From Stanford’s Public Policy Program:

OCT 27 2017 CALMATTERS

… Across the district, 19 percent of them [San Francisco public school black students] passed the state test in reading, compared to 31 percent of black students statewide. The result: San Francisco, a progressive enclave and beacon for technological innovation, has the worst black student achievement of any county in California. …

San Francisco’s challenges are escalating even as its black population and share of young residents are shrinking. Soaring housing costs have been driving lower- and middle-income families out for decades, and it now has a lower percentage of children than any other major city in America.

Many of the black families who remain are concentrated in public housing in the city’s industrial Bayview and Hunters Point neighborhoods near the toxic naval shipyard whose jobs drew black laborers there around World War II. …

One strategy designed to boost academic achievement across the district and better prepare students to join a modern workforce is a citywide focus on science, technology, engineering and math instruction. Willie L. Brown Jr. Middle School anchors that effort in the Bayview.

The gleaming $55 million campus with state-of-the-art laboratories and floor-to-ceiling windows with panoramic city views opened to fanfare in 2015 on the site of Willie Brown College Preparatory Academy, which was under-enrolled, had low test scores and was crumbling before the city tore it down in 2011. …

Last academic year, at a school named for the city’s first black mayor, only 10 percent of black students passed the state test in reading and 2 percent passed math—an improvement from the prior school year when none of the school’s black students passed the math exam. …