San Francisco Public Schools' Battle To Survive

"Public education is in danger of sinking along with the fortunes of its departing middle class.

By now, most San Franciscans are familiar with the dismal litany: the soaring cost of housing, the resulting loss of some 800 kids from the public school system each year, the constant battles over school closures.

As they compete for a dwindling number of children, San Francisco's public schools are making heroic efforts to survive. Thanks to special arts-in-schools funding voters approved three years ago, the city's public schools are awash with artists-in-residence, dancers-in-residence, poets-in-residence. Language immersion classes are the hot thing in public education. San Francisco parents have seen the future, and it is multilingual. You can watch kindergartners rattling off Mandarin and first-graders speaking Spanish as if it were their native tongue.

The silver lining in all this is that the public schools here have extra motivation to improve, to make it into the top tier of parents' lottery choices, or at least to avoid closure."