
San Francisco's Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation Made It Worse - phsource
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-segregation.html
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anxman
This is like everything that touches SF politics: total dysfunction.

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jstepka
Lived in SF for 10 years.

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

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magicfractal
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?

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closeparen
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.

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lozenge
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.

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speedplane
> 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.

Putting children with similar learning abilities in the same class-room is
better for everyone. Placing an advanced child with a challenged one can hold
both students back.

