LESS DIVERSITY: A San Francisco Chronicle special report on the city’s public schools, “Living Together Learning Apart: Is Desegregation Dead?” shows that as parental choice between schools increases, so too does racial and social segregation.
As an example, the paper explores the cases of two schools with very different populations: Cleveland Elementary and Clarendon Elementary. The first serves mostly low-income Latino families, the second wealthy Asian families. While few families want to enroll their kids at Cleveland, Clarendon was the most requested elementary school in the 2015-2016 academic year lottery. (With 97 families vying for every available seat, this school is harder to get into than Harvard). Despite being only four miles apart, both schools face opposite challenges regarding poverty and parents' satisfaction.
