Growing up in San Francisco I did not attend public school, but I was always aware of the constant battle to diminish the achievement gap through the newspaper articles, news reports, and hearing about it from my teachers. The achievement gap between black and white students in the city of San Francisco is among the worst in the US because students of color are constantly undereducated, not something people would expect from a city that is extremely progressive and liberal.
The annual national report card, a program that assesses states in the US on their education level and achievement gap graded California as a C in 2018 and the state has been consistently ranked 40th or below among the 50 states in terms of education. For comparison, other states like Massachusetts have tied for 1st out of 50 states by the national report card 12 years in a row.
According to the passing rates of the CAASPP, which is a standardized test taken by all public school students in California, black students are the lowest achieving group across all subjects, with only around 1/6th of them meeting expectations (reference my graph below). This data reinforces the well-established fact that San Francisco public schools are the worst in the state of California for black students to attend. According to the Los Angeles Times, 96% of other districts in California that serve black students had better reading scores than San Francisco did. Even though the city and state policymakers are aware of the massive achievement gap, there has been little change because in order to bring teachers back into the Bay Area, policy makers first must fix the housing crisis of San Francisco, a complicated problem with no obvious solution that politicians and community members can agree on.
A common cause of the achievement gap all over the country is that high quality teachers almost never teach in low income schools and this is no different for San Francisco. In the past decade, the number of qualified teachers living in San Francisco has gone down drastically, making it nearly impossible for the gap to lower as qualified teachers are proven to be a major factor in learning for low income students. Teachers are unable to afford to live in the city because of the sky-high rent that their salaries don’t come near to covering, which in return doesn’t allow them to settle in the city. Teachers that do teach in San Francisco usually face very long commutes with terrible traffic, so more and more are choosing to teach at schools which are much closer to their homes outside of the city. According to Audrey Amrein-Beardsley “qualified teachers are the biggest school level factor related to success or failure of students in low income schools” and many other professionals agree this is a major part of the gap. With lower rent prices, San Francisco can start working towards bringing qualified teachers back into the city and begin the process of lowering the achievement gap.
