There’s good news in the San Francisco Unified School District. It is succeeding in educating students in multiple languages, producing citizens and workers who are better equipped to navigate a cosmopolitan global economy compared with the rest of the country.
Author Archives: Jeremy Adam Smith
Jeremy Adam Smith’s coverage of racial and economic segregation in San Francisco schools has won numerous honors for the Public Press, most recently the Sigma Delta Chi Award and the Education Writers Association National Award, both for investigative reporting. His work has also twice won the John Swett Award from the California Teachers Association and he’s worked on three Public Press projects that won excellence in explanatory or investigative journalism awards from the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
He writes about behavioral science for the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Before joining the GGSC, Jeremy was a 2010-2011 John S. Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford University. He is the author or coeditor of four books, most recently “Are We Born Racist?” and “Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood.” You can follow him on Twitter.
Posted inBilingual Schools, Education
How San Francisco Paved the Way for California to Embrace Bilingual Education
For almost two decades, the San Francisco school district mostly ignored Proposition 227, which emphasized English-only instruction. Today, with the passage of Proposition 58, the city stands as a leader in bilingual education while much of the rest of the state catches up.
Posted inEducation, Elections
San Francisco’s Multilingual Schools Could Forge Path if California Measure Succeeds
If California goes the way of San Francisco — creating more dual-language immersion programs and reviving bilingual education for immigrants — it would not just signal a dramatic change in education policy. It would also symbolize a massive cultural shift in the state.
Posted inEducation, Elections, Neighborhoods
If Proposition 58 Passes, California Schools Might Not Be Prepared for Bilingual Ed
State Proposition 58 aims to undo almost two decades of voter-approved state policy that has actively discouraged bilingual language education. But just as demand for bilingualism is growing, California lacks teachers, standards, curricula and reading materials.
Posted inChoice Is Resegregating Public Schools, Education, News, Social Justice
San Francisco Schools’ Changing Demographics
Over five decades, San Francisco saw a demographic transformation in its public school system. In 1969, white and black students together were the majority, as in most of the rest of the United States. Since then, San Francisco public school enrollment has fallen by 39 percent, and almost all the missing faces are white or black. But the two groups have not disappeared in the same way.
Posted inChoice Is Resegregating Public Schools, Education, News, Social Justice
As Parents Get More Choice, S.F. Schools Resegregate
Each January, parents across San Francisco rank their preferences for public schools. By June, most get their children into their first choices, and almost three-quarters get one of their choices. A majority of families may be satisfied with the outcome, but the student assignment system is failing to meet its No. 1 goal, which the San Francisco Unified School District has struggled to achieve since the 1960s: classroom diversity. Since 2010, the year before the current policy went into effect, the number of San Francisco’s 115 public schools dominated by one race has climbed significantly.
Posted inEducation, News, Public Schools
10 Solutions to Inequality in Elementary School Fundraising
PTA fundraising at public elementary schools in San Francisco is wildly uneven, with only a small number of schools raising enough money in recent years to avoid the worst effects of state budget cuts. Based on Public Press research and conversations with experts in the field, here are some options for addressing uneven access to funding for San Francisco’s public elementary schools.
Part of a special report on education inequality in San Francisco. A version of this story ran in the winter 2014 print edition.
Posted inEducation, News, Public Schools, Social Justice
Two PTA Presidents, Two Realities
Photo essay: Ana Hernandez, Junipero Serra Elementary; and Barry Schmell, Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy
Today, after five years of severe budget cuts in the San Francisco Unified School District, PTAs are being asked to pay for teachers, reading specialists, social workers and school psychologists, computers, basic school supplies, staff training and more. But not all PTAs can afford those things. Parents at just 10 elementary schools raise more than half the PTA money that all 71 elementary schools in the district take in. Many of the rest raise nothing, or almost nothing.
Ana Hernandez and Barry Schmell come from very different backgrounds, but they have at least one thing in common: They both lead their schools’ parent-teacher associations
Part of a special report on education inequality in San Francisco. A version of this story ran in the winter 2014 print edition.
Posted inEducation, News, Public Schools
How Budget Cuts and PTA Fundraising Undermined Equity in San Francisco Public Schools
PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE MONEY: Parent fundraising for elementary education in S.F. skyrocketed 800 percent in 10 years. The largesse saved some classroom programs, but widened the gap between rich and poor.
In an era of shrinking public investment in schools, parents have struggled to hold the line one school at a time. Since the pre-recession year 2007, elementary school PTAs in San Francisco collectively managed to more than quadruple their spending on schools.
With this money, some schools have been able to pay teachers and staff, buy computers and school supplies, and underwrite class outings and enrichment activities. These expenses, previously covered by the taxpayers, are increasingly the responsibility of parents.
But school district finance data, PTA tax records and demographic profiles reveal an unintended byproduct of parents’ heroic efforts: The growing reliance on private dollars has widened inequities between the impoverished majority and the small number of schools where affluent parents cluster.
Part of a special report on education inequality in San Francisco. A version of this story ran in the winter 2014 print edition.
Posted inEducation, Media, Social Justice
Bucking a punitive trend, San Francisco lets students own up to misdeeds instead of getting kicked out of school
How one big-city district cut suspensions and expulsions — and why they may rise again
These articles were produced through a reporting collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity.
Instead of being kicked out for fighting, stealing, talking back or other disruptive behavior, public school students in San Francisco are being asked to listen to each other, write letters of apology, work out solutions with the help of parents and educators or engage in community service. All these practices fall under the umbrella of “restorative justice” — asking wrongdoers to make amends before resorting to punishment. The program launched in 2009 when the Board of Education asked schools to find alternatives to suspension and expulsion. In the previous seven years, suspensions in San Francisco spiked by 152 percent, to a total of 4,341 — mostly African Americans, who despite being one-tenth of the district made up half of suspensions and more than half of expulsions. But the data — along with interviews with parents, students and educators — reveal that progress so far is halting and uneven. Critics say that’s because the transition from punitive to restorative justice is underfunded and haphazardly evaluated. The resulting picture is a school-by-school patchwork, at best an unfinished project to reform the traditional juvenile discipline paradigm.