San Francisco Schools

That meal application: Returning it benefits your kid's school

2009-08-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

Every fall, school officials and school food advocates urge SFUSD families to return the school meal application form, writing “not interested” if they know they don’t meet the income criteria for subsidized lunch.

This year, we are recession victims and are filling out the form for real. So now I know — this form is awful. Even though it’s pretty short, it’s ugly, intimidating and user-unfriendly. That’s not the fault of our school district — even though the form is customized for San Francisco Unified, its contents are mandated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the National School Lunch Program.

Many school food advocates are calling for the feds to eliminate the form and the massive bureaucracy that it creates and just feed every student free who shows up in the cafeteria. Among other benefits, that would mean the caf workers could actually pay attention to providing lunch for the kids, rather than devoting much of their energy to the “counting and claiming” process — keeping track of the record-keeping for qualified students to ensure that no “cheats” get a school lunch they don’t “deserve.” The nation’s current best-known school food celebrity, Chef Ann Cooper, has joined that call.

Here is an explanation of why families who think they qualify are urged to fill out the form (even if their kids aren’t likely to eat in the caf), and why all families are asked to return it, even with “not interested” on it. It benefits all our schools and our kids when those forms are returned!

Why do parents need to fill out a meal application?
Student Nutrition Services (SNS), the district department responsible for providing school meals, is asking all families to fill out the meal application, even those who know they won’t qualify based on family income. See below for more details.
SNS has annual expenses of about $16 million. Their main source of income is from federal and state reimbursements for breakfasts and lunches served to students who qualify for free and reduced price meals. Without a meal application on file, SNS cannot receive the full government reimbursement for those meals.
Based on family size and income, as reported on the meal application, students are designated eligible for free or reduced price meals, or they are designated as being on “paid” status (meaning not reimbursable). The “paid” category includes not only students whose family income is too high to qualify for reimbursement, but also students whose families have not filled out a form at all. SNS receives just 25 cents from the government to offset the cost of “paid” lunches, while total reimbursement for a student qualified for free meals is $2.78. Students on “paid” status are expected to pay for their school meals. However, not all of them do so.

How will my school benefit if parents fill out the meal app?
BENEFITS TO SCHOOLS
-- Schools receive money based on the figures that come from these forms.
-- Free and reduced lunch counts determine individual school eligibility for
Federal Title 1 funding.
-- There are other grants and award available to schools based on percentages of students enrolled in the NSLP.
-- Higher rates of students qualified for free or reduced price meals brings higher WSF funding.
-- Having a free/reduced lunch participation rate which accurately reflects the economic status of the school’s students ensures a more accurate “similar schools” ranking on the Academic Performance Index.
BENEFITS TO ENROLLED STUDENTS
-- Eligible students can receive breakfast as well as lunch.
-- Often school lunch is more nutritious than what students bring from home, because the school lunch must comply with USDA nutrition standards.
-- Studies show students who eat a nutritious breakfast and lunch learn better and behave better in school.
-- Enrolled students pay a greatly reduced rate for each AP exam they take, and are eligible to participate in other paid programs at reduced or no cost.
BENEFITS TO EVERY STUDENT IN THE SCHOOL
-- Higher participation in the lunch line means better quality food for everyone!
-- Student Nutrition Service is working to improve the meal quality at all schools, but changes require money. The budget for SNS comes from government reimbursement and from student’s payments for each meal served. No revenue is generated when students don’t sign up or use the lunch program, when students buy their food off campus or from vending machines, or when students do not pay for their lunches even when they should. If more students enroll and use school meal programs, more money will be available to order fresher, more appealing food for every student’s lunch, whether they are eating the NSLP lunch or buying a la carte food from the Beanery.
(This information is available as a flyer which can be printed out at:
www.sfusdfood.org)
What about families who know they won’t qualify because their income is too high?
SNS is asking all families to fill out the meal application, even those who know they won’t qualify based on family income. Those families can simply provide the student’s name and write “NOT INTERESTED” prominently on the top of the form. The reason why families are being asked to return the form even if they are not interested, is that SNS has determined that fear of being identified as “poor” created a stigma for students returning the form in prior years. Having every student return a form eliminates this stigma, and makes it more likely that students who would qualify for reimbursement will return their forms without embarrassment.
Why not just add a “not interested” box on the form to be checked off if the family knows they won’t qualify?
The contents of the meal applications are tightly regulated by the state and federal government. No changes can be made to the form with prior approval. SNS did ask for permission to add such a box to their form, but permission was denied by the state.
Why should a family fill out the form if their child doesn’t want to eat in the cafeteria?
If there is any chance that the student might qualify for reimbursable meals, the family should fill out the entire form, even if the child won’t eat in the caf, because every qualifying child raises the school’s free and reduced percentage. It is on this percentage that funding decisions are based. So being identified as qualified helps the school even if the child never sets foot in the caf. Of course, if the child does decide to eat school meals sometimes, then that helps too, by bringing in more reimbursement money for SNS, which is then available to fund better quality food.

For more information on the meal applications and all other aspects of SFUSD school food, go to www.sfusdfood.org, the volunteer-maintained website of the SFUSD Student Nutrition & Physical Activity Committee.

Critical views of charter schools from around the nation

2009-08-30T18:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am a charter school critic, and the charter school advocates who read this blog tend to view me (or pretend to view me) as some kind of weird, offbeat outlier voice.

Actually, that's not the case. There's a growing voice of resistance around the nation against the invasion of charter schools and privatization that's largely being pushed by opponents of public education.

