On voting for public school governance

Once upon a time, I managed, very successfully, a campaign for a candidate who sought election to the San Francisco Unified School District board. In retrospect, I'm not exactly proud of that. We made sure that our candidate was visible everywhere in the city we could think of, won endorsement from every 2-bit political club we could find, and was listed on every organizational slate card we could afford. The candidate was ubiquitous. Nobody really knew anything about the candidate's intentions -- which were good, but irrelevant to getting elected.  

I've voted in this year's school board election -- and I did precisely what we urged voters to do in that long ago campaign: I checked out endorsements from entities I generally like (Pissed Off Voters is a good one) and filled in the little dot without knowing anything much about any of them. Or, since I'm not a parent, much of anything about the SFUSD.

Parents and kids line up for school opening

I share this discouraging truth because I want to pass on here observations about our public schools from someone who does make a practice of knowing what goes on within them: experienced local journalist Tim Redmond. 

The School Board voted last week to approve a new assignment policy that will make it difficult for any parent to send their kids to anything except a neighborhood school. Board President Matt Alexander made a classic statement: He said that parents have been thinking about their own kids, “but now it’s time to think about all kids.”

That’s what a School Board member should say. When my kids were at McKinley Elementary, the amazing, wonderful, hero principal, Bonnie Coffey Smith, used to remind parents all the time that “all of our kids are all of our kids.”

The problem is that San Francisco neighborhoods are segregated, not just by race but by income and wealth. It’s worth noting that folks in the real-estate industry have cheered this decision: It means homes in neighborhoods near “good” schools will be worth even more money.

Throwing money at government programs doesn’t always work—witness the cops and the military, where more money often means more waste and less effective results. But when it comes to education, by any metric, better funded schools do better for their students. More money means better outcomes; it’s a pretty straight-line correlation.

And neighborhood schools mean more inequality in funding.

The dirty secret of SFUSD is the role that PTAs play in providing extra cash for better enrichment, lower class sizes, and better facilities at schools that serve the kids of wealthy parents. Some PTAs raise more than $500,000 a year for relatively small elementary and middle schools. The parents at schools in working-class neighborhoods can’t possibly match that. So those schools don’t get the same benefits.... 

A serious program for neighborhood schools should involve the basic concept of equity: The schools in areas that have been underfunded and marginalized for decades due to a legacy of historic racism should get the most money. 

That might anger the parents in the rich neighborhoods, who want their money to go to their kids, not to all kids—but that’s the price they have to pay for “neighborhood schools.” 

Could candidates for the San Francisco School Board proclaim these realities loudly? Maybe they try, but they remain inaudible to most voters. There's so much else, with more cash, clamoring for our attention. (Matt Alexander certainly has carried such a message, but I would not know that if I didn't encounter him in other contexts.) 

I end up questioning whether electing a school board really serves the city. Yet we'd probably be worse off without giving parents and teachers someone they can yell at who has needed some level of broad endorsement from the voters. We certainly would not want the Mayor's office to predominate in school policies. Does any reader have thoughts?