Kimberly Wicoff

Parents across the city are frustrated with the lengthy and opaque school assignment system. If we put the resources that are spent on the school assignment system toward improving the quality of all schools, this would not be an issue. The only real answer is to make every school a school parents would be happy to send their kids to. But while we are working to make that vision a reality, we must do more to make the assignment process work for families. This will take many steps but must include a move toward neighborhood schools, better communication with families, and a system that better incorporates their needs.

• Move to neighborhood schools. I believe strongly in the value of a diverse student body as a way to promote cross-cultural understanding, community building, and life experience. However, I think we also need to recognize the reality that the current system is not achieving those goals. 50% of African American families don’t participate in the school assignment process and thus default to the poor schools in their neighborhoods that were not chosen by others. Students assigned to schools across town also face the challenges of transportation, truancy, and more limited parent involvement due to inaccessibility. If neighborhood schools are the primary basis for assignment, we can tap into the resources of a community to help invigorate a school and bring people together around change.
• Preserve the option to choose a different school. While neighborhood schools as the basis for initial assignment will help us invest in schools and bring communities together, we must preserve the transfer option for students who are assigned to a poor-performing school or who request a specific program to meet their educational goals. While a significant gap in school quality remains, the percentage of slots held open in non-neighborhood schools should be higher, and it can decrease as the quality gap decreases.
• Improve outreach and communication to families about both the process and the schools. Many families make decisions based on rumors and reputations, without having good information about the many wonderful schools that are available to them. But many families also make no decision at all, and by not participating in the lottery they are left with the low-performing schools. We must do more to engage parents, particularly on the east side of the city, so that all students participate equally in the system. And for those hardest-to-reach populations there must be a proactive outreach strategy that reaches parents and engages them in a conversation about their options. Too many low-income, ESL, and other families are not able to participate in school visits or navigate the system without extra support.

The overall drop-out statistics mask a much larger problem in our city: African American, Latino, and low-income students drop out at much higher rates than Asian and white peers. In the southeast part of the city some drop-out estimates are as high as 50%. We cannot see ourselves as a city of opportunity when this level of disparity exists. To solve this problem we must work both to engage students and families with targeted outreach and support before they drop out and to provide different models of education for students who did not succeed the traditional system.

• Engaging students and families before they drop out. This can be done in part through improving the school experience for students so that they become the “joyful learners” the district seeks to foster. But we also must work with our community partners to engage the families of chronically truant students to help them through the issues that make it difficult to keep their kids in school. Communities of Opportunity has piloted a successful program to pair community truancy “coaches” with school outreach workers to reach out to families and help them address the issues that lead to truancy – whether by providing transportation, educating parents on the importance of school attendance, or just providing community support for re-engaging in the system. Today all 135 students who have participated in this program have improved their attendance.

• Providing alternatives for our students who have dropped out of the traditional system. Young adults who did not succeed in high school are unlikely to do better when brought back to that environment. Creative models that meet them where they are and leverage partners like our community colleges can provide new ways for them to learn and get reconnected to their education.

Quality requires resources. But even in tough times there are creative ways to bring resources to schools. To do this we must make budget choices that prioritize putting our money into school sites and build partnerships with the city and funders who can bring resources and services to our students. We must also target those resources to schools, teachers, administrators, and communities who try innovative approaches and get breakthrough results.

Bringing new resources to our schools. We must prioritize getting our limited funds to school sites and teachers who deliver high-quality instruction to our kids. That in turn will help convince families to stay in San Francisco and through their ADA bring more resources to our schools. This year alone we will lose over $2 million due to decreased enrollment in our schools. In addition, we need to focus on new sources of funds, such as Prop 13 reform and partnerships with city and private funders to diversify our funding sources. I have spent the last two years working on a public/private partnership and have seen the power of aligning goals and bringing in private funding to support public efforts to change the system. Budget cuts are not the answer; creatively using our existing funds and expanding the base of funding for schools and students will help us break the vicious cycle.
Nurturing best practices from within and without. As the field of education continues to advance, we must create opportunities to nurture best practices that grow within our schools and bring in new ideas that have had proven success in other communities. Prop A funds have been set aside to reward schools that demonstrate significant improvement, but we also need funds to encourage innovation and testing of new models and ideas, both within the school and in partnerships with the community, to help make our schools continuous learning environments for our teachers and administrators as well as our students.

I am proud to live in a city with some of the best urban schools in the state. San Francisco has demonstrated what is possible with the outstanding results of many of our schools. But I’m outraged that in the very same city our African American students get even lower scores than special education students on standardized tests in elementary school. It doesn’t matter whether you have kids in our school system or not – as a city that prides itself on being one of the most progressive places in the country, this is simply not acceptable. But changing these results will be difficult, and the work cannot be done by the schools alone. To create lasting change we must work both within the schools to improve curriculum and with parents and communities to help them nurture and support our students.

Engaging families as part of the solution. Even the most heroic teacher will struggle to overcome the issues some students face outside of school that make it difficult for them to even attend, much less succeed in school. We must build stronger partnerships with the community, the city, and nonprofit organizations in the community to develop a holistic approach to helping parents become active participants in their children’s education. For some this means working together to help address the issues those families face; for others it means providing more opportunities for engagement and ensuring that the school environment is welcoming to parents of all backgrounds. We must strive to get our parents as active and engaged as the students to foster a positive learning environment both inside and outside the school.
Supporting a 21st-century curriculum. To be competitive in today’s economy our students need the tools that will enable them to participate in a digital age. They need education that infuses the use of technology and teaches them to be critical thinkers. I support the district’s plan to build a better 21st-century curriculum and will continue to push the leadership to build partnerships with the business community to provide resources for this endeavor and to ground the work in what our economy really needs, ensuring that students graduate with the knowledge and skills that will make them sought-after members of tomorrow’s workforce.

Our city is facing a crisis. Middle-class families are leaving in greater numbers every year, and the gap is widening between those with good opportunities and those who have been failed by the system. At the core of both issues is the uneven quality of our schools. While San Francisco is home to some of the best urban schools in the state, it is also home to some of the worst. And with a school assignment process that is lengthy and opaque, middle-class families are often not willing to gamble with their kids’ futures in the lottery system so instead choose to leave, while families with the fewest resources simply don’t have the tools to engage in the system at all and are doomed to attend the poorest-performing schools, reinforcing cycles of poverty. Until we come together as a city and see that these are not separate issues but the same fundamental problem of ensuring quality schools across the system, we will fail. But together we can work to lift all schools, students, and families and make San Francisco a great place for everyone to live and raise a family.

The key issues I’m ready to tackle are:

• Closing the achievement gap
• Increasing quality across all schools
• Reducing the dropout rate
• Improving the school assignment system