Here's a description of charter schools from the blog Seattle Education 2010:

What Is A Charter School?
The basic difference between a traditional public school and a charter school is that with a charter school there is complete control of the school by a private enterprise within a public school district. Although taxpayer-funded, charters operate without the same degree of public and district oversight of a standard public school. Most charter schools do not hire union teachers which means that they can demand the teacher work longer hours including weekends at the school site and pay less than union wages. Charter schools take the school district's allotment of money provided for each student within the public schools system and use it to develop their programs. In many systems, they receive that allotment without having to pay for other costs such as transportation for students to and from the school. Some states, such as Minnesota, actually allocate more than what is granted to public school students.

A charter school can expel any student that it doesn't believe fits within its standards or meets its level of expectation in terms of test scores. If the student is dropped off the rolls of the charter school, the money that was allotted for that student may or may not be returned to the district at the beginning of the next year. That is dependent upon the contract that is established by each district.

Here are some more onlinevoices critical of charter schools:

Education Notes Online (New York City)
NYC Educator (New York City)
Perimeter Primate (Oakland)
Schools Matter blog (contributors from various places; the blog owner is in Massachusetts)
Small Talk (Chicago) (This blog by Mike Klonsky is not as critical of charter schools as other voices, but it takes strong exception to many aspects of privatization and is sharply critical of Arne Duncan)
Solidaridad (Los Angeles)
SusanOhanian.org (Vermont)

And here are two books that are not all-out anti-charter school, but that raise and examine many questions about them:

The Charter School Dust-Up
Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement

By Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein
Economic Policy Institute

Keeping the Promise?
The Debate Over Charter Schools

Edited by Leigh Dingerson, Barbara Miner, Bob Peterson, and Stephanie Walters
Rethinking Schools and the Center for Community Change

Here, too, is a recent commentary by Diane Ravitch on the Huffington Post voicing dismay about the direction the Obama administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are taking:

... what is the Obama administration now doing? Its $4.3 billion "Race to the Top" fund will supposedly promote "innovation." But this money will be used to promote privatization of public education and insist that states use these same pathetic tests to decide which teachers are doing a good job. With the lure of all that money hanging out there to the states, the administration is requiring that they remove all restrictions on the number of privately-managed charter schools that receive public dollars and that they use test results to evaluate teachers.

This is not change that teachers can believe in. These are exactly the same reforms that President George W. Bush and his Secretary Margaret Spellings would have promoted if they had had a sympathetic Congress. ...
Now that President Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan have become the standard-bearer for the privatization and testing agenda, we hear nothing more about ditching NCLB, except perhaps changing its name. The fundamental features of NCLB remain intact regardless of what they call it.

The real winners here are the edu-entrepreneurs who are running President Obama's so-called "Race to the Top" fund and distributing the billions to other edu-entrepreneurs, who will manage the thousands of new charter schools and make mega-bucks selling test-prep programs to the schools.

Diane Ravitch, by the way, is a former advocate of privatization who was an assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration. Having watched the principles she once advocated being implemented on New York City schools, she has switched course and become a sharp critic of the forces of what's often called "school deform."

Edison Schools: It's baaaaack, and bringing with it innovations like child labor

2009-07-31T21:49:00.000-07:00

Detroit’s public school system is hiring a retooled version of Edison Schools, a flopped school-reform fad of a few years ago, in a desperate effort to make over the floundering city’s schools.

In a local Bay Area angle, Detroit has brought in Robert Bobb, former city manager of Oakland and a non-educator, to be the school district’s financial manager. My understanding is that Bobb was respected in Oakland, but his business decision to hire Edison requires an unnatural willingness to turn a blind eye to past performance. I’m proposing a corporate motto for Edison: “Fool me twice, shame on me.” Edison is one of four firms the district is hiring; the Detroit Free Press (showing the press elsewhere how it’s done) has done its homework, finding a spotty history.

Edison, a New York-based for-profit firm, was the great shining hope of advocates of unleashing market forces on public education back around 2001. School districts around the country hired Edison to take over schools, which the company promised to turn into high achievers at no extra cost, while also making a profit for its shareholders.

Edison was a big story in San Francisco in 2001, after the Board of Ed started looking into severing a contract initiated by former Superintendent Bill Rojas that had brought Edison in to run one SFUSD school. Edison, somewhat inexplicably, decided to respond to SFUSD’s move by working up a media frenzy (the willingness of the international – yes, literally international – press to make a major news story out of an arcane school policy issue, at Edison’s behest, baffles me to this day).

Then Edison quietly fizzled as its clients, one after another, dropped the company, and retreated from the limelight, still running a few schools here and there.

But a few years later, Edison was planning its comeback. In October 2007 I blogged here about a leaked plan for the E2 project, a do-over for the company. Now, renamed Edison Learning, the firm is quietly — in contrast to its past grandiose publicity-seeking ways — trying to tiptoe into new client districts.

Some five years ago, as an advocate critical of Edison, I co-wrote a summary of Edison’s history:

Controversial, for-profit Edison Schools, once hailed as the salvation of public education, has fallen from glory as what seemed like visionary ideas turned out to be just a sales pitch. In its heyday, Edison claimed that it could run public schools for less money than school districts could. The company dropped that claim as dismayed clients complained about its extra costs.

Edison's boasts that it could improve student achievement while making a profit fell just as flat.

Edison's student achievement has been mixed at best, and its claims about academic improvement never held up to scrutiny. A July 2002 New York Times analysis of Edison's claims found that the troubled Cleveland, Ohio, school system achieved higher gains than Edison's schools when analyzed with the methodology Edison applied to its own schools' achievement.

The notion of making a profit collapsed too. Edison Schools lost millions of dollars every year, showing a profit in just one quarter of the 10 years it made its finances public.

Edison's stock was publicly traded on the NASDAQ for four years. After reaching a high of close to $40 per share in early 2001, the share value tumbled to a low of 14 cents. In November 2003, the company was taken private in a buyout which paid only $1.75 per share. It was shortly after the buyout that Edison posted its lone profitable quarter, and then immediately ceased providing any public disclosure of its finances. The company has never indicated that it was able to maintain profitability for more than the one quarter.

