San Francisco's Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation Made It Worse

Lived in SF for 10 years.

The strong liberal politics are turning me conservative on many issues.

It is an inevitable consequence of the algorithm run by parents who raise academically successful children: each year, move to the school with the highest proportion of other academically successful children. (Not to say this is responsible for success but it’s definitely correlated).

Start with a perfectly even distribution of family characteristics between schools. Make a few random swaps. Now some schools have just slightly more academic-success density than others, but this is enough to attract some other successful families.

Run that out for a few cycles, and the differences quickly become extreme and permanent.

Even if SF could attain that even distribution, it’s inherently unstable.