San Francisco Public Schools 2011 – 2012 Assignment Data

Rachel Norton, a member of the San Francisco Public School board writes an interesting blog about public education in San Francisco. If you have school age children, and/or have an interest in the politics and policy of public education her blog always makes for a fascinating read. Over the weekend letters went out to parents informing them of their assigned school for the coming school year. For a little background on how public school assignment works in San Francisco, I suggest you read this post from her blog.

She has some really interesting statistics and graphics on her blog taking a look at the high-level trends and how things played out for this coming school year. She says it better than I could, so I’m going to quote extensively from her article:

• The number of people applying to Kindergarten has increased by more than 20 percent since 2005;
• Only 23 percent of K applicants listed the school closest to them as a first choice;
• 39 percent of K applicants listed a language pathway (primarily Spanish/Cantonese/Mandarin immersion but some biliteracy pathways as well);
• 50 percent of all K applicants listed one of 14 schools (see below) as a first choice;
• 50 percent of all 6th grade applicants listed one of three schools (Giannini, Presidio or Aptos) as a first choice.
• 53 percent of all 9th grade applicants listed one of three schools as a choice (Lowell, Lincoln or Washington).
• Four out of five applicants received one of their choices (similar to previous years).  For K, 74 percent received a first, second or third choice (81 percent received a choice); 85 percent of 6th grade applicants received a first, second or third choice (86 percent received a choice), and for 9th grade applicants, 84 percent received a first, second or third choice (86 percent received a choice).
• I was totally wrong about Clarendon demand from CTIP, and my commenter Wayne was right. Residents of the Clarendon attendance area, if they were not siblings of existing Clarendon students, were not very likely to get seats, due to a huge number of siblings (40) and a large number of CTIP requests (30).  Of the 14 high-demand elementary schools, demand from CTIP definitely affected attendance area residents at Clarendon more than others on the list that had high CTIP requests ( E.R. Taylor and Alvarado).  See the table below, taken from page 16 of the district’s report.

You should be warned that many of her posts are pretty acronym heavy – she does a good job of explaining them on her website. The acronym CTIP1 deals with children in census tracts with the lowest test scores. These students are given preference ahead of the general school population in school selection, the obvious hope being that it will increase test scores in those areas over time.

In addition, for those of you who are visually oriented, here is a chart she put together:

2011 - 2012 Kindergarten requests, from Rachel Norton