After losing many contracts — along with its media luster — Edison quietly began moving away from its original mission of "revolutionizing" public education, and into marketing conventional supplemental services such as testing, summer school and tutoring. Almost all of its new business involves providing such services rather than trying to manage schools.

Edison attracted ideological support from backers of privatization and school vouchers, and from such powerful conservative bastions as the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Hoover Institution. But its name is no longer mentioned when "school reform" supporters talk about solutions for public education.

It remains to be seen how Edison fares this time around. I looked back at my five-part blog item on the E2 design and realized I’d forgotten how entertaining it was, with its plans for saving money by using child labor rather than hired paraprofessionals and leaving the students in minimally supervised “independent learning” for as much as half the day. Unfortunately, this may not be so amusing when inflicted on Detroit’s badly troubled schools.

I really liked the part in the E2 document on avoiding grandiose promises next time around, too:

.. the marketing campaign ... must also be exceedingly careful not to contain any implicit promises that we might not meet.

... we must be vigilant at all times about the promises, both implicit and explicit, that we make to all parties and about our ability, realistically, to execute consistently on these promises. Our credo in the E2 group must be to under-promise and over-deliver. We have learned how our enthusiastic talk is taken literally by customers and stakeholders and interpreted as a commitment. Our constant caution to make commitments wil be greatly admired by stakeholders — far more so than audacious claims and promises. ...restoration of trust with the opinion leaders in the school reform movement is our goal. That's why we have to be so very careful about what we commit to and the claims we advance. Anything that seems reckless, disingenuous, or arrogant undermines all the hard work we are and will continue to do to build trust.

For anyone following this closely enough, and in case anyone in Detroit does care to do this much homework, here are my posts on this blog on the E2 scheme:

A whole new Edison Schools: the E2 project

The new Edison strategy and child labor

Don’t promise miracles this time

The new Edison: How they’d teach

Oh jeez, I’d forgotten this great part:

"We currently have many teachers who are very low skilled themselves. … We would stake out a courageous and much-admired position if we called a stop to the obvious fallacy that uneducated adults can develop high-achieving students."

Cutting-edge innovation: Don't hire incompetent teachers.

Government of Edison, by Edison and for Edison

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Does Bay Area Rep. George Miller support harming Calif. schools? One blogger thinks so

2009-07-31T20:38:00.000-07:00

The Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education think tank, claims that the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program for schools aims specifically at harming California — and that it does so with the blessing of liberal East Bay Rep. George Miller, an architect of the reviled Bush-era No Child Left Behind legislation.

The rest of this post is from Fordham’s Flypaper blog, by Mike Petrilli, who points out that there’s only one absolute requirement for states to apply:

“

States that don’t permit schools to use student achievement data when making teacher tenure or evaluation decisions need not apply.
It’s not apparent why this is more important to the Obama Administration than, say, lifting charter school caps, or embracing merit pay. But two things are clear. First, it pokes the teachers unions straight in the eye. ... Second, it pokes California straight in the eye, as it is the only state that is indisputably disqualified as a result of this provision. ...
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has promised to change California’s laws to bring it into compliance, though California teachers unions aren’t happy about that.
But here’s my question, again: Why did this issue rise to the level of an eligibility requirement? And why pick on California?
I have two theories. (Actually, I have one theory, and a friend of mine has another.) My theory: George Miller, the chairman of the House Education and Labor committee, is having fun yanking California’s chain, and the CTA/NEA’s chain as well. Miller, a liberal from the Bay Area, has a long history of driving his own state’s officials bonkers, especially around teacher issues. He’s also probably still mad at the NEA for making such a stink about merit pay when Miller’s NCLB reauthorization bill was floated back in 2007. ...
There’s no way that the Administration published the Race to the Top application without running it by Miller; I wouldn’t be surprised if his office pushed the Department to be as tough on California over the firewall issue as possible. At the least, he signed off on it. And he doesn’t regret it; he said in a statement to the LA Times: ” “I hope states that don’t presently meet the eligibility will decide to take the steps necessary to meet it. It’s the right policy to take our education system to the next level.”
... Here’s what’s interesting: Most members of Congress try to bring home the pork to their home states and districts. (That’s one issue that’s surfaced around healthcare reform—how to keep Congress away from Medicare reimbursement rate decisions.) But here’s George Miller, proud California citizen, doing what he can to keep the Golden State from winning the Race to the Top. (Or, more fairly, trying to browbeat it into changing its laws in order to qualify.) Someone should ask a political scientist to make sense of that."

Flak hits Jerry Brown over fundraising for his charter school projects

2009-07-31T20:26:00.000-07:00

The July 29 San Francisco Chronicle reports:

“Democrat Jerry Brown, who wrote the landmark 1974 state law to curb special interests' power in politics, has raised nearly $10 million in gift contributions to his pet charities from some of the interests - utilities, casino operators and health care organizations - that he oversees as [California] state attorney general, state records show.”

Brown’s “pet charities”? Those would be the Oakland Military Institute (OMI) and Oakland School for the Arts (OSA), two charter schools that he founded (in defiance of Oakland school district administration) amid a flurry of publicity during his terms as Oakland mayor, 1999-2007.

Brown, by the way, is a likely candidate for California governor, a position he previously held from 1975-1983.

The point of the Chronicle’s front-page story is the ethical concern involved in Brown’s requesting donations to a cause from interests over which he has power. In my opinion, since Brown isn’t benefiting personally from those donations, it’s not the worst breach of ethics I’ve ever seen (the Newsweek high school rankings are a greater ethical sin – that story is complicated; click here to read more).

But there’s an interesting story all the same. I heard Brown speak at an event promoting charter schools in December 2001, while plans for OMI and OSA were under way. His attitude, as I interpreted it, was that those stoopid educators who have so much trouble running inner-city schools should get out of the way and let him show them how it’s done.

