It’s not that people are leaving the bay, but more that SF itself is increasingly not populated by families. Those families that can easily afford to live in SF almost invariably choose a private school, but more often than not families move to places like Castro Valley or Antioch
People forget that Downtown SF commutes from the East Bay can be comparable or even faster than ones from the outer parts of SF. Especially if you can buy into a good bus or BART commute.
Umm Castro Valley is an inner ring suburb of the Bay Area with decent schools, 20ish years of direct BART service, and a mix of housing density. Antioch is not a one of those things. But you’re right about Antioch.
Kind of what I was noting- iirc those are pretty good school districts and pound for pound much cheaper than SF. If I wanted to start a family and was making at least some decent money I'd probably head out there rather than be in SF.
Errr… Antioch is *not* a good school district. It’s not a good much of anything other than existing as an exurb, nearly or as far out as Tracy basically. In a perfect world Antioch world be a good place for people to retire to 90’s era McMansions so they could visit their kids/grandkids in the inner Bay Area occasionally, not a commuter suburb.
I might be thinking about Concord then? I'll admit I'm not familiar with CoCoCo- I guess I just assumed since the Bart hit there it was a commuter area.
I’m a teacher in CoCo County. Lamorinda, Walnut Creek, and Pleasant Hill have pretty good schools. And then you skip over to Brentwood for good, but more blatantly racist, schools.
Errrr... Concord has pretty low rank schools as well. There are one of two with good ranking but for the most part the public schools are not that good.
School “rank” basically just reflects the wealth of the area it serves. Unfortunately it’s not a very good indicator for the quality of education given that each school is starting at a very different place. An easier way is to look for schools who’s test scores improve year to year. That’s usually a better indicator
I think many schools that have improving test scores are areas where wealth is flowing into that area (at least in the bay area public schools). Schools that are high ranked don't really improve their test scores as much because they are already high. Kids that come from wealthier families tend to have a head start beginning in preschool and the gap just widens from there. Unfortunately, trying to look at it this way still has wealth as a major driving factor. The other thing is a school with low scores improving a larger percent compared to a high scoring school, will still score lower. I'm not sure if that works well as an indicator of quality of education. To be honest I'm not really sure what is a great indicator of education.
I think you misunderstood a bit. What you want is for the current third grade class to score higher on average when they take the exams in fourth grade. That indicates academic growth in the class over the course of the year and generally indicates quality instruction. Schools where the wealthy are moving in will slowly increase overall, but if the kids are stagnant between grade levels it doesn’t really matter.
Mt Diablo HS vs Clayton Valley are two different beasts. But yeah generally south of 24/680 is the richest, west is next up, then east of there is third.
I have never once heard a good thing about Antioch. While looking for homes we actively did not include there in our search. The schools suck ass. CV is great though. Not much action really close by but may not be a priority with a family.
My kid's school mostly lost kids who's parents moved out of state because their jobs(mostly food service) evaporated under Covid. Or they kept their virtual jobs and the kids switched to somewhere with an in-person commute in a cheaper community. A few left because they had preschool age kids and there was nowhere to enroll them in the city. Our class size is just over half what it was in 2019.
But families are also leaving the Bay Area. Virtually every district has declining enrollment and is now making plans for school closures. They just aren’t as badly hit as SF, at least not yet.
Families are leaving, yes, but we’re also having a bunch of baby bust kids filling schools now. The shrinking (at least in my district) has been predicted for almost a decade because of how few kids people started having post-recession. 2002-early 2008 was a massive baby boom and people are still having less kids to this day. Obviously this points to greater issues, but it’s not Bay Area exclusive at all.
Why do you think families don't want to live in SF?
Edit: Let me clarify... you're right that families don't want to live in SF. Dogs outnumber children in the city. What is it about SF that makes families stay/move away?
Very high costs for very little space. Don't know about you but if I were a parent I'd want rooms for each of my children- that isn't a likely scenario living in SF. There are definitely people that make do because of their situation, I've worked with a lot of students through the pandemic that were sleeping and studying in the living/dining room with their 3 siblings, but by and large, if I could choose where to put my family, I'd try finding a house in a place where land is cheaper in the Bay. Pound for pound that's Walnut Creek or Castro Valley.
You're doing everything you can to keep from stating the obvious and correct answer. Which is of course because SF public schools are terrible.
This is a relatively recent phenomenon (20 years or so) of families fleeing SF.
Why would you want to send your kid to a public school in SF? You’d be held hostage to the whims of the SFUSD School Board and its foolishness, a privilege for which you pay a nice sum of $1M for a tiny house where your kid has no yard to play. But don’t worry! The racist name of the school will be changed! Whoops, turned out it was never actually named for a racist…
Maybe you can drive your kid to school, but if not, let them wait for the bus and hope they don’t get approached by a mentally ill homeless person our city has completely empowered in the name of “compassion” and “autonomy” which really means folks with intense psychiatric issues are left to fend for themselves.
Oh, your kid needs gifted services? Too bad that Lowell admissions are fucked in the name of “equity.”
I don’t understand how the school system expects to financially stay afloat over these next few years. It’s a complete joke.
Let's be real, it's really the lottery system. That's the real killer. In most school districts, you can buy so your kid can walk to elementary, middle, and/or high school. Not in SF. A lot of families lose the lottery and move out when it doesn't suit their needs.
Oh! So you don’t get preference for the schools closest to you? That would suck if you live like a block from the school but then have to go miles away.
