Perhaps you had to be a wizard to comprehend the school closure survey. We couldn't find one. But lawyers and scientists were plenty confused
When the San Francisco Unified School District wants to get parents’ attention, it can. We receive multiple emails in multiple languages. Text messages buzz on our phones. Landlines ring and robocalls drone on about an important pending announcement. Public-school parent Ed Parillon compares it to the episode of “The Office” in whichcalled WUPHF that links everyone’s means of communication, resulting in all the fax machines and phones and printers going off at once.
But we are informed that district representatives were seriously planning to tell aggrieved parents that their kids’ school was closing because of tabulations based on imaginary baskets of hearts, moons, stars and clovers. Perhaps a wizard could make sense of this, but we were unable to locate any wizards who doubled as public-school parents.
Laura Padilla is on her kids’ school’s English Learning Advisory Committee, and volunteered to help monolingual Spanish-speaking parents with the surveys. When she told them to choose between “access” and “equity” and “excellence,” they were confused. “They kept telling me that all of these are important.” She was then asked to define “excellence,” which is harder than you might think.
His advice, and much of the input from the District Advisory Committee, went unheeded. The survey, Parillon concludes, was “essentially manufacturing consent for closing schools.”So the criteria here were opaque, confusing and questionably suitable. That’s a problem. But another problem was that, as you’d expect, the parents who’d take the time to fill out an online-only, voluntary survey skewed disproportionately white, educated, and financially stable.
“Correcting the factor of race cannot correct the self-selection of the sample and the overrepresented higher level of education and also income. It’s just whoever shows up. They shouldn’t make it look more scientific than it really is.” He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.The survey seems nonsensical. They should instead survey parents who have taken their kids out of SF schools and better define those parents who are most likely to leave the district and prioritize those responses. In the health insurance business the adage is “the healthy hunt while the sick stay”.
In one of the richest cities in the world, we can do better. The fact is, the powers that be want to privatize public education, and profit off insanely valuable land that has been owned by the public for years, and “under-monetized.”Whatever the motivation for this closure plan, it will eventually come out. Let’s just hope it does while there’s still time to expose the corruption and folly, so it can be fought. When you give these public resources away, they are VERY difficult to get back.
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