On this particular morning, she's bundled into a turquoise coat and a pink backpack whose color nearly matches the juice mustache on her face. On most days, Sarah's mother stands with her, baby Nathan in a stroller. Today, Sarah is under the eye of other adults at the bus stop; her mother fell on the Muni bus last week and has her leg in a cast.
Sarah takes her place in front of a black gate locked across the front of a barber shop that faces a littered street where her bus will arrive. She's first in line to board the bus today, an important position to hold when you're 6 years old.
The morning air is crisp, and the sun is starting to shine through the clouds. Within a few minutes, three more ponytailed girls come from somewhere up Ellis Street, accompanied by one mom. A steel door next to the barber shop creaks open and out comes a small boy with a Power Rangers backpack, followed by another mom. They move to the end of what is now a lineup, following the front of the building. Across the street, a woman with gray hair who looks a few decades older than her likely chronological age staggers and weaves.
There are 4,000 children under the age of 18 in the Tenderloin, more than 1,200 of whom are of elementary school age. There is no school in the Tenderloin. Right now, the children of the Tenderloin are bused to more than 40 different elementary schools all over the city -- from Treasure Island to Nob Hill to Western Addition to Chinatown and almost everywhere else.
As 7 o'clock approaches this morning in March, there are six kids and two moms gathered into the line that Sarah began. Across the street, what appears to be a woman in what appears to be a prostitute's garb -- black hot pants and high heels -- begins to argue with a man with a cane. The altercation attracts the attention of the adults at the bus lineup. Sarah is oblivious to the event.
"April 3 is my birthday," she says, tilting the bottom of an orange juice container up until the entire contents have been consumed. "I'm going to be 7."
Her attention is diverted across the street to Ryan Maxwell, a friend who has emerged from the Senator sporting a denim jacket and four braids corralled into two pigtails.
"There's Ryan," she announces. "Rryyyyyyyaaaann!!!!"
Ryan looks across the street and smiles, then quickly catches herself, regaining a cool composure and crossing the street without further acknowledgment.
"The bus is always late," Ryan says offhandedly as she joins the bus line, her eyes fixed on a young boy passing by on his way to another corner, where he will wait for another bus. The boy turns quickly, and both children stick their tongues out at each other. A girl, the 12th of this little grouping, meanders toward the corner as the bus makes its way up Ellis Street.
"Hurry up Jasmine," Ryan bellows. "The bus is coming. You're going to miss it."
And if you miss this bus, you miss school. There are no later buses taking students from the Tenderloin to the near-fantasy known as Treasure Island.
Treasure Island is simply, absolutely, stunningly beautiful. It features the Bay Area's best view of San Francisco, a picture postcard, but it's as real as salt air and strong sunshine. The school there is probably the safest in the city, located on what was until recently a military base. The school also has something no other San Francisco public school seems to possess: space. The play yards are huge, courtesy of the Department of Defense, which is closing the base and donating it to San Francisco.
But no matter how idyllic the setting, a school on Treasure Island can't give the kids of the Tenderloin the community and parental support that a neighborhood school should. Even parents who live in the ugly, gritty, dysfunctional world of the Tenderloin want their children to go to school nearby.
So by the end of next year, after nearly a decade of campaigning, politicking, arguing, and negotiating, the Tenderloin will finally get its own school. The building, designed at no charge by San Francisco architect Joe Esherick, who also designed the Monterey Bay Aquarium, is under way on Turk Street, near Van Ness. Along with classrooms, the new school will house a community center that can provide medical, dental, child care, and social services to families stuffed into grungy rooms and apartments throughout the Tenderloin. There's even space for a big kitchen, and a rooftop garden.
But Ryan and Sarah and many of the other children who wait for buses on gritty street corners of the Tenderloin each weekday morning may not get to attend the new neighborhood school.
The Tenderloin school will accommodate less than half of the elementary school children who live in the surrounding neighborhood. Ethnic quotas imposed by a federal court desegregation decree signed 14 years ago could require that students from other areas of the city be bused to the Tenderloin school, even as Tenderloin kids are shipped across town to other schools.
