Thoughts and insight on:
SFUSD 2012-13 Annual Report on Student Assignment
I recommend to anyone who wants to
comment on this thread to first read the report or to skim it if time
doesn't permit.
http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/enroll/files/2013-14/2nd_annual_report_april_17_2013.pdf
This post focuses on the race-related data in isolated schools and how this data is reported and analyzed by SFUSD. I believe the statistics are used to mislead rather than inform upon the issue of racial isolation. That said, I think SFUSD is on the wrong track by focusing its attentions on diversity rather than student achievement given the paucity of data that links more diversity with significantly greater student achievement. Not to imply that diversity is not in and of itself a good thing, but the purpose of a school district is not, as the United States Supreme Court has ruled, to alter the racial demographics of schools, but to teach students a curriculum that will further their abilities to be productive members of society. Be that as it may, is SFUSD's diversity goal being met? (jump to "isolated schools" for the answer)
THOUGHTS ON THIS ASSIGNMENT SYSTEM PROCESS
This post focuses on the race-related data in isolated schools and how this data is reported and analyzed by SFUSD. I believe the statistics are used to mislead rather than inform upon the issue of racial isolation. That said, I think SFUSD is on the wrong track by focusing its attentions on diversity rather than student achievement given the paucity of data that links more diversity with significantly greater student achievement. Not to imply that diversity is not in and of itself a good thing, but the purpose of a school district is not, as the United States Supreme Court has ruled, to alter the racial demographics of schools, but to teach students a curriculum that will further their abilities to be productive members of society. Be that as it may, is SFUSD's diversity goal being met? (jump to "isolated schools" for the answer)
THOUGHTS ON THIS ASSIGNMENT SYSTEM PROCESS
Reading the above report was a
trying experience. It brings tears to the eyes imagining the cost in the millions
of dollars required to develop, implement and maintain all the complex pieces of this
new student assignment system (P5101) - piles of money that could have gone directly
to classrooms that are so much in need of extra funding, money that's being spent for a purpose with limited value and less chance of success. To understand the folly of this
new system is to understand the ethnocentric predilection of SFUSD leadership,
to understand how race politics is paramount in the minds of the leaders and to
understand that student achievement is little more than an afterthought to them.
At the time of this writing, two weeks after the start of the school year, there are still hundreds of people who are hoping to get a call from EPC to receive news of their children's assignments because of this complicated, slow and laborious assignment system. Frustrated parents across the city are wringing their hands and hoping against hope to get that call with good news. Many have spent every day at the district placement office hoping to be able to advocate for their children's best school placement. In the meantime, classrooms are in flux, students are coming and going and all this is a major disruption to the teachers and their students.
ISOLATED SCHOOLS
At the time of this writing, two weeks after the start of the school year, there are still hundreds of people who are hoping to get a call from EPC to receive news of their children's assignments because of this complicated, slow and laborious assignment system. Frustrated parents across the city are wringing their hands and hoping against hope to get that call with good news. Many have spent every day at the district placement office hoping to be able to advocate for their children's best school placement. In the meantime, classrooms are in flux, students are coming and going and all this is a major disruption to the teachers and their students.
ISOLATED SCHOOLS
Anyone who has followed
this process knows as it clearly states in the Board resolution as well as in the
subsequent literature that the purpose of the assignment system is, first and
foremost, to decrease racial isolation (increase diversity). The text is replete with race language despite numerous studies in case after case showing more diversity having very limited efficacy on student achievement . The resolution also says that
school choice is only a tactic in the larger context of decreasing isolation,
not the purpose of the resolution which is diversity - an outdated reform by modern standards that focus on achievement.
So is the new assignment
system decreasing isolation and increasing diversity given that these are the stated goals? They say a trend won't reveal itself for several
more years. I doubt that's true and I'll tell you why. On p.14 of the report it says:
"Our current student assignment system
has been in place for two years, which means it has been used to assign
students to six out of 13 grades (kindergarten, 1st grade, 6th grade, 7th
grade, 9th grade, and 10th grade). Over these two years, there has not been a
shift in the number of schools with an enrollment of more than 60% of a single
race/ethnicity".
The devil is in the
details. Having looked at the data for the 26 schools that had more than 60% of
one race and have an API rank of 1, 2 or 3 (racially isolated), 15 of them increased in isolation while only 8
decreased and three were neutral between the years 2009 and 2012. Is this
subterfuge on the part of the District and the way they report the numbers? I
think so. Please see for yourself starting on p.11 of the report.
APPLICANT POOLS
Moving on to the next point, the Board says a diverse applicant pool
is essential to a diverse school. True. Below they also say the
assignment system is only one factor in determining applicant pool diversity, betting an entire assignment system's success on altering those pools:
"Student assignment has a role to
play in reversing the trend of racial isolation and the concentration of underserved students
in schools; however student assignment alone cannot overcome the complex elements that
contribute to the current state. For example, the demographics of the city, parent
request patterns, and language pathways all have an impact on the demographics
of our schools."