Well, after the initial publicity about both schools, they largely fell out of the limelight – probably to Brown’s relief, because from the reports that have trickled out, both have struggled badly. (Yes, OSA has pretty good test scores, but it’s a school with an audition selection process, which inherently means it loses the right to crow about the scores – more about that below.)

OSA, for example, has suffered from near-fatal student, teacher and principal turnover.
I have better information on OSA than on OMI, and I know that at least in the case of OSA, Brown has worked his tush off raising money (as we see from the Chronicle story) and remaining otherwise hands-on in running the school. Some of this I know personally because after struggling to find a stable, effective principal, he wooed away Donn Harris, the very popular principal of my own kids’ school, San Francisco School of the Arts, to run OSA. My strong impression is that Brown personally recruited Harris, whose mission includes bringing stability to the school.

In 2007 the Chronicle reported on another income stream Brown created for OSA – an electronic billboard at the Bay Bridge toll plaza that generated controversy mostly over its brightness, which was blamed for impairing drivers’ night vision and also blighting nighttime bay views from as far away as Sausalito. The lighting was eventually dimmed somewhat. The income generated by renting space on the billboard went to OSA.

According to press reports, Brown legitimately channeled money from the mayor’s discretionary fund to the two charter schools, and also had city staff working on various tasks for the two schools. An August 2006 column in the Berkeley Daily Planet charged that Brown himself and city underlings devoted themselves to OSA and OMI while neglecting the Oakland school district:

Voters … believed that [Brown] would follow through on his promise for “dramatic public school improvement in Oakland,” expecting that Mr. Brown would spend considerable time and energy in reforming the public school system.

Instead, Mr. Brown appeared to lose interest in the public school system … focusing instead on trying to get his two charter schools approved. No one knows the amount of staff hours the City Manager’s office put into the approval process, but it was massive.

The diversion of city staff members to Jerry Brown charter school duty did not end with the approval process. Once the OMI was approved and opened, City Manager’s office employee Simon Bryce moved his offices from City Hall to the OMI headquarters at the Oakland Army Base, working on the city payroll but spending much of his time coordinating OMI activities. Imagine if Mr. Brown’s office had put as much effort trying to help OUSD get out of state receivership? The City of Emeryville did, ending up in an innovative—and perfect legal—transfer of money to Emery Unified that allowed the school district to pay off their state loan.

But [Robert Bobb, then Oakland city manager*] and Mr. Bryce were not the only city employees working extensively on Mr. Brown’s private charter school on city time. So was Mr. Brown himself.

On five separate days in July and August of 2005, for example, Mr. Brown’s official schedule shows entries of between three and five hours of something called, simply, “OSA Phoning with Marianne,” all taking place in the middle of the work week. On July 28th and 29th he is listed as working at this OSA phoning business for two straight days, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thursday, and again from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday. I have no idea who Marianne is or why they needed to take up the bulk of the mayor’s working time, but you are free to make your own guesses. No other single activity took up as much of Mr. Brown’s time during the period of January 2005 through April 2006, the period in which UnderCurrents received copies of the mayor’s schedule.

… Could Mr. Brown have helped make “dramatic public school improvement”—as he promised in 2000’s Measure D—if he had put his full attention to solving Oakland’s school problems? It’s impossible to say. All we know is that while Mr. Brown was putting much of his time into his two charter schools, Oakland’s public schools were going into state receivership, with children sometimes vainly trying to learn amidst continuing chaos.

So what to make of all this? Obviously, Brown rapidly learned that it’s not so easy to run a school better than professional educators after all. (By the way, I’m told that there was disdain for the notion of hiring an experienced educator to lead OSA in its first years; the recruitment of veteran principal Harris signaled a change in that attitude.)

Turning to the governor’s race for a minute, I have to say that the M.O. of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Brown’s rival in the primary, would have been to forget all about both schools as soon as the going got rough, if not before. By contrast, Brown has demonstrated his dogged commitment, even as the schools floundered. It sounds like OSA, at least, would have collapsed without that – not to mention without the extra millions he has raised for it. (Brown was similarly dogged about working to get OSA into its permanent home in the restored Paramount Theater, where it moved a few months ago; he also recently made news for recruiting Sean Penn to do a fundraiser for the school.)

Commitment shows far more character than fickleness. However, the more righteous attitude for Brown to adopt would be one of repentance: He would apologize publicly for the disdain for educators he displayed while founding OSA and OMI – and for turning his back on Oakland’s public schools to support his two charter projects -- and publicly ask forgiveness. (If I were better informed about religion I could invoke Biblical terms here, given Brown’s Jesuit education and former interest in the priesthood.) He would publicly lay bare the challenges he has faced in working to keep those two schools afloat, and would vow to work to help all schools rise above those challenges. He would declare that it costs far more to run a school than our state provides, and would decisively refute those who claim otherwise. Then he’d go back to all those donors and ask them to support all of California’s underfunded schools, with both money and political support – including calling on them to work with him to repeal Prop. 13.

Now that would be the gubernatorial candidate of my dreams. As it is, at least I can say I admire his commitment and determination.

About the achievement scores for Oakland School for the Arts: Schools with selective admissions processes can’t be fairly compared to schools that admit by lottery – and I’m speaking as a parent at a school that has a selective admissions process. Even though the audition process for an arts school doesn’t take academic achievement into account, the fact that it takes a significant effort to get in still weeds out the unmotivated and low-functioning. So there should be an asterisk on achievement reports for OSA and for my kids’ school as well.

*By the way, former Oakland City Manager Robert Bobb, a non-educator, is now in a position as financial manager of the badly troubled Detroit school system. One of his strategies is bringing in private for-profit companies to run some Detroit schools – including Edison Schools, trying to rehabilitate its image after its previous failure as the great hope of privatization. I’ll be blogging more about that soon.