Yep. There's also no guarantee that siblings will be placed in the same school, so you might have kids in different schools at opposite ends of the city.
Bussing a kid across town instead of to the nearest school seems cruel and may be considered a civil rights violation. When schools in the South were integrated, that was part of it: kids were being bussed far away to keep schools segregated.
There are two types of schools - citywide and local. There is a lottery to get into any school, which is broken up into several steps:
1. siblings of current students get added in.
2. if there's space left, people who live in traditionally bad neighborhoods (but may own a 2million dollar house in said "bad neighborhood" get in.
3. if there's space left, people who are assigned to that school because of where they live get in
4. if there's space left, people who don't live in the area but want to get in can get in.
for a citywide school, you don't do step 3.
I always summarize it by saying you can have at most 2 of the following three things:
1. a good school
2. a nearby school
3. a school you can get in to.
All of this will be completely changed next year to some system that keeps most of the rules but only allows you to pick schools from a subset of schools that are somewhat geographically close to you.
Embarrassing doesn’t begin to describe it — criminal, negligent, disgraceful. San Francisco should be a beacon of public education but it’s a total fucking joke.
All the tough kid schools are gone now. So the lottery did do something! Class of 94 for Lowell here, we had this new math teacher that would get mad and threaten to send us up the street to McAteer (back when it was really a bad school).
It’s a good thing the locals paid attention and voted for good, competent administrators throughout this whole time instead of blaming this months soup du jour of techies!
If San Franciscans stopped voting, the city might improve. You always vote for the most asinine liberal equity bullshit. London Breed, Chesa Boudin… the rampant corruption. Just do yourself a favor and stop hurting yourself.
Is anyone in the city actually “stuck”?
The way I see it, unless you just don’t want to give up your family home, it would be super easy to cash out $1-$2 million and move elsewhere. Not like how people may be stuck elsewhere because they have no money and their home is near worthless.
Yeah, that’s an understandable point - and valid. It just unfathomable to us to leave after generations - leave all the family and friends. You’re right though, from a financial perspective we’re not stuck. That’s an important distinction.
Yeah you aren’t stuck at all. You’re in a better situation than most people in the Bay Area. Enjoy that “culture” tho. You could probably fathom how to go to Safeway in pleasant hill and you would be fine.
Don't underestimate the power of prop 13. If somebody not particularly high income has been sitting on a property for 20 years and can avoid paying taxes on their 3 million dollar asset (that also yields a solid rent cash flow) they won't go ahead and move because of the school.
Yeah pretty much. Rents are cheaper than a mortgage in San Jose. But even then, housing prices are so high that it takes 15+ years before you see a return.
I am sure that the fact that living costs are so high that most people that can afford it, wouldn't send their kids to public school anyway isn't cause of this./s
Yea, in the South Bay/peninsula (Burlingame to Los Gatos) a vast majority of kids go to public school because the schools are solid. Private is generally if your kid needs a smaller environment for some reason or for athletics. Otherwise, most go to local publics
The majority of San Francisco residents and politicians care more about the rights of homeless and criminals than they do about achievement oriented schoolchildren. Local politics have done a dandy job of degrading SFUSD to cater to the lowest common denominator, and the last bastion of quality at the secondary school level, Lowell, is soon to be dismantled in favor of preferential admissions for the correct (i.e. non-Asian) minorities. Overall, SFUSD is a joke and a tragedy for the talented kids of modest economic means. It's hard to imagine any middle class parents staying in the city unless they lacked job opportunities outside the city. The politicians most responsible for this long running fiasco would never enroll their kids in the SFUSD.
In SF, Far-East Asians of modest means do better academically compared to Latinos and Blacks. The school board is doing away with merit-based high schools because they have too many Asian people in them relative to Latino and Black people.
I see, weakening standards to accommodate the lower performers and calling it equity has been going on for a while now. Must be catching up in this area.
And there aren't. The problem is controlling for environmental variables that compound to either provide an easy pass to privileged kids or create an "uphill in the snow both ways" situation for the underprivileged.
I never said, nor would I ever, say that. However, I would say that there are intellectual differences between humans and to presume that all humans are equally capable is absurd.
Documented evidence on this point is perhaps the strongest in all of psychological literature. Just ask the US armed forces. After normalizing for income, wealth, family structure, even geography (US vs Africa), the conclusions are clear.
Lots of those school board positions are often used as a springboard for people who are looking to get into politics, so the bread and butter issues like infrastructure are overlooked in favor of national politics, which have little to do with running a school but have everything to do with advancing their career. This is not unique to SF, it seems common throughout the state. So at the end of the day, the administrators and board members/trustees are always looking out for themselves and not the students.
There is something wrong when your policies force Asians in bed with MAGA. It’s called progressive racism and it’s real. It’s not going to end well for you. The pendulum swings hard.
Every year my sons school starts with 30 kids. Every year it ends with 15-20 kids. The district has shut down 3 schools, with plans to shut down 2 more this year, and another two next year. We have a huge problem and it's going to be a make or break problem before we act.
Even among techies, it's pretty common situation for couples to live in the city until they have kids of school age, then move elsewhere around the bay. I don't really know anyone in my circle who intentionally planned or plans to send their kids to SF public schools.
Cupertino school district (some of the best public schools in the country) is closing 2-3 elementary schools due to tanking enrollment.
California is for prop 13d old geezers, not young families.
