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SFUSD staff outline monitoring plan to track racial isolation and choice outcomes
Summary
SFUSD staff presented a monitoring plan and an external-advisor team to measure whether the new student assignment system reduces racial isolation, will publish an annual report (first due Jan. 2012), and run tiebreaker simulations to test choice outcomes and attendance-area capacity.
Ms. O'Keefe, the district staff lead on student assignment, told the committee the superintendent had convened three external experts to advise monitoring of the new assignment system: Prudence Carter, McCall Kurlander and Sean Reardon. She said the district's monitoring work will focus on reversing "the trend of racial isolation and the concentration of underserved students in the same school," and that the annual report will use historical baselines and explicit thresholds for analysis.
"The specific goals for monitoring student assignment that we're looking at are reversing the trend of racial isolation and the concentration of underserved students in the same school," Ms. O'Keefe said, adding the report will examine schools where a single racial/ethnic group exceeds 60, 70 or 80 percent as part of the baseline analysis.
Staff described metrics the annual report will include: changes in school diversity over time by race/ethnicity, special education and English-learner status; achievement for sixth- and ninth-graders (where available); comparison of students assigned to a school with students who requested it; attendance-area capacity and the percent of kindergarteners assigned to attendance-area schools; family and student survey data to gauge engagement; and simulations testing different tiebreaker orders.
Ms. O'Keefe said the district will gather application and address-level historical choice data to compare prior systems with the new attendance-area-based assignments, and that the first annual monitoring report is expected in January 2012. Commissioners asked for preliminary assignment outcome data after the first round of letters and for the system's requirements and process-flow documents; staff said draft process flows would be available to the Board and to the public in February as testing concludes.
Public commenters urged greater transparency in the software and called for the assignment algorithm and post-development code or process documentation to be publicly accessible so parents can verify that race is not being used to determine assignments. Ms. O'Keefe said race data are collected on application forms for federal reporting and for later analysis but are not needed for running the assignment algorithm itself.
