Why white families should support public schools.
Why white families should end flight to private academies, support public education
Shuja Khan, the former director of admissions at Stuart Hall High School, said parents who tour San Francisco’s private schools will be “blown away” by their “crazy programs, tiny classes, and top-notch admissions events.” His wife, who worked at Katherine Delmar Burke School for seven years, agreed but said when she toured schools for the couple’s own child, “the public school offerings didn’t look that different” from the Sea Cliff elementary school that runs parents around $30,000 a year. Emily Khan was surprised: “I expected to be disappointed.”
That’s because a negative narrative about San Francisco’s public schools swirls around professionals of childbearing age, insinuating itself into their collective consciousness. San Francisco Unified School District is broken, the story always ends. Sometimes it starts with how district schools are rough and overcrowded, holding pens that beat the spark out of children and teachers alike. In other incarnations, there are loads of good schools, but you can’t get into them. Or sure, you can get in, but your two kids will end up halfway across town from each other.
What the city ends up with is low public school enrollment among middle-class and affluent families, especially white ones.
According to the 2015 census, 41 percent of San Francisco residents identify as white, yet the district’s student population is only 14 percent white. Board of Education Member Matt Haney summarized: “White families are opting out of the public schools at very high rates: It’s off the charts. But only some folks are fleeing to the suburbs. A lot stay put and just go private.” Though reliable numbers are hard to find, Haney said 30 to 35 percent of kids living in San Francisco enroll in private school, but that number jumps to 75 to 85 percent for white students. In contrast, approximately 10 percent of kids attend private school nationally.
That’s the reality wrought by the narrative. The thing about common wisdom though is that repetition can lend a veneer of truth that rubs away upon examination. Math and English proficiency at San Francisco’s 72 public elementary schools exceeds the state average, in many cases by quite a bit. The minority of schools that truly struggle to educate kids do so because they serve a high percentage of children touched by the traumas of poverty and/or not yet able to speak English — not because district teachers lack for creativity and caring. In fact, awe-inspiring educators abound. But violence doesn’t. In the most recent survey, 82 percent of district fifth-graders reported feeling both safe and happy at school most or all of the time. Almost 90 percent said they hadn’t seen a weapon at school. As for overcrowding, no class from kindergarten through third grade exceeds 22 students.
That’s not to say the city’s public schools are problem-free. The district has well-documented segregation. The student body of César Chávez Elementary, for example, was 88 percent Latino, and John Yehall Chin Elementary was 90 percent Asian during the 201516 school year. And then there’s the citywide choice plan allowing parents to apply to any district school. The complex algorithm that takes into account parental preference and district priorities as it matches students with seats can certainly be improved upon. Yet even with the assignment system’s flaws, 61 percent of kindergarten applicants received their first choice in the first round of “the lottery” last year, despite the fact that more than half of them listed one of the same 17 schools first. Around 10 percent received their second choice at the get-go.
Some will respond, “But I know a family ... ” And that’s true. Each year, I hear of a parent who applied to 20 or 30 schools only to be placed elsewhere in the first round. That’s because in a district with nearly 56,000 students, it’s bound to happen to a few applicants. And parents who live within walking distance of the city’s most in-demand schools end up disappointed more often than others. This is a real problem, but it is, statistically speaking, not a very significant one.
What’s more, one of the groups to which the district gives priority is applicants with an enrolled older sibling. That means a teenager could end up at a high school far from their brother’s kindergarten (especially if parents prioritize something other than proximity), but a younger sibling of similar age is virtually guaranteed a spot at the same school.
Yet the horror stories are the ones that get told, and they function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Parents worried they won’t get placed at a satisfactory public school apply to charter schools and private schools. Because those applications are separate, the district has to run its computer program, offer seats, wait to see who registers and run it again. Some parents hold spots at more than one school for months, and the reshuffling must continue.
Meanwhile, too many take their initial seat allocation, that first step of the process, as the final say and publicly declare it “impossible” to get a “good” school. Action must be taken to change the uncertain, time-consuming nature of the lottery, but it is an ugly irony that faithless parents are part of what causes the process to drag on. Applying to private schools undermines the public system in a second way: inertia. In their jobs, the Khans watched parents invest a shocking amount of time, energy and money in the assessments, play dates, interviews, tours and evening events the admissions process can require.
Theresa Johnson, a rocket scientist with a doctorate from Stanford University to prove it, looks at all this and wonders where to send her African American preschooler. We need more highly educated parents to invest in
our public schools, but is that the responsibility of people of color? At a talk last summer at the Commonwealth Club, MacArthur grant recipient Nikole Hannah-Jones answered with a resounding “no.” For first-generation college students like her, “ability to confer advantage on our children is much more critical.” As a result, she said, “I don’t think it is on ... middleclass black parents” to forsake the bells and whistles of prestigious independent schools: “White folks have to fix segregation.”
My gut screamed back, “but we all have the duty to help,” and then whispered, besides, “Black parents with graduate degrees are the ones it’s easiest for educated white parents like me to connect with.” And that’s the core of the problem, according to SFUSD board member Mark Sanchez. “Many educated Caucasian parents,” he said, “whether deliberately or subconsciously, find ways to enroll their children in schools that don’t include African American students.” In his view, segregation isn’t an unfortunate by-product of white parents looking out for their kids’ interests; it’s a goal. This perspective is consistent with a point his colleague Haney was careful to emphasize: “Some people assume [white flight owes to] the current assignment system, but it’s been consistently that way for decades.” So the narrative persists because of repetition, yes, but also in no small part thanks to fear.
Are the bulk of white parents discomfited by sending their child to a school that reflects the demographics of the city? Not in my view. Most (but not all) just aren’t willing to have their children be grossly underrepresented racially. That often means deciding public school will only work if they can get a spot at one of the few where white parents cluster. Meanwhile, the district can’t produce many schools with a representative number of white students because so many white parents refuse to throw in their lot.
Someone needs to be the first to break these cycles, to eschew convenient rumors and reflect on what it means for a school to be good enough. That someone is white parents.