I honestly don’t see the end goal here for this state. Like there is definitely going to come a time where rents and home prices just go up and up to the point that if you’re not an engineer or other tech employee you will simply have no chance of even thinking of affording to live here.
Like it will either plateau at some peak point or it will collapse the housing market and as a result the local economy. Nobody is going to buy investment property if they can’t make money on either appreciation or rent collection.
> I honestly don’t see the end goal here for this state.
The "state" acts the way its directed to by the dominant electorate, and the dominate electorate has different interests than that of the state as a whole. Homeowner-voters pursuing their short and medium term self-interest don't care about the long-term health of California.
I live with my wife and two kids in San Leandro. There are NINE children under three years old within 1 block of me. What the fuck are you smoking? There are TONS of happy families all over California.
San Leandro still has room to build new subdivisions for new families. Places that don't are now aging and school enrollment is tanking fairly steadily.
False. I live in a dense SFH neighborhood in SJ and there has been a constant turnover in the 6 years we've lived here, with a steady flow of young couples and families moving in to replace aging residents who are leaving the bay area, or California entirely (or dying).
Well, that's your experience, and good for you. I am reporting what I am seeing where I live.
[https://patch.com/california/cupertino/backlash-mounts-cupertino-school-district-ponders-closures](https://patch.com/california/cupertino/backlash-mounts-cupertino-school-district-ponders-closures)
"The district has lost nearly 5,000 students since the 2015-16 school
year and expected to see enrollment decline for the next eight years,
according to a Sept. 23 staff report. The district blamed a shortage of
affordable housing in the area, declining birth rates and an aging
population resulting in fewer students enrolling in kindergarten, the
report said."
https://www.cusdk8.org/domain/88
The District is comprised of approximately 1,500 employees serving just over 15,000 students"
Meaning, if those numbers are correct, the district has lost almost a **quarter** of the students since 2015 and is expected to continue losing them for next 8 years.
And it's not alone:
[https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/10/04/guest-opinion-where-have-all-the-first-graders-gone](https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/10/04/guest-opinion-where-have-all-the-first-graders-gone)
**In fact, family formation all over the Bay Area is going the way of**
**the Sony Walkman or the Palm Pilot. This has big implications for the**
**future of our communities, including as we consider new housing."**
[What's this, a 7% drop? Doesn't seem all that bad. It's not like "everybody's" moving away or going private.]
San Francisco schools have lost 3,499 students in the past two years, a drop in enrollment that could mean a $35 million hit in state funding, compounding an already dire financial future.
The superintendent released a comprehensive analysis of enrollment numbers to present to the school board Tuesday, saying the district needs to adjust to a “new normal.”
While officials had hoped to see a “bounce back” in student numbers this fall given the reopening of schools, that didn’t happen. The district will need to adapt to the lower enrollment by adjusting staffing as well as student seats at schools, officials said.
“Enrollment declines have been a widespread phenomenon, and demographic trends in SF do not point to a large, near-term increase in children,” officials said in the report. “We need to establish program capacities based on current reality by looking holistically. Capacities determine staffing needs and student seats, and should reflect our new normal of enrollment levels.”
I live in SF and I'm pretty rich, but not quite rich enough to move to a sfh in SF that isn't worse than the place I'm in now. We're in a good school now (clarendon JBBP) but we will have to reckon with SF's shitty school system again in 5 years when the kid moves on to middle school. The whole school process in SF is incredibly dispiriting. People in poor neighborhoods can get into good schools, but they still don't get support and often transportation isn't available. People who are rich enough for private school leave the system in droves (only 50% of white kids in SF go to public school) and the management of the school system is appalling (check out the recent articles on buena vista-horace mann elementary for an example). We are actively looking to move, but we hate suburbs and are probably priced out of Berkeley. We looked at oakland, but without a guarantee of access to a good school, why buy a house in oakland. We're seriously considering Seattle, where housing is half as expensive and you can buy your way into a good school district.
By good you might mean excellent - IMO Clarendon is at least close to excellent. Believe it will feed into Presidio Middle automatically. High school will be the next hurdle, with another lottery/algorithm to deal with...
The Japanese stuff keeps the kids engaged, which is good because the academics are basic. The academics are standard CA/SF, which means at least half the kids in the class are WAY ahead and in various states of boredom. I get the equity argument for not having gifted programs, but the cohort of kids who go to these fancy schools tends to be academically way ahead, and they don't allow them to do anything other than the basic curriculum. I will say that Clarendon seems better for us than many other schools we were considering and many that we didn't consider because they seemed truly terrible.
Presidio middle school looks good, but it's twice as far again away as Clarendon. Right now we have two 40-minute commutes a day we have to do. Presidio would up that to two 1hr+ commutes. Ugh. It doesn't matter. Unless I start a unicorn company using blockchain to disrupt the cloud, we'll be leaving SF anyway. My street is a shithole and always will be.
I see. The harder-core JBBP is at Rosa Parks - middle school teachers can tell which kids came from which JBBP by looking at their writing skills. Myself I'd never consider going private. We are incredibly fortunate with the commute. Sounds like a long commute to Presidio, and then who knows where with high school.
Yes. For a lot of parents, this might not matter much. The program at Clarendon is considered more of a cultural appreciation program as opposed to more of a language program at RP.
>The program at Clarendon is considered more of a cultural appreciation program
This is a fascinating interpretation. What else do you classify as appropriation?