This long-distance, race-based shuffling of children continues year after year in San Francisco, even though educators know it is dismantling communities and harming the children it is meant to help. This stupid, expensive shuffle continues because political, bureaucratic, legal, and monetary factors have made schooling here much more a matter of space and race and politics than of teaching children the things they need to know.
Do your homework. Play well with others. Share. Give everyone a turn. Don't cheat. Help your neighbor. These are lessons that every child should learn by the end of the first grade.
For years, though, the adults who run San Francisco's public education system have failed to follow these elementary prescriptions. The city's educational system has grown so illogically complex and politically polluted that, most objective indices show, it shamefully fails to educate the children for whom its intricate, expensive, politically sensitive framework supposedly was designed.
The calamity inside San Francisco public education has monetary and legal roots.
The state of California has failed to meet the most basic needs of students -- classrooms and teachers -- because of structural financing problems. There are not enough schools to serve children near where they live, and there is no apparent source of funding to build new ones. And there hasn't been any significant new money since Proposition 13 put the brakes on property tax spending for schools two decades ago.
Meanwhile, legal responses to past segregation problems have separated children from the neighborhoods -- and the family support systems -- necessary to successful education. In theory, parents can choose which schools their children attend. In fact, a computer program scatters schoolkids across San Francisco, based on their race and other demographic factors that have nothing to do with learning.
Many parents have never been to the schools their kids attend. Many of those schools have no extended-day programs, because such programs would not mesh with cross-town busing schedules.
Educators know the current system disserves children and could be improved with a few straightforward policy changes, but the San Francisco Unified School District is immobilized in a web of legal, political, moral, and financial obligation. The adults responsible for public education seem to have forgotten another important lesson that all children should learn early and remember throughout life: You are never excused until you have cleaned up the mess you made.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed its sanctioning of "separate but equal" public schools and ended legal segregation in education with the landmark case of Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Clearly, the court ruled, separate had never been equal in American public schools.
The integration debate came to San Francisco in 1978, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed a discrimination lawsuit on behalf of African-American parents against the San Francisco Unified School District. The schools in Bayview-Hunters Point were abysmal. The children who attended them -- almost all of whom were African-American -- were failing.
The parents won.
The case ended in a consent decree -- that is, a plan agreed upon by both sides to address the segregation problem in S.F. schools. The court made the plan official, and told the state to pay for it.
A flurry of new academic programs, rebuilt and enhanced schools, new staff, and additional busing followed. Children from Bayview-Hunters Point were given priority in school preference. But by the mid-1980s, the academic part of the desegregation plan had lost steam and focus.
The district was keeping a body count, but paid little regard to what the bodies were or were not learning.
And over the years, while the court continued to monitor the situation and as children continued to do poorly in school, the consent decree was tinkered with time and again. Eventually, the decree specified what programs would go in which schools, who would be hired to run the programs, where those employees would be put, and what would be done if and when the programs and associated people didn't work.
By 1992, the school district had so failed to achieve the educational goals of the consent decree -- specifically, the improvement of education for African-American and Latino children -- that the court called for the "reconstitution" of schools that were failing to make the grade. Reconstitution, as it's applied in San Francisco, essentially means replacing the entire staff of a school from the principal to the janitor.
About the time that the NAACP called the school district on the carpet for segregation, California voters approved what would be a devastating blow to schools -- Prop. 13, the infamous initiative that capped property tax spending and left school districts holding their cup out to the state for money. The measure forced a $7 billion cut in local property taxes, the largest source of revenue for school districts and the primary funding mechanism for capital improvements for schools.
The revenue squeeze Prop. 13 brought to public education created an odd unintended consequence: As part of the consent decree, every year the S.F. school district receives $35 million in desegregation funds from the state. Proposition 13 and the state's continuing budget constraints made the consent decree money crucial to the school district budget. Any move to end the desegregation order, or even risk a new plan, suddenly became extremely financially unappealing.