The SFUSD strategic plan says
that demographics is the biggest predictor of student achievement and it's
widely accepted that schools can only exert so much influence over social
factors which can enhance or impede achievement. But when it comes to student assignment the leadership overlooks the
predictive power of demographics and indulges itself in the notion that it
can change many of the same social factors that drive school choice decision-making - that it can increase diversity of the applicant pools despite the social factors that inhibit diversity. SFUSD's free ticket called CTIP1 is based upon
a contrivance that a family will travel cross town twice every day to exercise a preferential seat at a school further from home. How many people will travel across town even once to see a movie that doesn't interest them just because they get a free ticket? How about twice a day 180 times a year? The CTIP preference hasn't worked so far because it is extremely difficult
to change people's ideas about where they want to attend school and especially those people for whom travel poses a particularly difficult challenge, and, as such, it is unwise to predicate an entire
assignment system on believing it will change attitudes without any data to back up such a supposition. You cannot force people in a free
country to do things that they don't want to do when given a choice otherwise. Districts across the country have failed for decades to convince people to voluntarily swap out their neighborhood schools for distant schools that pose much greater challenges in time, money, convenience and comfort.
With a stated 20% reserve for CTIP1 applicants at high schools, the Superintendent has had to let many of those spots go to non CTIP1 applicants because of this lack of demand by those students who simply don't want to attend schools far from home, particularly as school bus service has decreased. At elementary schools the CTIP1 preference has been largely unused by those that attend the racially isolated and underserved schools which remain even more isolated because, as SFUSD would have you believe, the families don't know any better for lack of outreach. But the fact is that those target applicants will and are choosing the schools that serve their communities, not the distant ones, and rather than coming to terms with the idea sooner than later that the CTIP1 golden tickets are not the carrot they were attended to be, the District is telling us that the trend has not yet been revealed and that it will take several more years. Unless we see a sea change in attitudes this lack of interest in utilizing CTIP is likely to persist. In the meantime many families of means have been able to get trophy placements using their own CTIP addresses. The transportation and convenience issues are far less important to them. QED
BEHIND THE CURVE
Lastly, I don't know why the Board
would only classify as racially isolated those schools that have both 60%
of one race AND an API decile rank of 1,2 or 3 when there are many other racially isolated schools in the district. If diversity is the
general goal, why only label underperforming schools as racially isolated when other schools are
equally isolated?
SUMMING UP
In any case, it seems that only in San Francisco school leaders still believe in the debunked theory that diversity increases academic performance. If they don't believe in that hackneyed theory to explain this assignment system, they would be abdicating their primary responsibility to educate our children and instead would be engaging in a social engineering experiment with no proven educational benefit, likely perpetrated upon the school public to espouse a politically correct diversity agenda despite its actual value in increasing diversity. That is to say, in politics appearances and good intentions are is often more important that real results, which can be fudged, as in the case here. While consent decree orders have expired here and elsewhere with a whimper, school districts across the country have retrenched and rethought their assignment policies and have moved on to other academic and achievement-related reforms. Expensive diversity-first agendas have been a colossal failure and this sixty year old American experiment has driven new thinking about the way students learn and what is the proper role of school districts. But not the SFUSD.
Do we desire diversity and want to promote it? Yes. One of my children attends a very diversified middle school, but the school lacks sufficient funding. With all the costs and resources spent attempting to achieve greater diversity through this and former assignment systems, all the while failing to achieve it, we are taking our eyes off the prize of student achievement. This year SFUSD has turned flat in math and negative in English on the STAR tests, and in the meantime we are putting our children's education in peril by throwing precious education dollars down the drain for an unproven and questionable purpose for a school district. Strangely enough, if SFUSD really wants to generate more school diversity, it need only take advantage of the inherent diversity of our city's neighborhoods and assign students geographically.
SUMMING UP
In any case, it seems that only in San Francisco school leaders still believe in the debunked theory that diversity increases academic performance. If they don't believe in that hackneyed theory to explain this assignment system, they would be abdicating their primary responsibility to educate our children and instead would be engaging in a social engineering experiment with no proven educational benefit, likely perpetrated upon the school public to espouse a politically correct diversity agenda despite its actual value in increasing diversity. That is to say, in politics appearances and good intentions are is often more important that real results, which can be fudged, as in the case here. While consent decree orders have expired here and elsewhere with a whimper, school districts across the country have retrenched and rethought their assignment policies and have moved on to other academic and achievement-related reforms. Expensive diversity-first agendas have been a colossal failure and this sixty year old American experiment has driven new thinking about the way students learn and what is the proper role of school districts. But not the SFUSD.
Do we desire diversity and want to promote it? Yes. One of my children attends a very diversified middle school, but the school lacks sufficient funding. With all the costs and resources spent attempting to achieve greater diversity through this and former assignment systems, all the while failing to achieve it, we are taking our eyes off the prize of student achievement. This year SFUSD has turned flat in math and negative in English on the STAR tests, and in the meantime we are putting our children's education in peril by throwing precious education dollars down the drain for an unproven and questionable purpose for a school district. Strangely enough, if SFUSD really wants to generate more school diversity, it need only take advantage of the inherent diversity of our city's neighborhoods and assign students geographically.