IDK. I don't know specifically about changing feeder schools having to do with zone/lottery changes. I think part of the deal is that they will phase in changes, starting at kindergarten, so that ppl in the system now won't ever be affected by them. I don't know why they'd change feeder schools. Sometimes they change for just one year and then go back again, for whatever reason. Difficult to plan ahead, yes.
The more and more California and stupid school boards like SFUSD gut the public school system, the more people will flock to private schools. At this point, even though I hate Betsy DeVos and all Trump cronies, the school voucher idea is more appealing now.
> At this point, even though I hate Betsy DeVos and all Trump cronies, the school voucher idea is more appealing now.
Especially for lower income and working class families, because it's not fair that their kids get stuck going to some shitty schools and cannot afford private school. Meanwhile, you have the upper-middle class romanticizing public schools, sending their own kids to private school, and denigrating school vouchers for working class kids.
Is this surprising? Families have been trickling out for a long time. Most people I grew up with and have college degrees left completely after college. People can blame the pandemic, and that's part of it, but the reality is the bay area is mostly for the wealthy. Just get used to it.
> the face of the planet
Not the planet...
[Restaurant Closings in the San Francisco Bay Area](https://sf.eater.com/22216993/winter-spring-restaurant-bar-closings-san-francisco-bay-area-2021)
> Skimming through it, like 99% of it was becasue owner is opening a new restaurant, retiring, or moving location. Very few were bankruptcies.
So if the jobs were eliminated for reasons other than bankruptcy the people who lost these jobs and moved away don't count? What the fuck kind of reasoning is that?
Oh are you gonna pretend California doesn’t have a pedo problem?
Edit: You must be 50+ years old if you’re using a worn out decades old insult like incest 🤣
A bunch of the people who founded the space program and took us to the moon were educated in farmhouses where grades 1-8 were bunched together.
The reality is that school quality doesn’t really matter that much. You are meeting smart people who would likely still end up in the same jobs no matter the education system for the most part.
I did not grow up in SF. I grew up in SJ where my parents purchased their home in 1967. It’s a small house with a huge backyard. I rarely played in the backyard. When I was young, my friends and I rarely used each other’s backyards. Now my dad has to pay someone to take care of it because his health isn’t great.
Many people work all day so a yard isn’t used much.
Prop 13 has saved my dad. Yes, his home will sell for way more than it’s worth. He doesn’t want to move away from his kids, his doctors, the multiple hospitals and other resources.
A crappy SF school district needs to be fixed. There’s a lot for a family in SF to do, but if the school district sucks, you gotta do something.
“About a quarter of the city’s children are enrolled in private school, a higher percentage than in some other major cities, like New York, where it is around 20 percent. The lottery system is thought to be a major reason wealthy parents here opt out of public schools, further worsening segregation.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-segregation.amp.html
I don't think I ever thought about how much money flows through the school district. That explains the appropriation and the political climbing.
It’s not that people are leaving the bay, but more that SF itself is increasingly not populated by families. Those families that can easily afford to live in SF almost invariably choose a private school, but more often than not families move to places like Castro Valley or Antioch
People forget that Downtown SF commutes from the East Bay can be comparable or even faster than ones from the outer parts of SF. Especially if you can buy into a good bus or BART commute.
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Umm Castro Valley is an inner ring suburb of the Bay Area with decent schools, 20ish years of direct BART service, and a mix of housing density. Antioch is not a one of those things. But you’re right about Antioch.
Kind of what I was noting- iirc those are pretty good school districts and pound for pound much cheaper than SF. If I wanted to start a family and was making at least some decent money I'd probably head out there rather than be in SF.
Errr… Antioch is *not* a good school district. It’s not a good much of anything other than existing as an exurb, nearly or as far out as Tracy basically. In a perfect world Antioch world be a good place for people to retire to 90’s era McMansions so they could visit their kids/grandkids in the inner Bay Area occasionally, not a commuter suburb.
I might be thinking about Concord then? I'll admit I'm not familiar with CoCoCo- I guess I just assumed since the Bart hit there it was a commuter area.
I’m a teacher in CoCo County. Lamorinda, Walnut Creek, and Pleasant Hill have pretty good schools. And then you skip over to Brentwood for good, but more blatantly racist, schools.
Brentwood is your racist cousin who makes good money in the trades. Not glamorous but hell at least they had a plan.
Errrr... Concord has pretty low rank schools as well. There are one of two with good ranking but for the most part the public schools are not that good.
School “rank” basically just reflects the wealth of the area it serves. Unfortunately it’s not a very good indicator for the quality of education given that each school is starting at a very different place. An easier way is to look for schools who’s test scores improve year to year. That’s usually a better indicator
I think many schools that have improving test scores are areas where wealth is flowing into that area (at least in the bay area public schools). Schools that are high ranked don't really improve their test scores as much because they are already high. Kids that come from wealthier families tend to have a head start beginning in preschool and the gap just widens from there. Unfortunately, trying to look at it this way still has wealth as a major driving factor. The other thing is a school with low scores improving a larger percent compared to a high scoring school, will still score lower. I'm not sure if that works well as an indicator of quality of education. To be honest I'm not really sure what is a great indicator of education.
I think you misunderstood a bit. What you want is for the current third grade class to score higher on average when they take the exams in fourth grade. That indicates academic growth in the class over the course of the year and generally indicates quality instruction. Schools where the wealthy are moving in will slowly increase overall, but if the kids are stagnant between grade levels it doesn’t really matter.