Now, there's another lawsuit alleging discrimination in San Francisco's schools. This one was filed in 1994 by a group of Chinese parents who allege that their children are unfairly victimized by the district's enrollment plan. The suit, which seeks to unravel the 1983 consent decree and is still pending in federal court, has brought national attention to Lowell High School, the city's premier academic alternative school.
Students must take an admission exam to be considered for Lowell. The lawsuit alleges discrimination against Chinese students who were required to score higher than other ethnic groups on the entrance exam to gain admittance, because the Chinese students wanted to enroll in numbers higher than the court-mandated ethnic cap.
But the case also complains that Chinese children are being unfairly prevented from attending school near their homes. Chinatown has wanted its children to attend neighborhood schools for a long time. But so have a lot of other San Francisco neighborhoods.
Margaret Wells' office is so regularly filled with so many complaining people that it has been given an entire building at the San Francisco Unified School District headquarters. On a March afternoon, a line of people stretches far back from the office counter. This is not an unusual state of affairs.
From her nearby office, Wells presides over the most complicated and emotionally charged division of the public education system in San Francisco -- student placement. The student placement office is the headquarters of confrontation, begging, pleading, testing, and crisis. It is the center of the storm.
Since the mid-1970s, the San Francisco Unified School District has operated under an open enrollment plan. Initially, the plan was operated on a first-come, first-served basis, but that method of school selection went by the wayside several years ago; parents were camping out for days preceding the start of school, creating scenes akin to those that surround the purchase of tickets for major rock 'n' roll concerts.
Now, open enrollment means that parents are allowed to select and rank three schools they would like their children to attend. That information, along with home address, ethnicity, and a few other details, goes into a computer that assigns children to public schools.
Those assignments are made randomly, within certain constraints. School space is, of course, limited; the city's "best" schools could never accommodate all the students who want to attend them. Also, a federal court order prescribes that there be at least four of nine "official" ethnic groups in each school, and that no one ethnic group represent more than 45 percent of the students in a "regular" school, or 40 percent in an "alternative" school. (Alternative schools feature special academic programs and transportation services designed to attract students from all over the city.)
All children attending San Francisco schools are labeled as one of the following: African-American, Latino, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, American Indian, Filipino, "other white," or "other non-white," a growing category that lumps together Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Samoan, and everyone else who doesn't have his or her own category. Children of multiethnic heritage must declare allegiance to one racial tag or the other.
"We've had a lot of arguments at the counter with parents over that," Wells says.
The following school district policy is testament to the level of racial silliness that has arisen over the years in response to the federal decree: Parents may change their child's ethnicity once, but must prove that the new ethnic identity is valid.
There are waiting lists and appeals. Parents shopping for private schools will wait to see what the school district computer offers their kids; if the public school choice is unsatisfactory, the parents go private -- but not before their children take up "space" in public school that might have gone to someone else.
The district's computer enrollment formula does give priority to children who want to attend neighborhood schools. But those schools still must meet the court's ethnic caps. Moving to a neighborhood where you want your child to attend school is, therefore, not necessarily helpful; the school may be "capped out" with students of the same race as your child.
The giant computer school-assigning run and placement process is under way for the fall semester of 1997. Historically, 35 percent of the students applying to school in San Francisco do not get any of their three choices of school each year. This year, that number is expected to be even higher because of space limitations.
And every child who does not get one of his or her choices will be assigned to another, to which he or she will probably be bused.
Chinese children living in Chinatown or the Sunset have the worst odds of attending neighborhood schools. Latino children who live in the Mission also are likely to be disappointed. Together, Chinese and Latino students compose more than half of the school district's student population.
There are more children than classrooms in those communities, and schools in Chinatown and the Mission hit their "caps" of Chinese and Latino students quickly; all the rest must go elsewhere.
