San Francisco's 'State of Emergency' for Black Students

I'm doodling around online and was looking at articles about the failure of progressive education models, and this piece came up at RealClearEducation.

Remember, this is the most progressive city in the state, and this whole state is supposedly progressive, run by so-called progressive Democrats in Sacramento. But everywhere you look, it's failure all the way down for impoverished minorities.

It's really sad, when you think about it.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Inside the fight over how to address San Francisco's 'state of emergency' for black student achievement":

Black students in San Francisco would be better off almost anywhere else in California https://t.co/107akUpBJ1

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) January 2, 2018

Black students in San Francisco would be better off almost anywhere else in California.

Many attend segregated schools and the majority of black, Latino and Pacific Islander students did not reach grade-level standards on the state's recent tests in math or English tests.

A local NAACP leader called for declaring a "state of emergency" for black student achievement, a problem the city's school board acknowledged. "The problem cannot be reduced to one sickness or one cure," said Rev. Amos C. Brown, San Francisco's NAACP branch president. "Black students have been underachievers. They're living in toxic situations. It's amazing they've done as well as they have done, but it's criminal that sophisticated children in progressive San Francisco are performing at these levels."

But is the solution to fix what's broken, or to start schools anew? Answering that question has unveiled a heated political debate in Northern California.

The district's strategy targets changing instruction, hiring, school culture and instilling the belief that all kids can learn. Vincent Matthews, San Francisco Unified School District's superintendent since May, is expected to present a detailed strategy for improvement early in the new year. An opposing plan from a controversial nonprofit called Innovate Public Schools calls for starting new schools — traditional public or charter — from scratch.

For decades, San Franciscans have called attention to the achievement gap. Following an NAACP lawsuit regarding discrimination, the city entered into a 1983 consent decree mandating desegregation. Since then, the district has changed its school assignment rules.

More recently, a group of organizers from Innovate, which has brought some charter schools to the San Francisco Bay Area and receives money from the Walton Family Foundation, has been convening parents and calling renewed attention to the problem.

In September, Innovate released a report sounding the alarm on San Francisco's achievement gap — and called for the city to establish new schools as a remedy. Innovate's organizers and parents held a news conference outside City Hall and organized a parent meeting with Matthews.

On the most recent round of tests, 87% of San Francisco Unified's black students performed below standards in math, as did 79% of Latino students and 78% of Pacific Islanders. Ninety-six percent of districts in California that serve black students had better reading scores for low-income black students than San Francisco did, Innovate found. Many minority students attend schools that are highly racially concentrated in neighborhoods such as Bayview-Hunters Point, with high rates of staff turnover and relatively inexperienced teachers.

These factors, according to a recent district report, produce "a form of academic segregation that can be especially hard to overcome."

And after decades of gentrification and displacement by tech workers, black families are moving out: In the 1998-99 school year, black students comprised 16% of SFUSD's students, compared with just under 7% last school year.

Some parents were shocked when they saw these statistics — individually, they knew there were issues, but they didn't realize their problems added up to a larger whole. The poor educational outcomes stand in stark contrast to the reputation the city has built for itself as the country's center of technological innovation.

"It's been broken for a long time," said Geraldine Anderson, a mother of three who saw local schools cut back on hours from one child to the next. "I see IT companies coming to San Francisco and so much money coming in for the city, but our kids won't be able to live here or participate."

Innovate has found advocates in parents struggling to find adequate schooling...

It's criminal. Really. Progressives are criminal. Their policies are criminal. I have to shake my head: Ironically, Marx's idea of "false consciousness" explains how generations of disadvantage minority groups have been brainwashed to believe that leftist-Democrat institutions and leaders are protecting and promoting their best interests. Mind-boggling. Man.

More.