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Comment by pantalaimon | Hacker News Reader

What kind of policy is that based on? Seems very counter intuitive, aren't are supposed to meet your classmates after school?

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Essentially, this was the cheapest solution for our “limousine liberals” to address the problem of racial and economic segregation in San Francisco’s public schools. The idea was simple: since schools in areas like Hunter’s Point struggle, while those in neighborhoods like the Sunset perform well, the district decided to send students from Hunter’s Point to Sunset schools, and vice versa in order to “balance” outcomes.

But in practice, it backfired. Most families in the Sunset opted out: either by enrolling their children in private schools or moving out of city. The policy didn’t create meaningful integration; it just hollowed out neighborhood public schools and made traffic worse.

A striking example: St. Ignatius Catholic school located on Sunset Boulevard is now undergoing a $200 million campus expansion, while SFUSD is closing public schools due to declining enrollment.

It insane to me that anyone, let alone enough people to actually make it happen, would think that was a good policy. It's bussing, but without the busses.

There's a striking lack of accountability in politics. You don't really need evidence that a policy is going to accomplish it's stated goals, you just need the monkey brain narrative to resonate with voters (and the other elements of the political apparatus)

In the Nordics almost everything that gets passed as law has been thorough studies of impact and consequence first. Takes a long time but means the law has a chance of actually having the intended effect.

Ha, if only!

It's true systematic research on public interventions has historically been valued highly. The Campbell collaboration, Cochrane's sister project dedicated to public policy interventions, is based in Oslo.

But when some politicians wanted to praise and fund "centers of scientific excellence", it overwhelmingly went to the sort of high prestige research you'd expect, like neuroscience and AI. Politicians don't like being told what to do. Especially when the policies with scientific support from controlled studies are unpopular, as they often are (arguably, the study of public interventions against high alcohol consumption was how the Nordic's love of controlled studies in public policy came from).

Even uncontroversial things are decaying. Professor Dan Olweus, through controlled interventions, developed an intervention against bullying in schools in the late eighties. He pushed hard to get them implemented, and pushed back hard against "vibe coded" antisocial behavior prevention programs that didn't have experimental evidence. Bullying went down. But he died in 2020, and guess what, bullying is up again. Keeping government social interventions on the evidence-based path is constant, thankless work.

> Essentially, this was the cheapest solution for our “limousine liberals” to address the problem of racial and economic segregation in San Francisco’s public schools

It is frustrating to see this happen when —while it would be more expensive— they could’ve dealt with that by just

Just what?

Stop saying "the city". The city is a faceless opaque blob. It only cares about things people care about because caring about things is good for it.

There are demographics and individuals who work hard to bring these net negative boondoggles into reality and they ought to take blame.

It was a decision intended to foster racial and socioeconomic diversity, adopted in 2020[1]. It will likely be reversed in the 2026/2027 school year[2]

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WxAVUXfKCdhSlFa8rYZqTBC-Zmz...

[2] https://www.sfusd.edu/schools/enroll/student-assignment-poli...

The key of the new proposal is how they are going to define zones (neighbourhoods). Knowing the politics in SF, I think they will probably say that zone is 7-miles radius (and SF is 49 square miles).

The lottery has been around since way before 2020, I believe. You do get preferential assignment to one school close to you. Most schools can take in all the kids that have this neighborhood preference but I believe there are a couple that don’t. (This is for Kindergarten, TK is more of a mess).

I wonder if future centuries will look at the current obsession with diversity (tbh the peak is visibly behind us) the same way that we look at the ancient Egyptians collecting amulets with holy dung beetles: an utterly incomprehensible ritual.

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