SFUSD stiff-arms the Grand Jury
The district published a formal response(PDF) to the Grand Jury report "San Francisco Kindergarten Admission: Back to the Drawing Board"(PDF). We were highly critical of the report ourselves, so its not too surprising to see the district respond defensively. But it is an interesting read nonetheless.
The first excerpt that caught my eye was this one:
Another response that caught my attention concerned the call to drop the Diversity Index lottery weighting. I have advocated this approach myself. So I have to question the district response. The Grand Jury recommended that, since dropping DI will have little impact, keeping DI is not worth it. The response comes back that the 2005 district simulations showed that "'the number of schools with high racial concentrations would be slightly increased' with the use of a 100% random lottery." So there you have it. DI has a marginal impact on the racial composition of some schools. So live with it.
Overall the response was summary: we will not implement any of the suggestions except the one platitude about making all schools excellent. They claim to have done that by adopting the strategic plan back in June.
I'm beginning to see why no authors were listed on this response. They basically tell the Grand Jury to shove it.
The first excerpt that caught my eye was this one:
FINDINGSSo the enrollment process is not overly complex, or at least not unnecessarily so? That will be news to a lot of readers of the SF K Files!Disagree in part. The report provides no factual support for this conclusory finding. The District has not unnecessarily complicated its student assignment process. The student assignment system is complex, because it was designed to meet complex goals and challenges such as equity of access, family choice, and diversity. The grand jury report concludes that the Diversity Index fails to provide a diversified school population, but does not define what it means by “diverse.” The Student Assignment System, formerly the Diversity Index Lottery, was designed to facilitate economic, academic and linguistic diversity. The Student Assignment System achieves diversity in these three areas to the greatest extent possible within the pool of applicants who choose to apply to any particular school.
- 1. The SFUSD school choice process and its Diversity Index are unnecessarily complex and confusing, time consuming, alienating to families they purport to serve and, most damning, fail to deliver a diversified school population.
Another response that caught my attention concerned the call to drop the Diversity Index lottery weighting. I have advocated this approach myself. So I have to question the district response. The Grand Jury recommended that, since dropping DI will have little impact, keeping DI is not worth it. The response comes back that the 2005 district simulations showed that "'the number of schools with high racial concentrations would be slightly increased' with the use of a 100% random lottery." So there you have it. DI has a marginal impact on the racial composition of some schools. So live with it.
Overall the response was summary: we will not implement any of the suggestions except the one platitude about making all schools excellent. They claim to have done that by adopting the strategic plan back in June.
I'm beginning to see why no authors were listed on this response. They basically tell the Grand Jury to shove it.
Labels: Enrollment, SFUSD Politics
8 Comments:
There were no authors listed in the Grand Jury report either.
It's not stiff-arming to refute poor reasoning. More like blowing on a straw house.
I'm no fan of the Grand Jury report, which I think was oversimplified and snide in its tone, but this response is OUTRAGEOUS.
Basically, this entire response can be boiled down to, "We disagree, and you can just go shove your opinions."
For example, when it discusses the questions about race on the form, it says because the district says race isn't used in the process, then they can leave questions about race on the form because the answers aren't being used anyway???
Whose poor reasoning is that?
I'm being really irresponsible by commenting before I've read the response; I was out for the evening and will read it in the morning. However ... we have a friend who's a criminal defense lawyer, and we have his promotional magnet on our refrigerator. It says "Stay cool ... hang loose ... admit nothing." Doesn't it seem likely that "admit nothing" might be the operative principle behind whatever the district's response is, for legal reasons?
What is the point of the Grand Jury report if it has no teeth (need not be implemented, even in part) anyway?
Well, I'm reminded of the legal maxim, "a contract means what it says". The Grand Jury produced a document that was befuddled and fraught with unsupported opinions. The district responded in a literal manner, i.e. to the word of the document. Since the questions are ill-posed, the answers don't go much beyond "you didn't do your homework", which is correct.
According to the metadata in the PDF document, the response was created by a "blytheg."
Coincidentally, there's an article about kindergarten enrollment in today's (2008.08.27) Chron with numerous quotes from a "Gentle Blythe" who is identified as a/the SFUSD district spokeswoman.
Nice detective work. Gentle's job is public relations, so her role as publisher would explain the digital signature, leaving the authorship question unanswered.
"It's not stiff-arming to refute poor reasoning."
Borrowing from the response, I "Disagree in part" A stiff-arm is a trick used to avoid a weak attempt to tackle. The district is using a short, blunt response to leave the Grand Jury in the dust. Maybe it is perfectly appropriate, but their given reasoning is interesting because it shows their cards on enrollment and diversity policy matters.
Now I've read over the district response. I agree that their language comes across as denial and stonewalling when it comes to the charges that the Diversity Index system is badly flawed, though I can see that there might be legalistic reasons for that. Doesn't it seem likely that in the case of a lawsuit, it would be material if there had been any official admission of problems with the assignment process?
Since I picked apart the flawed Grand Jury report pretty thoroughly, I appreciated where the district's response mildly pointed out some of the Grand Jury report's areas of befuddlement: "The civil grand jury report provides no factual basis for a reduction of half of the District's alternative schools ... It is unclear why the report links bilingual programs to alternative schools. Bilingual programs are not limited to alternative schools and are equally placed in schools that are not alternative schools..."
If the district response had provided such a detailed commentary on EVERY point of total befuddlement by the poor baffled grand jurors, the response would have been book-length. (Examples: the tone of confused outrage regarding the reasons many students are bused from eastside neighborhoods to westside schools but not vice versa; the obvious unawareness of the difference between bilingual programs and immersion programs; the implicit recommendation to cut
bilingual AND immersion programs coupled with the contradictory recommendation to expand popular programs to low-demand schools -- and those are just a few samples.)
If there had been a way for the Grand Jury JUST to focus on the assignment process and its obvious problems, rather than expanding into areas where they failed to grasp even the basics, it would have saved everyone a lot of time and energy (and that was paid time, too) and been much more effective. For some reason the Grand Jurors appear to have fixated beforehand on the notion that mandatory/guaranteed neighborhood schools were the magical solution and have written the report in an effort to support their viewpoint, while also inexplicably venturing into areas they failed to understand.
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