The massive shuffling of students across the breadth and length of San Francisco might be defensible if it produced both racial and educational results. But the educational results of two decades of school Mixmastering here are most negative for the very minority groups desegregation was designed to rescue.
The most shameful sin of the San Francisco Unified School District is its overwhelming failure to educate African-American children -- despite two decades of court monitoring, tons of money, and piles of plans. In San Francisco, African-American children have been given priority in enrollment and special transportation to other schools. They have seen schools built, renovated, and reconstituted for their benefit.
Yet African-American children here remain the lowest-achieving among English-speaking students, scoring as much as 30 percent below their peers on academic tests. And the African-American kids are not catching up. Their academic scores show significantly less progress from grade to grade than those of other students.
Latino students, the second-largest ethnic group in the district, are the second-lowest-achieving population in the district. Latino students who speak limited English score lower than any other group, regardless of language, on standardized tests.
Students who fall into the "other non-white" category and speak limited English, primarily the growing population of Southeast Asian immigrants, are not far ahead of the Latino and African-American kids.
In San Francisco, the remedies, plans, court mandates, laws, and funding formulas -- all of the tentacles of public policy that are supposed to help disadvantaged children from ethnic minority groups -- remain tangled in a dysfunctional knot.
Busing and other attempts to respond to the desegregation decree have all but dismantled neighborhoods, creating a cruel Catch-22 situation.
It is poor children who are in most severe need of community support at school. They are the ones who have survival issues to deal with before they even get to the classroom. They are the ones who most need contact with responsible adults.
But in many cases, their schools are not connected to their communities, to their parents, or anything else in their lives, because inadequate funding and crazy responses to a 14-year-old federal court decree forbid any such connection.
Poor parents often cannot participate in their children's schools because those schools are across town. And for the same reasons, their children often are separated from the extra attention -- the social, after-school, and preschool programs -- needed to help them succeed academically.
If it has failed to improve the education opportunities of children, the court-mandated desegregation plan of 1983 has achieved a certain type of equality. It has managed to anger and alienate parents of every ethnic group in the city.
Feeling the pressure of that anger, the school district has attempted in recent years to decrease the amount of school busing by reconfiguring attendance zones surrounding neighborhood schools. The district also opened a few new neighborhood schools in places where they could draw diverse groups of children and fit the desegregation decree without significant busing.
These steps have stopped or reduced busing at 27 schools. But there won't be any more new neighborhood schools for a while. The school district is out of space and money.
"I dream of the day when all children can go to school in their neighborhoods, and they will be ethnically balanced," says the Educational Placement Office's Wells.
She's not likely to stop dreaming, or be out of a job, anytime soon.
Cesar Chavez Elementary School stands out from the heart of the Mission District because of the brightly colored mural that adorns its exterior. The school stands out from the rest of the school district because of its absurd combination of programs.
At Chavez Elementary, the legal system and ethnic politics have combined to create a situation that can only be described as schizophrenic.
Because of space limitations and the ethnic caps contained in the desegregation consent decree, many Latino children who live near Chavez Elementary are bused to school in other parts of the city. Meanwhile, to satisfy the caps, children are bused to Chavez from Chinatown and other parts of the city.
Once students from the neighborhood and elsewhere arrive at school, they are divided into several distinct programs: Chinese bilingual; Spanish bilingual; an Afrocentric track created in response to parent demand; deaf education; and a multicultural regime for all the children who don't fit into one of the others.
In other words, children are bused to Chavez Elementary to satisfy the racial dictates of a court decree -- and then, for academic reasons, they spend most of their days in classrooms with other children of their own ethnic groups.
Chavez Elementary has a Healthy Start Program and makes other efforts to provide the community benefits of neighborhood schools.
Still, Chavez Principal Pilar Mejia says, it's hard to get parents involved in the school when they don't live nearby. And the families of many of the school's students have no historical, geographi-cal, or logical connection whatsoever to Cesar Chavez Elementary School.
