In order to diversify schools you have to establish a system in which socioeconomic classes move in both directions. But middle class families do not migrate to poor schools, while SFUSD has bused low SES kids to better schools. As a result the schools in the “bad” neighborhoods are underenrolled, with middle class families taking flight instead.

The point being, the middle class opts out of the diversity experiment and that is why less than a quarter of SF’s whites go to public school.

Also, there is much debate over the link between diversity and achievement.SFUSD’s administration has one take on it. There are others.We have been busing and diversifying for decades and the achievement gap is still with us.

You said – “It just makes sense to me to try to spread those kids out. It’s more fair to them–they get more attention and more access to services, and better for all those other kids who aren’t dealing with deep emotional wounds, but might not have a parent who’s home to read to them every night.” The problem is that it may do low SES kids good, which is debatable, but how does it benefit the higher SES kids when all the problems of poverty arrive in the classroom. Diversity has its own benefits,but the enrollment numbers tell that most middle class families pick achievement over diversity.In other words, they don’t want their kids participating in a social experiment that has questionable benefits for them.

Because it makes sense to you is hardly a rationale to send kids across town. You are going to have to make a better case than that. For that matter you may have heard during your research reading the newspaper that SFUSD cannot afford to bus kids. Under the newest SAS they are giving low SES families a preference to get into better schools – a preference most will likely not utilize. This preference is based on living in a low performing censes tract. So if you happen to live in the up scale gated condo within the tract and your parents are lawyers you get the preference. Or if you have a cheap rented studio you get the preference. That system is a joke.But I diverge.

To have diversity you have to keep the middle class in public schools. Forget the upper class. They left years ago. SFUSD is 55% free and reduced lunch. Tell me, how are you going to get the right mix socioeconomic with those ingredients? Requiring families to enroll in schools they don’t want may seem egalitarian to you, but it is literally driving away the last hopes of retaining a strong middle componenet to our school population.

One of the things frequently seen in underprivileged children is a history of exposure to toxicity in the womb. Sitting next to a rich kid in class isn’t going to improve fetal alcohol syndrome. It isn’t going to cure your lead poisoning.

Maybe by starting before birth and testing for exposure to smoking, drugs,and alcohol, then following the children developmentally from birth and selecting the children who hit their developmental milestones above the 50th percentile we could find candidates for our study.

Then you would need to select for environment. In Britain children in start boarding school around age 8. The study could compare mixing the poor kids with the rich kids in a controlled environment such as boarding school from Monday thru Friday. Then compare this to children in a school where some go home to wealthy neighborhoods and some go home to poor neighborhoods.

We may find out that mixing poor kids and rich kids might help the poor kids if we saw that the children involved were otherwise normal and bodily removed the poor kids from dysfunctional homes. We may also find that as long as the poor kids went home at night to the stress of poverty that mixing with rich kids didn’t make much difference.

If we did, would we want to institute a citywide program of Monday thru Friday boarding schools in poor areas, but only for the developmentally normal children?

At that point would you even need the rich kids?

In practice, I don’t have the foggiest clue how to make that work. The children whose parents have any means will send them to a private school or move away to a place where public schools are less mixed.

People stratify themselves by their own actions. The rich usually mingle among the rich because the like to mingle among the rich. The middle class mingle among the middle class because, despite any protestations to the contrary, they probably feel ill at ease among rich people. And the poor do the same.

Bring them to a school, and you’ll see the same thing happen all over again –with brief experimental forays in to the other’s community, just to see what it’s like.

The Rich have their own problems. Money doesn’t fix stupid or lazy attitudes. In fact, upper middle class parents often are too busy acting professional to spend much time with their kids.

This is sad, but all too true. We stratify ourselves. There is probably an interesting series of social science papers to be written on the subject…

I went to an inner city art high school in Philadelphia, and we had maybe one student in a class of 130 from the suburbs, and he had to pay tuition to attend.

I believe that a program of allowing poor kids to attend richer charter and private schools is a must, otherwise we’re still feeding two divergent societies in America.

There is absolutely no ethical reason to pack in 35-50 kids in one classroom in North Philadelphia, and 15 minutes away there’s a private school with not only top-notch facilities but a teacher student ratio that you would think would be in every school.