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Budget contrast

2009-07-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

So true, and so tragic:

California values prisoners over students

During the budget debate, it became clear to me that something unthinkable has happened in California: Our fiscal meltdown has so distorted our legislative priorities that we are now a state that places a higher priority on prison than on higher education.

Rachel's bird's eye view of the budget

2009-07-24T11:02:00.001-07:00

There is so much to say about the ongoing CA budget fiasco. We've been remiss in our coverage. But if you want a nice, short rundown of what's in the works, check out Rachel's More details of the state budget and how it affects SFUSD.

And if that's too much to ask, the bottom line is we've correctly prepared for this year, but next year looks bleak.

Obama to the NAACP - No excuses

2009-07-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

Part three of a four segment compilation of Obama's excellent speech to the NAACP. We pick it up where he addresses education. Check it out.

Links to parts 1, 2, 4

CTA to the Terminator: Never Again

2009-07-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

Hat tip to the UESF for sending me a link to this video salvo in the CTA's battle to protect school funding.

How can the district possibly manage its business and prepare for the disasters ahead when the state budget process is so thoroughly busted? What a disaster. And the worst lies ahead.

Let's combine Don Fisher's museum, new SOTA site

2009-07-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

Don Fisher – Gap founder/mogul, philanthropist and modern art collector – has dropped his plan to create a museum for his world-class art collection in San Francisco’s Presidio, after years of opposition from various segments of the activist community.

Well, I have my areas of disagreement with Fisher, who has (undoubtedly with sincere good intentions) donated lots of money to what I view as education fads. But the man wants to share his collection with the world, and it’s sad to see his critics looking for self-serving ulterior motives. Couldn't every great museum and symphony hall ever created have been shot down on the same basis?

Now a fellow parent has an idea for Fisher: Those who follow San Francisco school issues know that there’s a long-term plan – with lots of money set aside for it – to create a new campus for San Francisco School of the Arts, our district’s acclaimed public arts high school (I have one child there and another who just graduated, Class of ’09). Though various options are sometimes proposed for a new facility in the Civic Center arts district, the longtime predominant plan would renovate a block of SFUSD-owned buildings at 170 Fell/135 Van Ness into the new SOTA facility.

My friend’s suggestion is that Fisher sign on as benefactor and create a facility that incorporates his modern art museum. Two key advantages over the Presidio site would be central location and transit-friendliness. Another is that the site is adjacent to the hipster-friendly Hayes Valley gallery/restaurant scene (which didn’t even exist when that location was first being discussed for SOTA). What’s not to like?

If Fisher decides to go for this idea, I’m ready to get the SOTA community on board. What better way to combine his two passions, arts and education? How about it, Mr. Fisher?

Follow me on Twitter @carolinesf

Progress on truancy

2009-06-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Chron recently published an article, Pressuring parents helps S.F. slash truancy 23% and an editorial, Fighting truancy yields big dividends with news of progress of efforts to combat truancy at SFUSD. From the editorial:

Nearly three years into her battle against school truancy, District Attorney Kamala Harris has something to celebrate: There was a 23 percent drop in the number of elementary school truants at San Francisco schools this year. On the simplest level, that drop means more money for the city: The school district received an additional $372,862 in funds tied to attendance. Any additional money for education is something to be celebrated in these tough times. And on the grandest level, everyone in the city benefits when children go to school.

We've been following this story from the begining so it is nice to see this follow up and to note the successes. As the reporting makes clear, progress has so far been limited to the lower grades. A nice start, but the harder problem of truancy in the upper grades, remains more or less unchanged. Hopefully the sustained attention on the problem will help officials find new answers. Prosecuting parents is not likely to work for older kids. Garcia speaks of making school "more joyful" for these truants, which may be noble, but in the context of reaching the dropouts most at risk here, the increasingly hackneyed "joyful learning" term comes off as risible. The success so far comes more from sticks than carrots. Garcia is probably right that the district needs to find ways to engage those older truants that are on the dropout path, programs like the Center for Academic Re-entry and Empowerment, (CARE) that we've noted before. But the success of those programs also relies on enforcement — paying attention to the problem, intervening, and letting these kids know that they can't just slip through the cracks.

Also, note that there are question marks surrounding some of the data provided by the district to back up this story. Caroline takes a look at some of the anomolies over on her Examiner blog in: SF schools' supposed truancy numbers make no sense. What's going on? Hopefully we'll get answers from the district, and improved data and reporting from the schools.

News From the School Lunch Campaign Trail

2009-06-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered a great blog devoted to the school nutrition issues that are near and dear to our heart, School Lunch Talk. The blog "dishes out the latest on public school food, from chicken nuggets and chocolate milk to legislation and regulations." Ann Cooper, a noted school nutrition leaders, is one of the editors of the site.

They provide a consice update on the progress on the legislative effort to update federal nutrition policy in this post: News From the School Lunch Campaign Trail:

The current Child Nutrition Act expires September 30, 2009, meaning it’s up for reauthorization, and in that process we have a chance to really improve on how food for our smallest citizens is funded, sourced, defined, and prioritized. Remember in 1981, how under Reaganomics ketchup was classified as a vegetable and 2 million children were dropped from the National School Lunch Program? The Act has far-reaching impact, beyond school lunch, to the WIC, Child and Adult Care Food, and Summer Food Service programs, and others.

Follow the link and read the whole story to find out how you can raise your voice at this critical juncture.

Chaos in class, and who gets punished?

2009-06-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

No, this is not what you want happening in your kid's Algebra class. And no, this is not how you want your kid's school to respond. Pretty sickening:

Bay Area girl suspended for videotaping unruly class

An end to the taco war?

2009-06-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

Because we just can't get enough of this issue... Breaking news from Mission Loc@l: El Tonayense Taco Truck’s New View ?:

Abandoned lime wedges near the parking lot of John O’Connell High School show that the popular El Tonayense taco truck can still be found operating behind the school.