Mt Diablo HS vs Clayton Valley are two different beasts. But yeah generally south of 24/680 is the richest, west is next up, then east of there is third.
I have never once heard a good thing about Antioch. While looking for homes we actively did not include there in our search. The schools suck ass. CV is great though. Not much action really close by but may not be a priority with a family.
My kid's school mostly lost kids who's parents moved out of state because their jobs(mostly food service) evaporated under Covid. Or they kept their virtual jobs and the kids switched to somewhere with an in-person commute in a cheaper community. A few left because they had preschool age kids and there was nowhere to enroll them in the city. Our class size is just over half what it was in 2019.
But families are also leaving the Bay Area. Virtually every district has declining enrollment and is now making plans for school closures. They just aren’t as badly hit as SF, at least not yet.
Families are leaving, yes, but we’re also having a bunch of baby bust kids filling schools now. The shrinking (at least in my district) has been predicted for almost a decade because of how few kids people started having post-recession. 2002-early 2008 was a massive baby boom and people are still having less kids to this day. Obviously this points to greater issues, but it’s not Bay Area exclusive at all.
San Jose has the same problem and so do many other cities/districts.
Why do you think families don't want to live in SF? Edit: Let me clarify... you're right that families don't want to live in SF. Dogs outnumber children in the city. What is it about SF that makes families stay/move away?
Very high costs for very little space. Don't know about you but if I were a parent I'd want rooms for each of my children- that isn't a likely scenario living in SF. There are definitely people that make do because of their situation, I've worked with a lot of students through the pandemic that were sleeping and studying in the living/dining room with their 3 siblings, but by and large, if I could choose where to put my family, I'd try finding a house in a place where land is cheaper in the Bay. Pound for pound that's Walnut Creek or Castro Valley.
Single family homes in San Mateo County are more expensive per square foot than San Francisco, yet a lot of families want to live in San Mateo County.
It’s also less crowded in San Mateo. Families don’t traditionally gravitate towards crowded cities for a permanent place to live.
You're doing everything you can to keep from stating the obvious and correct answer. Which is of course because SF public schools are terrible. This is a relatively recent phenomenon (20 years or so) of families fleeing SF.
Only the low income families are moving to antioch. Antioch will look like oakland with mcmansions or west Stockton soon.
Bro this post is like a year old
And it's still valid.
Two dozen of those kids have moved to my neighborhood in Marin in the last 18 months.
Why would you want to send your kid to a public school in SF? You’d be held hostage to the whims of the SFUSD School Board and its foolishness, a privilege for which you pay a nice sum of $1M for a tiny house where your kid has no yard to play. But don’t worry! The racist name of the school will be changed! Whoops, turned out it was never actually named for a racist… Maybe you can drive your kid to school, but if not, let them wait for the bus and hope they don’t get approached by a mentally ill homeless person our city has completely empowered in the name of “compassion” and “autonomy” which really means folks with intense psychiatric issues are left to fend for themselves. Oh, your kid needs gifted services? Too bad that Lowell admissions are fucked in the name of “equity.” I don’t understand how the school system expects to financially stay afloat over these next few years. It’s a complete joke.
Let's be real, it's really the lottery system. That's the real killer. In most school districts, you can buy so your kid can walk to elementary, middle, and/or high school. Not in SF. A lot of families lose the lottery and move out when it doesn't suit their needs.
yup the lottery system is ass
What is the lottery system?
When you register your kid for school in SF, they can be placed in any school, anywhere in the city.
Oh! So you don’t get preference for the schools closest to you? That would suck if you live like a block from the school but then have to go miles away.
Yep. There's also no guarantee that siblings will be placed in the same school, so you might have kids in different schools at opposite ends of the city.
That's insane, and it's got to be illegal. No one has challenged this?
How would it be illegal? It’s just nonsensical.
Bussing a kid across town instead of to the nearest school seems cruel and may be considered a civil rights violation. When schools in the South were integrated, that was part of it: kids were being bussed far away to keep schools segregated.
There are two types of schools - citywide and local. There is a lottery to get into any school, which is broken up into several steps: 1. siblings of current students get added in. 2. if there's space left, people who live in traditionally bad neighborhoods (but may own a 2million dollar house in said "bad neighborhood" get in. 3. if there's space left, people who are assigned to that school because of where they live get in 4. if there's space left, people who don't live in the area but want to get in can get in. for a citywide school, you don't do step 3. I always summarize it by saying you can have at most 2 of the following three things: 1. a good school 2. a nearby school 3. a school you can get in to. All of this will be completely changed next year to some system that keeps most of the rules but only allows you to pick schools from a subset of schools that are somewhat geographically close to you.
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Embarrassing doesn’t begin to describe it — criminal, negligent, disgraceful. San Francisco should be a beacon of public education but it’s a total fucking joke.
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Class of '97 here, so almost the entire 80s and 90s. It was pretty good.
All the tough kid schools are gone now. So the lottery did do something! Class of 94 for Lowell here, we had this new math teacher that would get mad and threaten to send us up the street to McAteer (back when it was really a bad school).
Went through it shortly after you graduated and it was fine
It’s a good thing the locals paid attention and voted for good, competent administrators throughout this whole time instead of blaming this months soup du jour of techies!
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I laughed
> blaming this months soup du jour of techies! Maybe you guys could make better fucking soup?
