kindergarten

okay, yes, ava is barely two, but yes, i admit it, i'm (vaguely) fretting about kindergarten already. today i attended a talk on the san francisco public school enrollment process put on by the parents for public school's organization. for those of you without preschool age children in san francisco, the reason for all the fretting about public school's in san francisco is that the district has a "parent choice" system of assigning kids to schools. you get no guarantee that you get to attend a school in your own neighborhood. you get to express some preference in the matter, but essentially it's just a lottery system that flings kids here and there randomly across the city. now let's be clear . . . san francisco is not a small city. it takes about 45 minutes to drive from the east side of town to the west and the city provides no school buses to ferry all these children to and fro.

one of the speaker's at the talk, dr. adams dudley, was very amusing. obviously a very intelligent and analytical fellow, he examined all the "no child left behind" data kindly supplied by the bush administration, and decided that it matter not a whit where or how your child was educated (public vs private, "good school" vs "bad school", language immersion vs straight english) - the only thing that matters is the parent's own socio-economic status and educational background.

i don't think that there is any debate that the numbers are on his side, but what surprised me was the fact that he was also a supporter of the current "parent choice" system. seems like an obvious contradiction to me. if your child's chance of success is baked into their socio-economic-dna and has nothing to do with which school they attend, why not give up this failed experiment, restore our neighborhood schools and all save a little on gas?