But the owner of the truck, Benjamin Santana told Mission Loc@l that by next week his taco patrons will have to walk north a block to place their orders of tacos de carne asada. “We are still negotiating the details but it looks like we will have to move the truck between 20 - 40 feet towards the 2300 block of Harrison,” he said.

Sounds like a good compromise. The truck will not be on the school boundary, visible from the yard. Its new location is visible from the old one, so few are likely to be confused by the move. Cool. Hopefully.

Good news from Mission High

2009-06-04T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here is some genuinely good news reported out of Mission High. These are inspiring stories of struggle and accomplishment against the odds. Congratulations to all.

The Mommy Files : College bound: Mission High School students beat the odds

Through all of this Mission High School was the only constant in Spencer's life. He enrolled at this school of some 900 students on Dolores Avenue in the second semester of ninth grade after he first moved to San Francisco. He commuted by Bart when he was living in the East Bay. At Mission, Spencer found the support he needed.

"It's my family," Spencer says. "It's like my home. People actually want to see me here. If I need someone to talk to, there's always someone there. I can go to Mr. Guthertz the principal or Mr. Javitch my adviser or Mr. Albano the J.V. football coach. These people helped me get through the tough times."

Another snippet from one of many great personal stories:

Braki enrolled in Mission in the 10th grade. Due to her home life it's no surprise that she went through periods when she was truant and didn't care about getting a high school diploma or a college education. She developed a close relationship with Linda Martley-Jordan, who monitors attendance at Mission. Martley-Jordan, who lives in Oakland and has worked at the school since 2006, contacts parents and guardians of students that are not attending school on a daily basis. As she crosses the Bay Bridge every morning to get to work, she calls dozens of kids to tell them to get out of bed and get to school.

"Cindy was one of those students who always came into my office just to talk," Martley-Jordan says. "She needed someone to talk to."

When Braki didn't come to school for several days in the 11th grade, the attendance liaison became concerned and picked up the phone. [...]

read the whole story, very inspiring. Glad to hear good things happening for the kids of Mission High.

"We Ain't Got the Do Re Mi"

2009-06-04T22:50:00.000-07:00

Brilliant!

SFUSD Budget Workshop, June 17

2009-06-04T11:45:00.000-07:00

Once again, the district will be conducting a workshop on the district budget. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the district of educational politics in genera. Here is the notice from PPS_SF:

There will be a Community Meeting held on Wednesday, June 17, from 6:30 to 8pm at James Lick Middle School to discuss the SFUSD budget for the upcoming year. To be covered:
Raise awareness of the state's budget and its implications for SFUSD
Share information about SFUSD's budget outlook, including o the impact of federal stimulus funds, Prop A parcel tax, Prop H, and rainy day funds o outlook for school budgets
Gather feedback (overall impressions and specific ideas) from participants about what SFUSD should consider in difficult budgetary planning
Let SFUSD community members know what they can do to advocate on behalf of San Francisco's schools
KidsWatch for ages 3 and up sponsored by PPS-SF Interpretation in Spanish and Chinese available. Contact 241-6081.

For more information, please contact budget@sfusd.edu

This event is sponsored by SFUSD, Parents for Public Schools-SF and Coleman Advocates

The one time I was able to attend one of these workshops I learned more than I had from all other sources. The presentations were informative and in-depth and there was ample time for Q&A. Hopefully Myong Leigh will be participating as he is one of a handful of people who have a detailed understanding of both SFUSD finances and CA school finances and budgeting. This is a topic that should not be so abstruse. But it is. Here is your chance to bone up on the myriad details.

College admissions report and confessional

2009-06-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

I had big plans to blog my way through my oldest child’s college admissions process, and co-blogger/technical guru KC Jones set up a blogspot, Taming the College Admissions Beast, for that to happen. Well, here’s why that fizzled during the most intense parts of the process:

1. I discovered that when your kid is a teen, you can’t pour out your soul about what’s going on with him the way you can when you have an incoming kindergartner. Au contraire.

2. So I moved away from that concept and started trying to aggregate the most useful information I could find for other parents about college admissions. But then it became clear that parents who are paying attention are inundated with an overwhelming barrage of information – far more than we can process – and the parents who aren’t paying attention aren’t going to read this blog either.

But with my son graduating from high school next week and the college search behind us, here are some key things I learned from the process.

We Class of 2009 families were told it would be extra-tough for our kids – this high school graduating class, and reportedly the ones immediately before and after it (2008 and 2010), are the largest ever, in U.S. history.

And we were told that our kids had to be not just superstars but veritable gods and goddesses to get into the most sought-after schools; that the competition would be crushing.

I’m happy to say it wasn’t that bad. For example, short of the Harvard-Stanford pantheon, UCLA is often presented as the holy grail of the 21st-century college search. Here’s the anecdotal information: Quite a few of my son’s friends got into UCLA without a sweat – all wonderful, amazing, talented kids, but within the range of normal; not necessarily jaw-droppingly perfect in every way. Others are going across the bay to now-prized UC Berkeley – also great kids, but still normal mortals.

What about Harvard (pictured) and Stanford? One of my son’s classmates is going to Stanford, and she is indeed an impressive, accomplished achiever. I know that a couple of his more-ambitious classmates applied to Harvard, though not with wild eagerness, and didn’t get in. The one kid we know this year who did is a talented musician from a very high-end Bay Area suburb – and who is going without enthusiasm, to please his parents.

Here’s a random and partial list of colleges that accepted kids this year in my son’s SFUSD world: Berklee College of Music, Cooper Union, Curtis Institute of Music, Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, McGill, New York University, Oberlin, Pace University, the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, University of Indiana, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, George Washington University, University of Washington, plus many other UCs and CSUs.