"They're having to work so much, having to care for their families," Mejia explains. "Having food [at school events] helps, whether it's a potluck or whether they all pitch in and have one or two parents make something."
Otherwise families miss dinner by the time they get to school and back.
From its perch atop a hill near Highway 101 and the Cow Palace, Visitacion Valley Middle School has a view of the entire valley for which it is named. It is an appropriate location for a school that's sticking its nose in everyone's business.
In the last three decades, Visitacion Valley has gone from Italian enclave to African-American community to Chinese neighborhood. Now, the Valley's an ethnic grab bag. The school is populated almost entirely by kids from its surrounding neighborhood. The kids speak a variety of languages. About 75 percent of them live in poverty, which is well above the average for San Francisco.
Otherwise, though, Visitacion Valley Middle School is the happiest of ethno-educational accidents: It is almost perfectly racially integrated. No one is bused to or from the school for racial reasons, because it is within the ethnic dictates of the federal desegregation consent decree naturally.
The school appears to be headed in the right direction educationally, too.
Three years ago, the school got an internal makeover, via reconstitution and a new principal. And last year it got money.
Beyond its educational functions, Visitacion Valley is home to two government programs that are running simultaneously and appear to be working, separately and together.
Funded by a $400,000, three-year grant from the state, the Healthy Start Program has brought an array of social services from the state departments of Health Services and Public Health, St. Luke's Hospital, and various family service agencies onto the campus. And through the Mayor's Office of Children, Youth, and Families and a handful of private foundations, the school has obtained another $350,000 for a so-called Beacon Program. Started in New York City, Beacon programs are designed to turn schools into community centers.
The two programs provide the school with social workers to deal with social problems; a public health nurse to care for physical problems; and a handful of administrators to make sure the programs run smoothly. There are coaches and tutors, lawyers (San Francisco Bar Association volunteers do pro bono work for families), and cops (via the S.F. Police Department's Wilderness Program).
There are after-school programs for kids; English, computer, and parenting classes for adults. Tutoring, recreational activities, and even baby-sitting classes are provided. The Village, a housing project in the neighborhood, uses the school's gym for its sports program. The school nurse makes referrals to the clinic at the Village.
The school is arranged so that groups of teachers are assigned to groups of kids. The teachers are required to meet, to discuss the kids, and to include the social worker, the nurse, the tutor, or some other adult on campus whenever a particular kid is having a particular problem that a particular adult might be able to help solve. In one recent instance, a student revealed a family problem; the school team swooped in to prevent an eviction of the family.
"We are trying to, on an individual, case-by-case basis, figure out what they need," says Principal John Flores. "It would be fruitless to just work with the kids. We have to work with the whole family.
"You have to walk into the flow of what's happening in the Valley to figure out who's what. I eat in the Valley. I walk around in the Valley. I do my laundry in the Valley. The kids can't go anywhere without knowing that there's one of us who will see them."
And while the whole program is too new to have results that can be measured -- it began last year -- there are some indications that it is worth pursuing. Parents are coming to the school. The kids seem connected to the community. Their scores are rising.
"If people feel comfortable in the schools, they have a real say in their community, they will build real neighborhoods," says Beacon Director David Weiner. "I walk up and down the street, and parents stop me now. They're starting to know who we are. If we have a problem with the kids in school, we can go over to their house and deal with it directly. If their kids go to school here, they can walk over here.
"The beauty of having kids in the neighborhood is that if the store owners see them and know they're supposed to be in school, they'll tell us. I'm grateful for the situation where I'm at.
"It would be a real challenge if kids were bused from somewhere else."
There were good reasons for the federal courts to get involved with the San Francisco Unified School District in 1978. A significant portion of the city's schoolchildren were failing inside a substandard educational system that discriminated against some kids because of the color of their skin and the part of town they lived in.
But the desegregation consent decree signed in 1983 was a remedy that came late to San Francisco schools and was never fully, or properly, implemented. It never really had a chance. Proposition 13 made sure the San Francisco school district never had the money to do what it was supposed to do under the decree -- improve the education of minority students. And what money was available went to play a numbers game that may have desegregated public schools, but never came close to achieving the goal of desegregation -- a good education for the city's minority children.
