San Francisco's Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation Made It Worse

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-segregation.html

by phsource • 7 years ago

19 6 7 years ago

nytimes.com

anxman• 7 years ago

This is like everything that touches SF politics: total dysfunction.

jstepka• 7 years ago

Lived in SF for 10 years.

The strong liberal politics are turning me conservative on many issues.

magicfractal• 7 years ago

As someone who’s not in the US, can someone enlighten me why there’s such a difference in school level in san francisco in the first place? If the schools have a similar budget shouldn’t they be pretty much the same?

closeparen• 7 years ago

It is an inevitable consequence of the algorithm run by parents who raise academically successful children: each year, move to the school with the highest proportion of other academically successful children. (Not to say this is responsible for success but it’s definitely correlated).

Start with a perfectly even distribution of family characteristics between schools. Make a few random swaps. Now some schools have just slightly more academic-success density than others, but this is enough to attract some other successful families.

Run that out for a few cycles, and the differences quickly become extreme and permanent.

Even if SF could attain that even distribution, it’s inherently unstable.

lozenge• 7 years ago

Why are the schools allowed to select students based on test scores? Rejecting students just means another school will have to pick them up so what is the gain to the overall education system in doing this? If this was removed then the system would be much fairer.

San Francisco's Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation Made It Worse

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