And here’s my son’s story: He’ll go to Oberlin Conservatory (a venerable private liberal-arts college outside Cleveland) to study jazz trumpet. He was very specific about what he wanted during his college search – unusually focused, I would say – and applied to a limited number of colleges, with Oberlin the most ambitious. He was accepted to all of them, most being CSUs. As an applicant, he was a distinct package: a jazz trumpeter with a long music resume, high test scores and an indifferent grade point average (it slid as his list of music activities grew every year).

Obviously, a BFA in jazz trumpet is not the most marketable of degrees, but it’s unstoppable. (I keep meeting college journalism majors who seem utterly unaware that there is no paid future whatsoever in their field, unless they re-create the entire industry on their own; at least my son is in touch with reality.) Oberlin has both a stand-alone conservatory and a traditional college and does offer a dual-degree program, which my son is considering moving into, possibly to pursue his passions for history and/or politics.

Here are a couple of other lessons learned.

• By now I’ve seen many, many students who were accepted to fine colleges that they could not, in the end, afford financially. (We were lucky; pricey Oberlin is offering us sufficient financial aid.) Many settled for a second or third choice because that’s what they could afford. Since I’ve listened to so many parents of young children trying to assess schools based on what colleges their graduates ultimately attend, this is a really important point to understand – you’re largely looking at family income, not academic outcome. This is especially true of many students attending many CSUs, and even more so with San Francisco State, City College, and suburban Bay Area community colleges like Skyline, Laney and College of Marin. (And those schools are providing excellent educations, too.)

• I watched as some kids handled the whole process themselves, without parental involvement, compared to others in which the parents were on top of things the whole time. We were in the latter camp except for the fact that my son did the research, quite doggedly, and chose the schools to apply to. He insists that the outcome would have been the same if we’d left him to do it all himself. But my observation – strictly anecdotal – is that while there are indeed many students who work the entire process themselves, with great success (a demographic in which this is especially true is the children of Chinese immigrant parents), there are others who I think would have had a more shining outcome if there’d been some parental involvement and guidance. That’s not to say that those kids won’t be happy and successful at college – or that those who were steered to prestige, big-name schools by pushy parents will be better off.

I still think there’s a need for a particular kind of blog; actually, KC has been doing this part of the College Admissions Beast blog already. What busy applicants and their parents do need is ongoing reminders landing in their inbox of dates, deadlines and obligations throughout the process, plus opportunities such as local college fairs, SAT prep options and such. It needs to be steadily maintained and relentlessly localized. Another huge need is one that some benefactor should be providing for SFUSD – high-level college application counseling and guidance at all SFUSD high schools, as opposed to the uneven, catch-as-catch-can resources that are provided now.

Congratulations to the Class of 2009! You're the future leaders, peacemakers, artists, innovators who will bring us a better world. We're so proud of you.

Bike to School Day: Volunteers Needed

2009-05-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

From the SF Bike Coalition newsletter:

Next Thursday, May 28th, is Bike to School Day! For the first time ever, Schools throughout San Francisco will be encouraging students and staff to ride their bikes to school for Bike to School Day! If you are a parent or staff member (or you know someone who is), we are in need of volunteers to make sure this day is a smashing success! We'll need parents to lead Commuter Convoys, park bikes at schools, hand out goodie bags and help with Bike Rode-eo's and more! If you can help on May 28, email bike2schoolday@gmail.com and for more information see:
www.biketoschoolday.org!

JROTC Reader

2009-05-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

For those who just can't get enough of the JROTC issue, here are some links to related articles.

SF Weekly: JROTC Is Saved. Its Instructors Are Not.
Chron City Insider: JROTC program saved; instructors still get pink slips
Tim Redmond at the Bay Guardian writes: JROTC: Now, the lawyers
Mission Loc@l: JROTC Wins Battle with the District

One thing is clear, this issue is not resolved. Will the instructors be laid off? Will PE credits be restored? Will JROTC enrollment rebound? Will there be an alternate service program offered? Stay tuned because this will continue to roil the district.

Mark Sanchez gets a pass in the revolving door

2009-05-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

This is interesting: S.F. school board hires Sanchez as principal

We have occassionally been critical of Mark during his tenure on the BOE. But I'm happy to see him return to the district as an educator. Lets not forget that he had to give up his teaching job to take on the thankless task of serving on the BOE. I see little or no ethical problems with letting him return to the district without delay.

There can be no doubt that he has been devoted throughout his carreer to the cause of social justice and the need to address the achievement gap in this district. This should be a good opportunity for Mark to make a difference at Horace Mann and to help Superintendent Garcia advance his strategic plan.

Rachel: Board votes 4-3 to reinstate JROTC

2009-05-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

No better place to get the scoop on last night's BOE vote than from Rachel Norton: Board votes 4-3 to reinstate JROTC:

Shorthand: Resolution passed 4-3 with the following amendments:
give schools with enrollment of 50 students or fewer the option of dropping the program;
ask JROTC students and instructors to work to oppose Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Votes in favor: Mendoza, Norton, Wynns, Yee. Votes opposed: Kim, Fewer, Maufas.

Still to come: a battle over P.E. credit.

The issue that will never go away. The cast of characters on the BOE changes, but this issue outlasts just about all of them.

NCLB tutoring under the microscope

2009-04-28T17:59:00.000-07:00

Mission Loc@l reporter Allison Davis takes a close look at a rarely examined aspect of NCLB in No Faith in No Child Left Behind Tutoring:

Once again students in San Francisco’s public schools are sitting down this week to statewide tests. As in others years, many in low-performing schools have been tutored since January by one of more than a dozen companies that earn $1,442 per student.

Teachers and administrators in the Mission District schools, however, said the tutoring is unlikely to make a difference in test scores.