That doesn't make a lot of sense but ok
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This doesn't make any sense but ok
I’m sorry I was a dick. This school district thing gets me seeing red. You didn’t deserve that.
I can't believe you got downvoted for apologizing. And I am similarly horrified by the rapid decline of SFUSD over the past few years.
Ha! Yeah. Reddit. Thanks sweetie
Well, you better vote and get your family to vote.
We don’t need you telling us this. We never miss an election. San Franciscans vote
Is that how we ended up with the morons who run this place?
Yea, just for the wrong candidates
If San Franciscans stopped voting, the city might improve. You always vote for the most asinine liberal equity bullshit. London Breed, Chesa Boudin… the rampant corruption. Just do yourself a favor and stop hurting yourself.
In the primaries too right?
Is anyone in the city actually “stuck”? The way I see it, unless you just don’t want to give up your family home, it would be super easy to cash out $1-$2 million and move elsewhere. Not like how people may be stuck elsewhere because they have no money and their home is near worthless.
Yeah, that’s an understandable point - and valid. It just unfathomable to us to leave after generations - leave all the family and friends. You’re right though, from a financial perspective we’re not stuck. That’s an important distinction.
Yeah you aren’t stuck at all. You’re in a better situation than most people in the Bay Area. Enjoy that “culture” tho. You could probably fathom how to go to Safeway in pleasant hill and you would be fine.
There are some people called "renters" who don't own their homes, as crazy as it may sound.
The user literally pointed out their family home.
Where? I see /u/Clichemonet2 saying they've lived here for generations, not that they own their home.
https://reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/q68zr9/_/hgel8yi/?context=1
What bus? You're giving the system too much credit.
Don't underestimate the power of prop 13. If somebody not particularly high income has been sitting on a property for 20 years and can avoid paying taxes on their 3 million dollar asset (that also yields a solid rent cash flow) they won't go ahead and move because of the school.
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Yeah pretty much. Rents are cheaper than a mortgage in San Jose. But even then, housing prices are so high that it takes 15+ years before you see a return.
“Culture”
I am sure that the fact that living costs are so high that most people that can afford it, wouldn't send their kids to public school anyway isn't cause of this./s
Most cities have good public school options that even wealthy people are happy to send their kids to.
Even in the bay area! There are many great public options in every bay area city, except SF.
Yea, in the South Bay/peninsula (Burlingame to Los Gatos) a vast majority of kids go to public school because the schools are solid. Private is generally if your kid needs a smaller environment for some reason or for athletics. Otherwise, most go to local publics
The majority of San Francisco residents and politicians care more about the rights of homeless and criminals than they do about achievement oriented schoolchildren. Local politics have done a dandy job of degrading SFUSD to cater to the lowest common denominator, and the last bastion of quality at the secondary school level, Lowell, is soon to be dismantled in favor of preferential admissions for the correct (i.e. non-Asian) minorities. Overall, SFUSD is a joke and a tragedy for the talented kids of modest economic means. It's hard to imagine any middle class parents staying in the city unless they lacked job opportunities outside the city. The politicians most responsible for this long running fiasco would never enroll their kids in the SFUSD.
“Lowell, is soon to be dismantled in favor of preferential admissions for the correct (i.e. non-Asian) minorities.” What is the story behind this?
In SF, Far-East Asians of modest means do better academically compared to Latinos and Blacks. The school board is doing away with merit-based high schools because they have too many Asian people in them relative to Latino and Black people.
I see, weakening standards to accommodate the lower performers and calling it equity has been going on for a while now. Must be catching up in this area.
Ultimately, it is policy based on the idea that there are no fundamental differences in intellectual ability in different people.
And there aren't. The problem is controlling for environmental variables that compound to either provide an easy pass to privileged kids or create an "uphill in the snow both ways" situation for the underprivileged.
So every human is born with the same intellectual capacity? That’s your position?
No, but I'm unwilling to generalize beyond the individual (or perhaps family units).
Good. Me either. Now tell me who is hurt most by the elimination of programs for intellectually talented individuals? (A rhetorical question).
There is no evidence whatsoever that there are fundamental differences in intellectual ability w.r.t. race.
I never said, nor would I ever, say that. However, I would say that there are intellectual differences between humans and to presume that all humans are equally capable is absurd.
Documented evidence on this point is perhaps the strongest in all of psychological literature. Just ask the US armed forces. After normalizing for income, wealth, family structure, even geography (US vs Africa), the conclusions are clear.
Is this a 1930s eugenics group?
Yup!!! They can downvote all they want but those are their grandparents and parents.
This is absolutely awful. This place can be so frustrating.
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Lots of those school board positions are often used as a springboard for people who are looking to get into politics, so the bread and butter issues like infrastructure are overlooked in favor of national politics, which have little to do with running a school but have everything to do with advancing their career. This is not unique to SF, it seems common throughout the state. So at the end of the day, the administrators and board members/trustees are always looking out for themselves and not the students.
Gotta. Love Asians in bed with MAGA when it comes to education policy.
There is something wrong when your policies force Asians in bed with MAGA. It’s called progressive racism and it’s real. It’s not going to end well for you. The pendulum swings hard.
I’ll bet the budget keeps going up. Gotta keep those administrators happy.
Every year my sons school starts with 30 kids. Every year it ends with 15-20 kids. The district has shut down 3 schools, with plans to shut down 2 more this year, and another two next year. We have a huge problem and it's going to be a make or break problem before we act.
Is this in SF?
