separate, discrete sites to small schools but clustering them, more than one at larger sites, for efficiency and cost-savings. I don't know if this is aimed at specific schools or just a general philosophical concept.
Garcia is shocked at the backward state of technology in SFUSD, and
rightly so. There seemed to be a little derision about that coming
from City Hall voices until someone pointed out that the city's
technology is just as bad, especially Muni's, which the mayor then ruefully acknowledged. (I wish I'd made note of what wise voice
pointed that out, but I didn't -- was it Bevan Dufty?) Can we fix
this? Private funders?
There was a lot of talk about language programs, basically praising the immersion programs. The question came up of providing
non-immersion language classes in middle school -- Garcia said K-5
would be even better, but the cost and need for additional time in the
school day are daunting. Newsom was enthusiastically talking up the
immersion programs, though my impression was that he thought they were something new and experimental that SFUSD is just now doing, when
actually SFUSD has been running them for years, quite successfully at the K-5 level at least, and is currently in a burst of rapidly
expanding them. I also had the sense that Newsom didn't recognize the difference between language immersion programs and the kind of regular language classes that were under discussion (a period of Spanish, Mandarin, French or whatever, with the rest of the school day being a traditional English-language school day). I hope all this will be clarified to him, because I and many others believe that we need our wealthy city to step up generously pouring resources into our impoverished school district! Traditional language classes as well as
immersion would certainly be a likely target for some of those resources.
Of course the issue of the assignment process and neighborhood schools came up. I was a bit confused by even the first question read from a card, from someone who identified him/herself as a resident of Upper Noe Valley. That questioner claimed that his/her neighbors can't get into their neighborhood public schools, so they're going private. But the school in Upper Noe Valley is Fairmount, which I believe is not
hard to get into. I think the closest surrounding schools may be Glen Park, Paul Revere and Alvarado. Of those, only Alvarado is oversubscribed. So I think the questioner started from a premise of incorrect information. I mention it because that so demonstrates the
level of confusion and misinformation around this topic. School board veteran Jill Wynns pointed out that fewer than 25% of school enrollment applications list the neighborhood assignment-area school as first choice, which totally stumps those who have only superficial knowledge of the issue. There wasn't much resolution of that topic.
Those are a few impressions; others can fill in more. Garcia is a
quick learner and well-informed about issues in general. One
questioner submitted a query about year-round schools, a topic I
researched for a work assignment. The question was based on the
assumption that year-round schools raise achievement, so of course it
was along the linse of "why doesn't that stupid school district create
year-round schools?" Garcia was well-informed enough to know that
year-round schools, which have been around and studied in experiments
here and there for decades, have surprised everyone by failing to have the slightest positive impact on achievement. But he said that fairly diplomatically.
I believe it was in the "parking lot session" after the meeting that
someone mentioned how badly SFUSD needs a development staffer or
department (someone to seek out grant money and schmooze the big
funders), pointing out that universities have huge development
departments. Yes!
Newsom didn't choose to read the question cards about two of the areas I want to start a push for the city to fund or improve. Hmmph. Those are:
1. Improving the child-care situation so that families can have easy access to after-school and before-school care as needed (sliding scale; I'm not talking about free for everyone) rather than the current bewildering and non-guaranteed patchwork. This is a non-school need that should be paid for by city and other resources, not SFUSD. The many current programs are too confusing and uncertain to be family-friendly, which drives some families to private schools that simply provide easy before- and aftercare. I learned that there's an
entity called Afterschool for All run by DCYF, so that sounds like a
place to start.
2. Providing ample and equally distributed college counseling and
additional related resources at all SFUSD high schools.
what is the PPS listserve?
thank you so much for the info on the meeting.
it does seem like a great idea to get the school district into the grant application process. does
any of the BIG money ( bill & melinda gates foundation,et al ) have any chance to get to the sfusd??
I'm not really clear on whether Gates money gets to school districts. As you can see from this blog, I'm a critic of charter schools, and one of my main problems with them is that Gates et al. (Fisher, Broad, Walton-as-in-WalMart, etc.) pour oceans of money into charters in blind faith that it's a wise investment. Well, it's their money and they have every right to do what they want with it. But I always wonder if ANY of their money finds its way into worthy programs that help traditional public schools.
The PPS listserve is a discussion forum run by Parents for Public Schools-San Francisco, so if you become a PPS member you get to be on the listserve. Go to www.ppssf.org to learn more.
And if you're not familiar with the sfschools listserve, there's lots of lively discussion about school issues in San Francisco and beyond happening on that. To look at it:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sfschools/
To subscribe, e-mail to:
sfschools-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
thanks again.
will check out the group.
the pps is really a great site with tons of info.
i was esp. interested in the woman, lynn gordon, involved in the girlsource program.
i am aware of your charter school concerns and am always interested in your perspective!
onward.
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