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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Even better quote:

"Through extensive research and data analysis as part of its 2009 policy revision process, San Francisco arrived at some key findings that bear recounting here:

•Neighborhood schools are limited in their ability to reverse the trend of racial isolation and the concentration of underserved students in the same school.

[b]•However, city-wide lotteries are also limited in their ability to reverse the trend of racial isolation and the concentration of underserved students in the same school because of the applicant pools for individual schools are racially isolated, and all families do not have the same access to information and time to maximize the opportunities of a city-wide lottery system.[/b]

•To reverse the trend of racial isolation and the concentration of underserved students in the same school through student assignment alone, the [SFUSD]
Board would need to assign students to schools they have not historically requested and to schools far from where they live."

Read those bullet-points again. If you want to make city-wide lotteries work for increasing diversity, you need to be prepared to change or override parents' requests AND send students all across the city. Talk about spelling out why this is a terrible policy...why don't we make all children wards of DCPS. [/quote]

The bolded part about city-wide lotteries not having a significant impact on racial isolation and concentrations of underserved kids has played out DIFFERENTLY in DC.  Granted, DC is a smaller city, and the creation of city-wide schools was a conscious effort to address the isolation and crappy options of underserved students, so it isn't the same as turning neighborhood schools into city-wide schools.  New schools were created that were never neighborhood schools in DC.

And DC charters have absolutely, definitely reduced racial isolation and also the level of concentration of underserved students, even though they're still concentrated for sure.

And I don't get it, while it's clearly true that all families don't have equal access to technology or time to research options (what I assume they mean by "fully maximize the opportunities of a city-wide lottery"), I'd be really really interested to know what strategies they used to TRY to get technology to families and families to technology.  SF's underserved communities are really not that large, and assuming most of the kids they were trying to reach were already in school somewhere when this all started, what did they do to reach out to parents through their schools and in other ways in their communities?

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