School Beat: Public School Assignment in San Francisco—What Works and What Doesn’tLisa Schiffbyline‚ Nov. 01‚ 2007Public school assignment is a hot topic in this city. The process of being assigned to a school in San Francisco, like other urban areas that combine family choice with larger assignment goals, is necessarily complicated. Providing parents the ability to express preferences for certain schools, while trying to achieve socio-economic diversity across those same schools is difficult to say the least. Reaching those goals is made even more challenging by factors such as historically segregated neighborhoods, a public school population that demographically diverges from the general school-age population (due to middle and upper middle class, and often white, families choosing private schools over public schools) and persistent misinformation and ill-informed “playground chatter” about the overall quality of our public schools in general and any given school in particular. |