A dose of reality about neighborhood schools

Neighborhood schools are a fine thing, in the general sense. They make families’ lives easier, reduce our carbon footprint, give us more time to live our lives, and encourage neighbors to get to know each other.

There’s a new passion for neighborhood schools among younger parents, and at least one community organization, called Plan C, is pushing for an assignment system that stresses them. And that’s all understandable.

But some of the advocacy blames the current all-choice assignment system for problems in our school district, and applies magical thinking to a future based on neighborhood assignment, speculating that it would inherently improve all schools, build parent involvement and enhance communities.

Those attitudes need a reality check — it’s not helpful to go into a project with unrealistic expectations and a lack of sense of history.

The fact is, only 10 years ago, most SFUSD assignments were to default neighborhood schools. Most families had certainty and a guaranteed school of assignment. But here’s the dash of cold water: A large number of middle-class families did not want the neighborhood school they were assigned to. In that era — this was the case in the 1990s, when my family first applied to SFUSD kindergarten (for fall 1996) — the official word was that families could only get their school of assignment or an alternative school (an official SFUSD designation for about 15 schools that had no neighborhood assignment area). Some alternative schools were highly popular and oversubscribed (Argonne, Buena Vista, Clarendon, Claire Lilienthal, Lakeshore, Lawton, Rooftop). A few were unpopular with middle-class families at the time and viewed as not a feasible option to the equally unpopular neighborhood school of assignment (21st-Century Academy, Charles Drew, Harvey Milk).

So families in my time understood that our choices were limited to our mandatory assignment-area school or a lottery for a prized, oversubscribed school that was nearly impossible to get into. (Some parts of the city were “satellite zones” for schools outside their neighborhood, a bizarre twist to the setup that mostly affected low-income areas.)

This was the setup that drove so many families off to private schools or suburbia.

Just before our day, another family-unfriendly policy made things even tougher. In the early ‘90s, families had to be officially “released” from their neighborhood school of assignment before they could apply to an alternative school. In that era’s version of a “diversity index,” they would not be released if they added diversity to the school. So even more families waved bye-bye to SFUSD because of that.

Then there was the era of camping out. In the ‘80s, alternative school enrollment was first-come, first-served. This meant that families lined up on the playground several days before the magic moment when applications were due. My cousin and his wife, taking shifts with my aunt and uncle, got their kids into Claire Lilienthal that way. All the best people did it — Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, for one, camped on the schoolyard to get his kids into Lakeshore.

Under that system, probably fewer families fled the district, because if you could just handle the logistics of the campout, you did have certainty. Needless to say, this system favored the resourced and comfortable. That’s why Ramon Cortines, superintendent here from 1987-’93 and now head of L.A. Unified, banished it by fiat, to howls of outraged from middle-class parents.

Through all these systems, the consistent thread was lots and lots of middle-class parents' not wanting — absolutely refusing — their neighborhood schools. The middle-class values system at that time (at least the ’80s through 2000) held that convenience must take a backseat to concern for the quality of our children’s education.

Things have changed. I follow the chatter among younger parents, and I get it. For one thing, the term “carbon footprint” was unknown in my day and earlier — and there are other shifts in values and ideals at work.

For the record, my family’s neighborhood school of assignment was then-unpopular Miraloma, around the corner from our house. We refused it and fought successfully to get into Lakeshore, about a 15-minute drive from us.

Here are three points, and then I’ll dispel a few myths (as I perceive them), because I do think the neighborhood schools push needs to be grounded in reality.

1. This seems obvious, but: How you feel about neighborhood schools largely depends on what schools are in your neighborhood. The notion that everyone covets assignment to the nearby school just because it's nearby is not based on reality.
2. Those younger than I am may not be aware of this, but “neighborhood schools” used to be a racist code. Today, I don’t know any white parents who don’t want their kids in ethnically diverse schools, but a neighborhood schools system in a city of segregated neighborhoods does promote segregated schools. So this connotation is something to be aware of.
3. A school board member recently made a comment at a meeting indicating that , as she perceives it, parents are willing to travel out of their way to get their kids to get to a school they prefer. Some younger parents were put off by that remark, assuming the official was out of touch and insensitive. But actually, that was exactly the case until recently. I can give endless examples of families I know spurning convenient nearby schools in favor of faraway alternative schools or distant private schools (at great expense, in the latter case). The values system until very recently viewed it as, basically, irresponsible parenting to put a priority on convenience over the perceived quality of the school. The change has been recent and sudden, so please cut veterans a little slack for not grasping that immediately.

Here are what I see as some myths and facts.

Myth: Of course all families would prefer their neighborhood schools.
Reality: See above.

Myth: All schools would be more successful if neighborhood families were assigned to them.
Reality: See above. And in fact, when we first applied, far fewer SFUSD schools were considered successful and desirable enough to attract middle-class families. The number has not just increased but exploded in recent years, under the all-choice system. I’m not saying correlation equals causation, but that’s the situation.

Myth: It’s the uncertainty and the fact that no one is guaranteed a nearby school that has driven a high percentage (about a third) of San Francisco families off to private school.
Reality: That percentage has held steady since the early ’80s, during the time that most families were guaranteed their neighborhood schools. As an involved SFUSD parent for 13 years now, I’ve seen the assumption that “anyone who can afford it goes to private school” transform, in fact. It has been under the all-choice system that San Francisco parents have approached, if not reached, a tipping point at which families who once would have looked only at private are now open to public school.

Myth: If everyone were assigned to their neighborhood schools, parents would be more committed to getting involved at school, and communities would be strengthened.
Reality: The countervailing view is that families who have sought out a school and taken some trouble to get their kids into it, not to mention to and from school every day, have a greater sense of ownership and are more likely to be involved. At the very least, it’s a wash. Families involuntarily assigned to schools outside the neighborhood would be a different story, of course.

Semi-myth: Schools have become less diverse under the all-choice system, so neighborhood schools would not increase segregation and might even promote diversity.
Reality: It’s true that SFUSD schools have become less diverse during the era of the all-choice system, but that’s because the former system imposed racial enrollment quotas on each school. Those quotas were outlawed by the Ho court decision in the late ‘90s. The elimination of the quotas coincided with the all-choice system, but it’s the elimination of the quotas that increased segregation. And back when all families were guaranteed an assignment-area school, it was almost always the alternative schools — which were all-choice — that were the most diverse.

(I do have to note that San Francisco schools are far more diverse than schools in most big U.S. cities, where it’s routine to see schools that are 95 percent black or Latino. Also, the standard in SFUSD is that a school that is 60 percent or more of any one ethnicity is viewed as segregated. By private school or suburban standards, a mere 60 percent of any one ethnicity would be viewed as heartwarmingly diverse.)

All this said, I understand and support the desire for convenient, nearby, community-based schools. I think proximity should carry significant weight in the assignment process, except in the case of specialty programs such as language immersion schools. I do think it would be logistically impossible to guarantee access to popular schools, and I support a preference system for at-risk, disadvantaged families' school choices, though I don't have a simple criterion for identifying those families. Again, I just think the advocates for neighborhood schools need to be aware of reality and recent history, and avoid magical thinking.

The big picture: SFUSD schools are getting better and better, and the new interest among young parents is a positive sign for our schools and our community.