A quick scan at the numbers

...suggests that I won't have to worry too much about reading people ripping on my school (about which they know nothing).  SFUSD has some enrollment statistics out, and I'm going to guess based on my read of these that the people who will not be happy to have been assigned our school are not also the kind of people to complain about same on the internet.


If the offers match the population we enroll, our school will remain fairly diverse but continue in its general direction (more Latino and Asian children, fewer African American children).  (Our school has been diverse but in flux for a number of years, and diversity should be understood to mean "few if any white children".)

In this we are not common, and I will be interested to see what the new assignment system does for district-wide school diversity.  There are some stunning numbers in the data release - 78% of offers at Grattan, for instance, are to white children.  (This would tend to suggest that the idea that the nefarious and secret discriminatory quota policies of SFUSD will finally die, but I both digress and doubt it.)

In other news, I think we must have won the Layoff Sweepstakes but SFUSD doesn't seem as inclined to let us have the data on that this year.  (Perhaps because we disseminated it so widely.  You should've seen Eric Mar!  I thought his eyes would pop out of his head.)  In between noting that there are solutions to inequitable layoffs that don't involve overturning unions or turning to education deform, I managed to get my crafty layoff posters up this week.  So now we turn up the noise.

I mean, like to 11.  That's the problem with laying off all the young things: they can still organize and get loud AND show up to teach tomorrow.

Simply, SFUSD cannot claim to be going "Beyond the Talk" if they are willing to lay off nearly half of our staff.  How many elementary classroom teachers got pink-slipped?  Less than fifty.  There are what, eighty elementary schools in the District?  And my school gets seven of those?  It's not about seniority: it's about equal opportunity.

The district's courage should not rest entirely in its southeast side teachers - but it does.  Their annual reward for doing a job that the state refuses to fund and the district refuses to value is a pink slip.  What does that say about access and equity?  Given SFUSD's long history of failing poor children of color, there is a pressing need to build relationships and trust.  Boo-hoo-hooing about seniority and legal requirements is fine - but you can't also pretend that you aim to build that trust.

Hence: 11.  Or louder.