San Francisco Middle Class Exodus

This summer we moved from San Francisco to Palo Alto.  After nearly 15 years in San Francisco, I have to say it was a hard move for me.  In fact, the last several years I worked from my home office as I was employed by companies in New York or Toronto respectively.  I left the city to go to the airport, or to ride my bike across the Golden Gate Bridge into and around the Marin Headlands.

But school for my kid was looming and it didn’t look like it was going to work out for us in the city.

We were committed to being a public school family.  I’m an entrepreneur so the career cash flow does not afford me the luxury of knowing whether I’ll have an extra 100 grand to put toward grade school for the next 12 years.  Who knows, I could get lucky, but I might not, and I was not going to lock myself into making a living that supports a lifestyle that did not allow me to take some serious risks with my career on a regular basis.

So, we tried mightily for several months to discern the SFUSD’s placement algorithm for assigning kids into kindergartens.  We went to School Board meetings, we downloaded resources other parents had published online, my wife visited probably a dozen schools.  But to no avail.

Essentially, SFUSD employs a diversity index algorithm in the assignment process.  The algorithm seeks to place middle class Caucasian kids in tougher schools, ie, predominantly African American neighborhood schools.  The purpose of this is to hopefully close the “Achievement Gap” that exists in standardized testing across the races, ie, white, black, asian, hispanic.

The irony of this approach to closing the Achievement Gap is that it seems to be based on two problematic assumptions. First, it assumes the black kids will get smarter by virtue of being in close proximity to some number of white middle class kids.  This seems like an unfair assumption to say the least.  Second, it also assumes nothing other that getting white kids to go to black neighborhood schools will improve those schools.  This seems to me to be a total resignation.

The foundation of this approach actually reflects a political philosophy which is totally San Francisco.  This political philosophy assumes it is the government’s role to promote social change by virtue of draconian public policy measures.  It’s the kind of thinking that would make Marx/Lenin proud and our founding fathers shudder in their boots.

But I’ve known this about San Francisco for some time.  It’s just that as a single guy or young married couple it didn’t really affect me.

Then we had kids, and those kids need to go to school.

So we joined the middle class exodus from San Francisco and moved south 45 minutes to Palo Alto.  Marin would have been nice as it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth, I’m pretty sure.  But I’m in tech/digital media/enterprise software….so here we are in Palo Alto.

I bought a big bar-b-que though, and we use it often…which is nice.