The reporter focuses on Mission district schools, but they are a good case study for a larger problem. I'd like to learn more about what the district is doing to better align this tutoring with the school's curriculum. Its not clear from the story if the inefficacy is built into the program or just a missed opportunity for effective coordination.

Public-school bashing is up; the dropout rate isn't

2009-04-27T21:46:00.001-07:00

A poster on the sfschools listserve commented on an article that said more students than ever are graduating from high school. He wanted to know how this jibed with recent reports that gave him the impression that the dropout rate is rising.

Since this tied in with issues I've followed, I responded to clarify, and then decided to post my response here too:

The classes of 2008 and 2009 are the largest high school graduating classes ever, in history, according to many sources. I've read this in numerous articles and guides on college enrollment. This information struck fear into the hearts of many parents of future college applicants in those graduating classes &— will SF State become as elite and selective as Harvard? (Actually, my Class-of-'09 son's classmates overall have done really well getting into colleges they're excited and happy about.)

It's a combination of a birthrate spike (more students, in hard numbers) and the fact that in the big picture, the percentage of students who graduate from high school has actually risen steadily over the years.

A hundred years ago, only elites graduated from high school. It was the norm for working-class kids to drop out and go to work, let alone poor kids. The high school graduation rate reached 50% only around World War II, according to Nicholas Lemann's book "The Big Test," about the development of the SAT and its intention of creating a meritocracy.

In my high school time and place, it was still common for working-class and poor kids to drop out to work or have babies, and nobody in power took any notice or gave a rat's ***. The notion that everyone should be encouraged to graduate is very new.

In a recent speech on education, President Obama bought into the "our public schools are horrible and getting worse" propaganda put out by the free-market privatizers, and Factcheck.org called him out on some (not all) of the erroneous statements. Here's what Factcheck.org said about the graduation rate:

The high school dropout rate hasn't "tripled in the past 30 years," as Obama claimed. According to the Department of Education, it has actually declined by a third.

(Also, my fellow "resistance" education bloggers are doing some interesting commentary about the study addressed in the San Francisco Examiner article, noting that it was conducted by an outfit called McKinsey that worked closely with Enron and helped create Enron's fabulous accounting practices. Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker: "The one Enron partner that has escaped largely unscathed is McKinsey, which is odd, given that it essentially created the blueprint for the Enron culture." But I digress.)

I'm not saying the graduation rate is high enough or that everything is roses, but the claim that it's dropping is false, and it's right-wing privatizaters' anti-public-education propaganda, so let's be clear about that.

(For the record, here are the other corrections Factcheck.org made in Obama's speech:)

Eighth-grade math scores haven't "fallen" to ninth place compared with other countries. U.S. scores have climbed to that ranking from as low as 28th place in 1995.
Obama also set a goal "of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" by 2020. But in terms of bachelor's degrees, we're nearly there. The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point.

Become a Burning Mom today!

2009-04-27T19:57:00.001-07:00

Commentator/journalist Sandra Tsing Loh — the keynote speaker at the April 25 Parents for Public Schools-San Francisco 10-year anniversary event — is the funniest Burning Mom ever to stand up for unsung urban public schools against the onslaught of pity, fear and genteel disdain aimed at them by the enlightened-parent set.

Loh, who lives in the shabby-without-the-chic San Fernando Valley suburb of Van Nuys, wound up a public school parent after a school application journey so insane it makes the SFUSD situation look like a game of Candyland. You can read her story in articles, blog posts and her 2008 book Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$ @ Story About Parenting!

The short version: Like every enlightened parent she knew in her Southland world, Loh assumed her child was headed for private school.

“In my Los Angeles,” she wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “everyone agrees that public education is a bombed-out shell, nonnegotiable, impoverished, unaccountable, run in Spanish.”

But the enriched and creative private educational haven her friends were swooning over wouldn’t even let her in the door for a tour. Then disaster struck: She lost her spot on a local public radio show after accidentally blurting out the F-word on the air. Life was bleak – until the whiplash moment when she became a free-speech cause celebre for getting fired.

Suddenly the Shangri-La private school was offering Loh a spot – but for a price, and it wasn’t a price that Loh and her musician husband could fit into the household budget. Meanwhile, the low-status — but at least it’s private! — religious school they thought they could afford rejected their daughter. Eventually the tortuous road led Loh to the unglamorous but tidy public school in her neighborhood. What it lacked in cachet it made up in potential, and the family took the leap.

Here’s what they found (from the same Atlantic article):

“While aesthetically uninspiring on the outside, inside it was a plethora of books, computers, LeapFrog pads, and the like. Title I schools, such as ours (those with a substantial portion of low-income students), are eligible for hundreds of thousands of federal dollars that affluent schools are not. Our library was stocked, litter was picked up, graffiti erased."

And as described in Salon last August, Loh had “found her real cause: rescuing our urban public schools. Yes, yes, she can hear you yawning.

‘This public education thing is so huge, yet … it's so unsexy,’ she says. ‘I would go to parties and people would back away. 'Oh, there's Sandra. She was fired last year for obscenity. Now she's into public school. Good luck with that.' “

Undeterred, Loh set out last year to organize a Million Mom March on the state Capitol to protest that year’s round of brutal education budget cuts. It would be a massive children’s crusade that would bring our overbearing governor to his muscled knees.

Well, she wound up with a nice little rally. At the PPS event, she showed an amusing video that was both a call to further action and a self-deprecating confessional of her deflated expectations.

But Loh and her Burning Moms are just starting to blaze. This year’s California Children’s Rally is set for Tuesday, June 23, in Sacramento. Chatting with parents at the PPS event, she may have established a “hands across the Tehachapis/Central Valley/Altamont Pass” connection that will eventually expand the reach statewide. I’ve already cleared June 23, and PPSSF is likely to charter a bus.

For more info: Learn more about the California Children's Rally here. Become a Burning Mom (you don't have to be an actual mom, an actual female or actually aflame) here.