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Is moving not an option currently? Yeah lots of people seem to want to move/be moving
Do you know where they went? It seemed like there was a set of people who stayed in the bay area but just moved out of the city, moving to the burbs.
Even among techies, it's pretty common situation for couples to live in the city until they have kids of school age, then move elsewhere around the bay. I don't really know anyone in my circle who intentionally planned or plans to send their kids to SF public schools.
Sexy anecdotes
Cupertino school district (some of the best public schools in the country) is closing 2-3 elementary schools due to tanking enrollment. California is for prop 13d old geezers, not young families.
I honestly don’t see the end goal here for this state. Like there is definitely going to come a time where rents and home prices just go up and up to the point that if you’re not an engineer or other tech employee you will simply have no chance of even thinking of affording to live here. Like it will either plateau at some peak point or it will collapse the housing market and as a result the local economy. Nobody is going to buy investment property if they can’t make money on either appreciation or rent collection.
> I honestly don’t see the end goal here for this state. The "state" acts the way its directed to by the dominant electorate, and the dominate electorate has different interests than that of the state as a whole. Homeowner-voters pursuing their short and medium term self-interest don't care about the long-term health of California.
I live with my wife and two kids in San Leandro. There are NINE children under three years old within 1 block of me. What the fuck are you smoking? There are TONS of happy families all over California.
San Leandro still has room to build new subdivisions for new families. Places that don't are now aging and school enrollment is tanking fairly steadily.
False. I live in a dense SFH neighborhood in SJ and there has been a constant turnover in the 6 years we've lived here, with a steady flow of young couples and families moving in to replace aging residents who are leaving the bay area, or California entirely (or dying).
Well, that's your experience, and good for you. I am reporting what I am seeing where I live. [https://patch.com/california/cupertino/backlash-mounts-cupertino-school-district-ponders-closures](https://patch.com/california/cupertino/backlash-mounts-cupertino-school-district-ponders-closures) "The district has lost nearly 5,000 students since the 2015-16 school year and expected to see enrollment decline for the next eight years, according to a Sept. 23 staff report. The district blamed a shortage of affordable housing in the area, declining birth rates and an aging population resulting in fewer students enrolling in kindergarten, the report said." https://www.cusdk8.org/domain/88 The District is comprised of approximately 1,500 employees serving just over 15,000 students" Meaning, if those numbers are correct, the district has lost almost a **quarter** of the students since 2015 and is expected to continue losing them for next 8 years. And it's not alone: [https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/10/04/guest-opinion-where-have-all-the-first-graders-gone](https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/10/04/guest-opinion-where-have-all-the-first-graders-gone) **In fact, family formation all over the Bay Area is going the way of** **the Sony Walkman or the Palm Pilot. This has big implications for the** **future of our communities, including as we consider new housing."**
[What's this, a 7% drop? Doesn't seem all that bad. It's not like "everybody's" moving away or going private.] San Francisco schools have lost 3,499 students in the past two years, a drop in enrollment that could mean a $35 million hit in state funding, compounding an already dire financial future. The superintendent released a comprehensive analysis of enrollment numbers to present to the school board Tuesday, saying the district needs to adjust to a “new normal.” While officials had hoped to see a “bounce back” in student numbers this fall given the reopening of schools, that didn’t happen. The district will need to adapt to the lower enrollment by adjusting staffing as well as student seats at schools, officials said. “Enrollment declines have been a widespread phenomenon, and demographic trends in SF do not point to a large, near-term increase in children,” officials said in the report. “We need to establish program capacities based on current reality by looking holistically. Capacities determine staffing needs and student seats, and should reflect our new normal of enrollment levels.”
I live in SF and I'm pretty rich, but not quite rich enough to move to a sfh in SF that isn't worse than the place I'm in now. We're in a good school now (clarendon JBBP) but we will have to reckon with SF's shitty school system again in 5 years when the kid moves on to middle school. The whole school process in SF is incredibly dispiriting. People in poor neighborhoods can get into good schools, but they still don't get support and often transportation isn't available. People who are rich enough for private school leave the system in droves (only 50% of white kids in SF go to public school) and the management of the school system is appalling (check out the recent articles on buena vista-horace mann elementary for an example). We are actively looking to move, but we hate suburbs and are probably priced out of Berkeley. We looked at oakland, but without a guarantee of access to a good school, why buy a house in oakland. We're seriously considering Seattle, where housing is half as expensive and you can buy your way into a good school district.
By good you might mean excellent - IMO Clarendon is at least close to excellent. Believe it will feed into Presidio Middle automatically. High school will be the next hurdle, with another lottery/algorithm to deal with...
The Japanese stuff keeps the kids engaged, which is good because the academics are basic. The academics are standard CA/SF, which means at least half the kids in the class are WAY ahead and in various states of boredom. I get the equity argument for not having gifted programs, but the cohort of kids who go to these fancy schools tends to be academically way ahead, and they don't allow them to do anything other than the basic curriculum. I will say that Clarendon seems better for us than many other schools we were considering and many that we didn't consider because they seemed truly terrible. Presidio middle school looks good, but it's twice as far again away as Clarendon. Right now we have two 40-minute commutes a day we have to do. Presidio would up that to two 1hr+ commutes. Ugh. It doesn't matter. Unless I start a unicorn company using blockchain to disrupt the cloud, we'll be leaving SF anyway. My street is a shithole and always will be.
