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SF has a lottery system. With the wrong stroke of luck, your child can be damned to hours of commuting across the city every day, just to go to a crappy school,
by scarmig 7y ago
SF has a lottery system. With the wrong stroke of luck, your child can be damned to hours of commuting across the city every day, just to go to a crappy school, when a "good" one might be across the street.
That's an extreme example, and in the worst case scenario there are plenty of good private schools to send your children. But choosing to live in SF comes with such a set of pros and cons that many parents of school-age children who have a choice choose to live outside of it.
- ska 7y agoIs a lottery system really worse overall than just letting people buy their way into desired school district? That model obviously hasn't been working well either.
- wil421 7y agoYou can have proper zoning and not have to make it buy in only. Before I moved to the suburbs the city I lived in created “Workforce” zoning to combat gentrification.[1] What’s really hard to stop are the doctors and lawyers who just send their kids to private schools and vote against everything. [1] https://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/brookhaven-zoning-overhaul-includes-affordable-housing-incentives/DIEN2Y7TxS40UXACqaHMxL/ https://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/brookhaven-zon...
- scarmig 7y agoDepends on your goals and metrics. I'd say yes, it is worse. An interesting read: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-segregation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-s...
- ska 7y agoThanks, that was a genuine question.
- badfrog 7y agoHow long has the lottery existed? Hopefully in a reasonable amount of time, it will cause the differences between good and bad public schools to disappear?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 7y agoThis is only the case if the schools are bad because of the students going to them.
- badfrog 7y ago> This is only the case if the schools are bad because of the students going to them. Presumably the good schools got good because they're in rich neighborhoods where the parents pour time and money into the schools. If their kids are going to a wider variety of schools now, the rich parents will have incentive to make all the schools good.
- scarmig 7y agoWhat instead happens is rich parents either move out of San Francisco to the burbs, or send their kids to private school. And so San Francisco ends up both with the lowest population of children of any major city and one of the highest private school enrollment rates in the country (~20%).
- golemiprague 7y agoYou don't need time and money to make a good school, what you need is pupils that are encouraged to study by their parents and that are not absolutely poor. We all know which group of people has a study culture and which doesn't and responsible parents make sure their kids are raised among those people who want to study. Simple as that, all the rest is a smoke screen for this basic fact of life.