Poor people also prefer schools nearby, or some place you don’t need 90 minutes and 2 bus transfers to go to school.
What has been improving San Francisco schools (e.g. Balboa High School) was Asians taking over. Which is not a preferable mechanism, in many ways.
What would make San Francisco schools even better is to be able to afford to hire more teachers. The naive approach is to pump more money into the district, and we really should reform Proposition 13 of 1978, but a more practical approach would be to legalize housing construction, so teachers wouldn’t have to compete so much for non-luxury housing with firemen and nurses and service workers and homeless crackheads.
>would be to legalize housing construction, so teachers wouldn’t have to compete so much for non-luxury housing with firemen and nurses and service workers and homeless crackheads.
Serious question here: Why do teachers, firemen, and nurses need non-luxury housing? Why do they need housing at all in fact? If they can't afford to live in SanFran, wouldn't it make more sense for them to just stay out, and go live somewhere else?
For getting people to do those jobs, then places in SF would then need to pay them a princely sum to endure a long commute from other nearby cities. Or if that's too much, SF can simply go without firemen, teachers, and nurses and many other service workers. Surely that would quickly fix the housing problem in SF.
Not directly answering your question, but Lowell HS[1] is the only high performing public HS in SF. Its admission is performance-based and is mostly Asian (56+%).
What has been improving San Francisco schools (e.g. Balboa High School) was Asians taking over. Which is not a preferable mechanism, in many ways.
What would make San Francisco schools even better is to be able to afford to hire more teachers. The naive approach is to pump more money into the district, and we really should reform Proposition 13 of 1978, but a more practical approach would be to legalize housing construction, so teachers wouldn’t have to compete so much for non-luxury housing with firemen and nurses and service workers and homeless crackheads.