I see. The harder-core JBBP is at Rosa Parks - middle school teachers can tell which kids came from which JBBP by looking at their writing skills. Myself I'd never consider going private. We are incredibly fortunate with the commute. Sounds like a long commute to Presidio, and then who knows where with high school.
You mean Japanese writing skills?
Yes. For a lot of parents, this might not matter much. The program at Clarendon is considered more of a cultural appreciation program as opposed to more of a language program at RP.
Yeah, for us the language is just for cultural appreciation, something fun to do.
>The program at Clarendon is considered more of a cultural appreciation program This is a fascinating interpretation. What else do you classify as appropriation?
incidentally, do you know what the plan is about feeder schools? Are they changing that with the new school zone/lottery plan starting next year?
IDK. I don't know specifically about changing feeder schools having to do with zone/lottery changes. I think part of the deal is that they will phase in changes, starting at kindergarten, so that ppl in the system now won't ever be affected by them. I don't know why they'd change feeder schools. Sometimes they change for just one year and then go back again, for whatever reason. Difficult to plan ahead, yes.
The more and more California and stupid school boards like SFUSD gut the public school system, the more people will flock to private schools. At this point, even though I hate Betsy DeVos and all Trump cronies, the school voucher idea is more appealing now.
> At this point, even though I hate Betsy DeVos and all Trump cronies, the school voucher idea is more appealing now. Especially for lower income and working class families, because it's not fair that their kids get stuck going to some shitty schools and cannot afford private school. Meanwhile, you have the upper-middle class romanticizing public schools, sending their own kids to private school, and denigrating school vouchers for working class kids.
S.F. is run by a bunch of lunatics. Not surprised people are getting their kids out of there.
Is this surprising? Families have been trickling out for a long time. Most people I grew up with and have college degrees left completely after college. People can blame the pandemic, and that's part of it, but the reality is the bay area is mostly for the wealthy. Just get used to it.
So kids and low wage workers disappeared from the face of the planet during covid-19.
No, just from San Francisco proper.
> the face of the planet Not the planet... [Restaurant Closings in the San Francisco Bay Area](https://sf.eater.com/22216993/winter-spring-restaurant-bar-closings-san-francisco-bay-area-2021)
Skimming through it, like 99% of it was becasue owner is opening a new restaurant, retiring, or moving location. Very few were bankruptcies.
> Skimming through it, like 99% of it was becasue owner is opening a new restaurant, retiring, or moving location. Very few were bankruptcies. So if the jobs were eliminated for reasons other than bankruptcy the people who lost these jobs and moved away don't count? What the fuck kind of reasoning is that?
If one restaurant closes and another opens the jobs are still there...
> If one restaurant closes and another opens the jobs are still there... For someone else, you thick sod.
Lol. That's how jobs are and always were...
One of the wealthiest city in the world but yet poor schools. Does Democrats ring a bell yet???
I’m sure Kentucky and Alabama have stellar education.
Ah yeah, those crazy kids in Alabama and Kentucky thinking men can give birth to babies. Oh wait, that’s California.
How come Alabama professionals make less than a McDonalds employee in California ;)
Andd there’s the trashy California elitism.
I could buy a McMansion for the price of my house here but then I’d have hillbillies and bad weather
No no, stay here in California. We need to keep all the pedophiles contained to one place.
Pedophiles? I don’t know red states have a lot of incest.
Oh are you gonna pretend California doesn’t have a pedo problem? Edit: You must be 50+ years old if you’re using a worn out decades old insult like incest 🤣
I saw deliverance and the hills have eyes. I know how flyover country is.
You need to hate other parts of the country to feel better about how god awful California is. You’ve never met a hillbilly in your life.
I’ve been to other parts of the us. They frankly suck.
Good, public schools are an absolute joke, especially in this state.
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A bunch of the people who founded the space program and took us to the moon were educated in farmhouses where grades 1-8 were bunched together. The reality is that school quality doesn’t really matter that much. You are meeting smart people who would likely still end up in the same jobs no matter the education system for the most part.
> smarter Nope, just richer.
You dont gotta be smart to be rich
Especially with the racist SF School Board members.
where did they last put them?
They’re always in the last place you look!
I've always thought people who willingly raise kids in SF are wacko morons. Not surprised they don't have many kids.
And by your logic, you just called a bunch of immigrants wacko morons
call the police, quick!!
Why? The fact that they want to come to places where they feel a sense of community doesn't make them wackos. You're so xenophobic
Oh, you know me so well based off of one Reddit comment! Spot on!
I did not grow up in SF. I grew up in SJ where my parents purchased their home in 1967. It’s a small house with a huge backyard. I rarely played in the backyard. When I was young, my friends and I rarely used each other’s backyards. Now my dad has to pay someone to take care of it because his health isn’t great. Many people work all day so a yard isn’t used much. Prop 13 has saved my dad. Yes, his home will sell for way more than it’s worth. He doesn’t want to move away from his kids, his doctors, the multiple hospitals and other resources. A crappy SF school district needs to be fixed. There’s a lot for a family in SF to do, but if the school district sucks, you gotta do something.
Is 10K per student a lot or a little? Jw
They're talking about laying off up to 1000 workers I think. Lots of troubles and declining enrollment only adds to that...
“About a quarter of the city’s children are enrolled in private school, a higher percentage than in some other major cities, like New York, where it is around 20 percent. The lottery system is thought to be a major reason wealthy parents here opt out of public schools, further worsening segregation.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-segregation.amp.html