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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

Having gone through the San Francisco public schooling system, I would never send my kids there.

I'd rather home school them if I lived in San Francisco, or if I have money, send them to private school.

This is one of the main reasons why there are more dogs than children in SF. There are some good public schools but parents don't want to deal with the vagaries of the lottery system so they move out to other school districts.

Same thing in Boston.

> I would never send my kids there.

Why not, what's wrong with it? What could you do better at home, or what could private schools do better?

The lottery is pretty rough on people, and a lot of the schools are not amazing.

What's "not amazing" about them?

Don't know why this is downvoted, seems like a reasonable question. I don't know much about SF or public schools in the US. Are they all bad? do we have data comparing public/private schools in these areas?

Public and private schools don't take the same tests, so we don't have good days to compare the schools. Even if we did, it would be hard to disentangle the impact of selection bias.

You could look at college acceptances or similar, but those aren't unbiased either, as colleges look at estimates of class rank, not just absolute performance.

I read thst San Francisco decided not to offer Algebra until high school so no one would feel left behind. One of those dystopian decisions that emerged from a well intentioned DEI initiative. A decision that defies logic and surprise didn't help. That would be enough of a red flag for me. https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-...

Algebra in 8th grade is back this year. https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/....

I have no other knowledge to vouch for SFUSD either way though.

my son is in pre algebra in 6th grade. I assume that mean algebra next year. I'm glad his fifth grade teacher realized he knew it all early in the year and moved him to sixth grade math early.

It's not fully back. Read the fine print.

I wonder the same thing, I have friends who send their kids there and are happy with it. Not surprisingly for SF, most of the parents are educated with good incomes and expect their kids to go to college. That has its own set of downsides of course, but you could do a lot worse.

You could literally live next to a school and there’s a chance your kids can’t go there.

There are many kids from low income, broken families who are just really bad students. Bullies. Disruptive. Disrespectful to teachers. It was hell going through public schools in SF.

So it's "opt out of being around average people", then?

Average people aim to provide a good a start for their kids as possible; average aims to avoid public school if possible. You now only have a set of people defined by behaviour or ability too poor for private, parents who don't care, or ones with no options...

Basically it's opting out of being around the dregs

Am I correct in reading this as you saying poor people and the ones with no options are "dregs"?

I'm not sure what your point is. All parents want to send their kids to the best schools. They buy expensive real estate for this reason. There is a very clear, unspoken reason why parents want to avoid poor areas for schools.

SF has a lottery system. This means all kids in the city are mixed. Unfortunately, my experience was absolutely horrible for learning.

I wish they were average.

If the average student is a bully, disruptive, and disrespectful to teachers then I think I might actually opt out of being around average people if possible.

And what's so bad about it? Mind you, it's not just 'being around', but "being stuck with them for 30% of your life for years in a situation out of your control".

Average people are cool. We're trying to opt out of being around the bottom 10%.

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