After two decades of mindless body-shuffling, in the last couple of years the state and the school district finally began responding to conditions in San Francisco schools in ways that made sense. They tried to reduce class sizes and limit cross-town busing, among other things. But a bureaucratic tangle of financial and legal constraints has brought those responses to a halt. The legal-political paralysis that allowed San Francisco to sail so far off educational course now stands in the way of changes that might put the city's public schools back on course.
The current problems at the San Francisco Unified School District are complex and vastly different than those the district faced when African-American parents from Bayview-Hunters Point filed their desegregation lawsuit in the late 1970s. Now, low-skill, high-pay jobs are disappearing; affordable housing is scarce or nonexistent; immigrant children are illiterate in multiple languages; and a blanket of gang violence and drugs has fallen over much of San Francisco's inner city.
These are problems that decades-old court rulings and governmental responses to them can't address.
There is racial injustice in 1997, and it still affects schoolchildren. Now, though, that injustice is felt in dismantled minority communities, where kids have to travel across town to school and parents are prevented from participating in their children's education. Injustice surrounds the 4,000 children of the Tenderloin, who will get a neighborhood school only after eight years of political campaigning, and even then may not be able to attend it. Most of all, injustice falls on San Francisco's African-American and Latino children, who have less chance to succeed in life because the courts, the state, and the school district have, together, created and sustained an educational system that is utterly incompetent at delivering quality education to the underprivileged.
Neighborhood schools are no panacea, and building more of them will not instantly raise the test scores of San Francisco's poorest schoolchildren.
But the district's own schools argue in favor of neighborhood education. Anecdotal evidence and standardized tests both suggest that many children who attend school close to home learn more and perform better than children who do not.
"Ideally, parents want their children to go to school in their neighborhood," says Mary Beth Wallace, a staff liaison with the parent advocacy arm of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. "Kids are close to home, they get to know their community."
"It's really hard to take kids from Bayview, ship them to Lick Middle School an hour away in Noe Valley, and expect the same outcome as if they were going to school in their neighborhood," she says. "Everybody wants the 65,000 kids in this school district to achieve. That consent decree was supposed to do that. It doesn't seem to be working with what they do now."
There are other ways to begin untangling the Gordian knot of a desegregation decree that now strangles San Francisco public education. Although no school district in America has done a perfect job of providing both racial equity and quality education, some districts -- many of them, ironically, in the South -- have found innovative ways to improve schools and end court-mandated integration schemes that were disserving students. Some of those districts moved schools, so surrounding neighborhoods would be naturally racially balanced and busing would not be needed; others have broken up school districts to reduce the amount of busing required to achieve rough racial balance.
The most successful responses to desegregation orders have involved specialized "magnet" programs. Such a magnet -- for example, a program that provides advanced training in the performing arts -- would draw an ethnic mix of students from across the city. But magnet programs sit inside regular schools, and those schools also serve kids from their surrounding neighborhoods. Racial balance comes voluntarily, even as a neighborhood school is strengthened.
To be sure, a federal court monitors the San Francisco school district for compliance with a consent decree that carries the weight of law. There is no guarantee that the court would agree to consider significant changes in city desegregation efforts that might -- or, admittedly, might not -- improve education of minority students. And in the short run, it will remain less politically risky for the school board to leave the desegregation issue alone, letting the court dictate education programs, as it has for years.
But hiding behind the federal court and the 1983 desegregation decree is not likely to be a long-term option for the San Francisco School Board. The tide has turned. The U.S. Supreme Court and federal district courts have overturned desegregation orders across the country. The counter-desegregation lawsuit has been filed. If the school district doesn't step up to the plate with a better plan for progressing toward racial and educational equity soon, board members may find themselves facing a new court order -- one even less pleasant than the one entered some 14 years ago.
